Support your local independent bookstores (if you still have any)!

I don’t know how common bookstores that are not part of large chains still are in other countries, here in Germany we have this thing called Buchpreisbindung (roughly translates to “fixed book prices”) which means bookstores actually have to compete only through presentation and their professional advice. Independent bookstores often have very knowledgeable personal that can give you great advice for free (in case of Germany) or with little extra cost compared to just ordering on Amazon/one of the corporate chains, e.g. at the bookstore around the corner the owner has been selling books for 50 years and has read basically everything ever published at this point.

She has just recommended me Gentleman overboard which is a short, although nonetheless incredibly moving book about a gentleman… well, going over board.

As for the titles/front page design/self-help books: I feel with OOP, but this seems to be what people care about/still feel they have the time to read. One actually very good (although slightly older) book from this rather modern category is The subtle art to not give a fuck.

Tldr go out, search for and support independent bookstores!

The objectively correct answer is maps, of course.

You’ve just sent me down another rabbit hole. Thanks man…

Truly a shitpost indeed

Both could be filtered out in theory (which they should do if they were smart, because amount of training data matters way less than quality or training data), but filtering AI created slop is harder, especially if you just slightly modify it.

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Imagine taking a comment like this seriously, also

YES!

Related blog post that puts it similarly well

<5min Germany

Pretty unusual, especially state-owned. There was a similar program on EU level that was just cancelled, apart from that I don’t know any other countries investing in open source.

Honestly, this sounds great!

Funding.json is a good idea for a standard proposal and seems to solve most problems I‘d personally recognize with FOSS funding :)

*fresh, running water that is not right next to their food. Cats would normally eat… dead things— and as water literally right next to these generally is not exactly hygienic, they will (as an evolutionary fact) much prefer even random puddle water.

So: different place for water than for food.

On a European level they interpret that as fixing the EU, e.g. giving the parliament meaningful power, creating a pan-European army etc.

This may be, but the probability is unarguably higher than with Trump. Voting exclusively for candidates you morally agree on only works if enough people have the same morale (in this case i.e. are educated on Israel and so on) and are also not willing to make compromises.

Even if unfortunate, this is currently not the case; and you voting independent has smaller chances of changing that than voting democratic. So you will probably have to accept this situation for the moment and choose the “best actually feasible” strategy— and feasible means having the highest probability to win in real life, not merely trying.

Personally, I’d even argue that it’s unethical to not vote for a candidate like Harris, just because the chances of getting stuff like ranked choice voting or educating voters done (which will then lead to you being able to realistically vote for others) is significantly higher when voting Democrats than… letting Trump win?

Notice that I don’t say you have to agree with anything else she stands for, you’re trying to achieve certain goals/get out of the very unfortunate current situation, and even a low chance of reaching that is infinitely better than none.

Yeah, but I don’t know whether you’ve recently taken a look in one of the local newspapers— being able to select topics you want to read about may very well be worth the extra effort (also, fun of course)

Χάρων, of course

Let me introduce you to my computer science professors…

(yes, no joke)

Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.

iOS user here, uYou++ is quite good, but only a mod for the regular YT app, not a complete alternative.

YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.

Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content. This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.