That added music was annoying though.

lol

Welcome to the 21st century, you might have to catch up on a few things. Start with Mozilla Media Engine and AVFoundation / WebKit Media Stack.

Your website sends me an H.264 stream (or whatever you decided you'll use). It doesn't need to know shit about my graphics hardware.

Someone please name one rare, valuable book that has been destroyed. I'm still waiting.

Nobody has answered my criticisms of this particular Frankenstein story:
1) there's essentially nothing IN rare books that LLMs benefit from
2) rare old books are difficult to ocr in the first place, when reprints are both easier to scan AND cheaper.

This entire contrived hysteria is even more amusing as people basically don't read anymore, not generally. Oh heavens! They're destroying the books NOBODY READS? Really? That's what you're weeping about?

The only remaining meaningful contemporary book sales are women reading their own particular flavor of smut.
https://www.pensandpoison.org/...

Less than half of adults say they've read ONE BOOK in the last year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

I love old books. I'm currently reading Rogers 3rd ed (1915) of A History of Babylonia and Assyria and it's delightful. An absolute pleasure to read from the skill of the author, the comprehensiveness of the information (without a tedious agenda to flog, imagine!), to the very tactile experience of leather bound, deckle-edged paper. A joy every minute I'm reading it.

I would genuinely join you if there truly was a threat against old books.
But this? This is a manipulated hysteria contrived for some reason, maybe an experiment to see if they could spur nearly-illiterate sheeple to rise up to 'save' something they absolutely care nothing about.

Right! That's exactly it. I was part of "Gen X" myself, and while I had friends who lived the whole "latchkey kid" lifestyle to the max? It really wasn't the norm to just be unsupervised all day or night.

I remember my folks both worked, but my mom went to working only part-time, early in the morning until around the lunch hour, when we were younger. She hired an older lady as a part-time nanny for us while she was gone. When we got older, mom was always home by the time school let out - so we barely knew she was ever gone.

And also true that even for the teens I knew who had a house to themselves after school each day until bedtime? Their parent(s) weren't just buying them electric motorcycles or any of that like you see going on today. Obviously, the Internet wasn't anything like it is today. Even as a hard-core computer geek though? I called and ran my own computer bulletin board system where it was just really a local niche community of like-minded people dialing in with modems. Most heated arguments that came up on a BBS got squashed when the BBS operator decided he had enough and banned all of them. It just wasn't *anything* like what goes on now where people get video-recorded against their will in high resolution just so someone can get famous on TikTok, or ?

Rei: Do you actually work for Amazon in a capacity where you're informed on how they're obtaining these books?

I'm asking for a couple reasons.

1. We all know Amazon has plenty of money to be able to afford to buy rare, out-of-print books that are difficult to obtain. I'd be surprised if they refrained from doing so if that meant their AI risked not having some of that knowledge/information while a competitor's did. I'm not saying the guy tasked with being manager over the disposable labor doing the book scanning is authorized to make direct choices about what books to buy. I'm saying someone in Amazon corporate, in charge of the AI project itself, was probably given the funding to buy what he/she felt was needed.

2. The original article's anonymous interview with the low-level worker sounded very accurate with such statements as the details/orders changing daily and everything feeling disorganized. I can speak with some authority that that's exactly how it feels when you work for them in a non-management capacity. Multiple layers of management are dictating new processes or policies in a constant stream, and then often? The entire thing is up-ended when top level management makes a company-wide decree or mandate. Your team lead/manager is even liable to change on short notice. Their push to constantly "reinvent" causes a whole lot of reinventing of the same wheel another department or team already invented, and it's kind of a zoo. That's why I'd also take their comments as legit when they express concerns some of the books appeared to be obscure titles, etc.

They're building quite the Duck Dynasty.

I have to agree. I'm not defending Facebooks' practices, but at the same time? It seems to me social media as a whole can become addictive, or promote bad ideas to kids or teens. You have to control this at the parental level ... not just depend on corporations to self-police it all.

