If you already have the physical book, why would you want to suddenly jump to an audio version of it? I can't see that market being huge. The only scenario I can think of is if you are reading the book, and you want to continue 'listening' to it when you can't read it (driving in a car, etc.) Most people I know (including myself) are kind of one way or another, they either like reading real books, or listening to audio books. I'm a real book person, but I do listen to a number of podcasts by authors of books (The rest is History, Empire, etc.) and the sale of books would at least be good for them as they could have direct-purchase buttons for books they've referenced in their shows, including their own.

Light passenger rail is ideal for batteries. With lightweight trains and low rolling resistance, coupled with regenerative braking, it should be pretty easy on the batteries. The only issue would be the batteries catching fire underground...might be better for surface transport.

I hope it reminds everyone that every interaction they have with non-local AI is logged and available to the next hacker in line. If you're typing anything into an online service of any kind (or into a document stored in the cloud) assume that it could be leaked and behave appropriately. Do you want the thing you are asking about to become public?

No one wanted to be intensely surveilled while shopping? Never would have thought. Sure, grocery stores today have tons of cameras (look up!) but typically they only use the footage when they need it as evidence to convict a shoplifter.

Linux on the desktop continues to be a hobby in and of itself rather than a tool to get other things done. There's no way I'm spending the time and frustration that he did to get basic things running. That cascading failure mode of package dependencies and "it all works great except this one little instance when you combine these two pieces of hardware or software together) is just maddening. I've dabbled in and out of it for years. It takes far less time and frustration to effectively neuter Windows 10 to do your bidding and stop leaking your information. The future is uncertain as M$ attempts to remove local accounts, but as long as there is a way around I will continue to use it. Besides, a lot of the software I use just isn't available for Linux. I wish it was, I truly do. But it seems to be a perpetual chicken and egg problem. Maybe something will tilt that balance away from M$ someday, but it doesn't seem to be happening soon.

When CDDB went away, gnudb stepped up and is now offering it for your favorite ripping software.

https://gnudb.org/

I am using it with CDex with no problems today. I buy a lot of expanded limited release film soundtrack scores from the likes of Intrada and LaLaLand, which are only released on CD so that they can afford the licensing from the studios for a small release. So I still have a great use for it. I've long since ripped the rest of my CD collection, but I buy a new soundtrack CD once every few months.

I wouldn't touch any microsoft-authored player.

Being from the Bay Area, I was an early Craigslist user. Used it to find multiple apartments, furniture and other items as a 20-something in the 90s, and sell a few things here and there that did not make sense on Ebay. It was a really great thing, especially when the only real alternative at that time was newspaper classifieds.

The other day I was looking for an inexpensive musical keyboard, and I was having trouble with Facebook Marketplace listings because most of the sellers didn't respond to inquiries about their ads. (this seemed particular to the type of item I was looking for, I've not generally had trouble with other stuff.) So I thought, "I wonder if anyone still uses craigslist" and sure enough, plenty of listings. I contacted one and went to pick it up later the same day. Reminds me to check there for anything else I am looking for as well.

Unlike just about every other online business today, Craigslist is a completely honest, straightforward business. There is no hidden toll or price (your data) for 'free' (they make revenue elsewhere) and the transaction is straightforward for buyer and seller. No upsells to a paid version. No AI. Unlike many early sites, the founders did not sell out and continued to be satisfied with the existing level of income provided rather than the temptation of a large payout up front, enjoying a first-mover advantage with a lot of good will and brand recognition. Somehow, no one came and ate their lunch. It just kept going, year after year after year. How many sites do you remember becoming enshittified after being sold to a large corporation? Craigslist is a super rare example of what happens when you don't sell out.

It would be fun if an AI and data mining backlash spurred a bunch of new 'old school' sites with honest, straightforward dealings. I guess one can dream...

Has there ever been a successful VR headset that has survived long term after the initial launch frenzy? It just seems like something that people are trying to will into existence, but most people have no interest in it. A niche product for hardcore gamers and a few useful applications in science and medicine. No one's come up with a 'gotta have it' application for them. Most of generative AI is trash, but there are more useful applications for that than for VR headsets.

Anything running an LLM interface as a means of input is not only insecure, it's anti-secure. When you write something that accepts user input, you always sanitize those inputs by dropping special characters,etc to prevent command injections. buffer overflows, etc. Anything that isn't what you are expecting. With input coming through voice to an LLM, How the HELL do you do that? So far in the last few years the only thing that's been proven is no one has come up with a way to properly sanitize inputs. LLMs are a nightmare of garbage both in and out. They can do some amazing tricks, but are still terrible at accuracy and safety.

The world is heating up, and we need to continue to find ways to make food and energy production more sustainable, but coming up with these completely un-relatable and nonsensical figures won't help. It's about as useful as a 'carbon tax'.

When costs impact individual consumer wallets, that's when people start paying attention. Food shortages due to lack of water or shifting climates drive up prices and create scarcity. Water scarcity and resulting political instability is scary, and starting to rear it's ugly head in a few places.

Unfortunately, I think people are going to have to get a taste of the impact before they do anything meaningful about it. Time has shown you can yell about it all you want, but sitting down to figure out how you can accomplish these goals without reducing quality of life is the most important thing you can do. Leaning into modern, safe nuclear energy for energy abundance (in addition to solar) is much better than advocating for artificial scarcity and extreme conservation. Figuring out ways to more efficiently grow food at scale, as we have been doing since the mid-20th century, is better than advocating for immediate, drastic changes in diet. Lab grown meat that tastes and feels identical to the real thing but environmentally costs far less to produce once it's at scale? I think it's possible. Keep working on it. Hyper efficient crop growth? I don't think we've gotten close to what we can accomplish with a given acre yet, or vertical greenhouse farming. energy efficient de-salinization or condensing? It appears possible. Space-based manufacturing and asteroid mining? It's far better to mine the asteroid belt than the earth, and send the products downhill to earth. Metals that exist in abundance in the solar system should be gotten from elsewhere if robotic mining and modern delivery systems can make it economical. This is a GIANT untapped economy that will eventually bare fruit, but it may take a while.

There's a lot of things we could push really hard that we're not doing. Markets are lazy and want to optimize today and not worry about tomorrow, if there is no immediate perceived danger. It creates a kind of blind spot that can lead to the world eating its own tail, causing a collapse. We'll either figure it out or we'll collapse and have to start over, or possibly die out completely. I think there's a window of opportunity to continue to lift civilization to great heights, that will close in the next 100 years if the status quo continues as-is.

Just a few weeks ago there was a slashdot post via the Reigster giving a good clue as to why people still pay for it versus LibreOffice/OpenOffice versions or Google Sheets:

"Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register."

You might say, "Well, if you have 20 million cells in a single spreadsheet you're doing it wrong" but excel has been abused in all kinds of ways for edge use cases and it will take it, and that's why people still use it. People have found it enormously useful to crunch vast amounts of data, and sometimes it requires astonishingly large cell counts. The world excel championships show just now useful it is for so many things. At an aerospace company I worked at, excel was the primary tool to calculate suborbital and orbital rocket trajectories given initial specific impulse, drag, mass, etc. The person who created the spreadsheet was a math and physics genius, and I referred to him as 'the Excel whisperer'.

Large companies that pioneered a piece of software have a first mover advantage, and then when they get big, they can afford to keep plowing money into improving the software and adding features to keep ahead of the competition that is less well funded, or relying on volunteers in the case of Open Source.

I ran into a similar problem trying to switch from Solidworks to a much cheaper lookalike competitor, as when you started to dig down there were some critical features that I needed that were just completely missing. I have the last bought and paid for version of Solidworks that they offered (2022) with no subscription, works great for my needs.

I use excel these days for a very complicated cost calculating sheet I developed to sell a particular product line with many different options. It calculates shipping weights and volumes critical for international container shipping quotes. It's a godsend. This sheet could be replicated on one of the free pieces of software, but since I own an Office 2019 desktop license outright, I'll continue to use it until I can no longer install it on future computers. You can still purchase a copy of MS Office 2024 desktop outright from Microsoft for $150. They don't advertise it much, but it's there on their website. I don't generally do software-as-a-service subscriptions, with a few very narrow exceptions. That's the one thing that will finally drive me away from Office, when 365 is the only option.

I'll keep driving my car that A. doesn't have any of that stuff and B. is to old for anyone to want to steal /25 year old truck with a bulletproof engine /10 year old car with same

Channel subscriptions, and I have my own channel that I manage.

I don't use that Google account for anything else though, so there's that. It's not logged in to my smartphone either. I have a throwaway account that holds my contacts in case I lose or break my phone. I got tired of re-entering the contacts by hand each time I got a new phone, so I gave up on staying logged out entirely on the smartphone.

Knowing Google, it's quite the possibility. To avoid that, you would need to stay logged out, use private browsing in a browser that isn't chrome, and use proxies to vary your IP address, and probably randomly spoof your browser type and OS type to avoid other methods of profiling. I don't think I care that much.

Hopefully not if you've left your YouTube watch history turned off.

Go to your Google Account settings, click "my activity" and then there is a button for YouTube history where you can disable it if you don't want them needlessly collecting data about your watch habits.

This will however make your YouTube landing page blank. But your subscription page for following channels still works the same.