So sure... slap them with large fines and use the money for good, where you can. I'm not opposed. But your kid or teen wouldn't be spending all day on social media if you controlled it as their parent. By the time they're old enough to legally move out of your house? Then it's too late for you to try to "fix" anything they're doing. But before that, they live under your roof and by your rules.

I wrote a compiler for an ObjC-like language (with less brackets), which can produce binaries for any of {Mac, Windows, Linux, WASM, Arm A9 (Zynq), m68k or 6502} running on any of {Mac, Windows, Linux}. So you can produce a dev-signed Mac binary on a Linux box. I’m just going through extending that output range to mobile {Android, iOS} and I’ll release it as open source.

The compiler docs for the language (xc) are at https://compile-xc.org/ - feel free to browse.

I didn’t think getting the signing working for Mac/iOS was terribly hard.

That's literally what I said, you dumb pillock.

The fact that Canada is insisting on their right to propagandize their own populace doesn't change that it's propaganda.
Of COURSE it's still 'soft power', even if the target is their own disaffected population.

Duh?

You mean the site whose water discharge processes were indeed certified shortly after that article in 2025?

https://www.faa.gov/media/9434...

Water discharge is covered in section 3.2.7, fyi.

I've been using Freestyle Libres (2, 3, 3 plus) for several years now. I have fewer connection issues with Libre than I used to have with the Dexcomm. I also find the Libre's adhesive to be superior to that of the Dexcomm - with the latter, I always had to use overpatches to keep them attached..

One thing Dexcomm does have over the Libre is it can be calibrated against a fingerstick. Also, I think right now the Dexcomm is the only one that will directly work with (certain brands of) an insulin pump. I'm not insulin-dependent, so that doesn't impact me.

"If one comes loose it is also useless and has to be replaced" is true of any CGMS, not just the Libre. They rely on a tiny tube that gets inserted just below the skin - it's not practical to re-insert that if it gets pulled out. But I can't say that's been a significant problem for me, at least.

Complete bullshit. Even for fullscreen video, the website doesn't need to know my screen size. It should tell the browser "here are the resolutions I can offer you" and the browser picks one of those. All the website needs to know is if I prefer 1080p or 4K. And I might pick 1080p even if my screen is 4K because, say, the hotel wifi is slow.

Complete bullshit. None of these things break if I don't tell you my OS. I've got extensions in this browser that can fake my agent string and nothing breaks. Fonts? Are you kidding me? Be more specific, what exactly do you mean by that?

And there's no reason it needs to. What legit use case requires a website to know whether my GPU is an NVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever chip? A shitload of the capabilities are only needed for 3D scenes (like max texture size), which is 0.1% of the websites I visit - they can ask and I can whitelist just them. Why does it need my refresh rate?

Again: All of these things have a legit use case, sure. Often exactly one. That is rarely if ever used. There's absolutely no reason that EVERY WEBSITE can query information that only one website in a thousand actually needs.

You don't tell the baker, florist and car dealer your shoe size just because the shoe shop needs it to serve you, right?

Because I want to be irrelevant to the fucking ad industry. I don't want them to track me, profile me and try every trick in the book to manipulate me into buying shit I don't need.

Sure, the same way that putting a finger into another man's ass has a legit use case (prostate examination) - but that doesn't mean I want every man to do that to me all the time.

The point is that tech companies are exploiting the legit use cases by abusing them when you're not in that use case. Basically, they think they can finger up your ass whenever they want, because once a few years ago you consented to a doctor to give you an exam and maybe you will do that again in the future.

I don't mind it being capable of. I mind it doing all kinds of shit without telling me and without giving me a choice. For example, I absolutely do not want websites to access my microphone. Or even know that I have one. For the once-a-year case where I might actually use that, I can enable it.

The problem is the same problem that the cybersecurity field has been fighting for 40 years: Permit All being the default.

It has happened under both.

Just gonna drop this here.

http://www.harkavagrant.com/in...