I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

CloudFlare was an aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation. Now it's an AI-powered aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation.

Why don't I feel excited about it?

Crypto grift, AI bubble and psychopathic billionaire CEO.

Yes, that's because there have been a lot more stupid humans doing stupid things to databases for a lot longer than AI agents.

So tell me: if AI is no safer than people, what's the point of replacing humans with AI?

and animate it eating your face when the AI agent wastes your entire database.

A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.

It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard. Note I'm not suggesting that they compress the videos as that might change the intended presentation of professional audio productions. I just mean peak-finding normalization which could be implemented losslessly and without breaking existing video links.

Having said that, when I look at my own channel - and I am not claiming to have great audio; I have a host which would destroy a lavalier microphone in mere seconds. YouTube's subtitling is really good. It automatically switches between English and French and Hebrew, and even with a fair bit of background noise (welding, grinding, cooking, crowd noise, music) it generally gets the text correct. So I don't know what the original complaint is, except that it's not perfect. Well, guess what, neither is human hearing. How about that famous Jimi Hendrix line, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

The people in charge of IT.

Exactly. There are many different learning styles. (One issue I had with school is I don't learn like most people - several learning disabilities/issues - so I'm aware of the differences and how things need to be altered, but for most students, yes, repetition within that first 24 hours is important.)

I haven't been in the classroom since close to the year 2000, so I don't remember the study names. What I do remember is that there were studies, plural - studies, that showed that when you learn how to do a new task or learn new information, that using that information or practicing the task within 24 hours increases the chance of it being remembered by a large percentage. That's over 25 years ago for me, and I'm not going to claim it's at a certain percentage, but I know it was WELL over 50%. So if you learn a new process in Algebra, or a new move in ballroom dance, and you don't practice it within 24 hours, you have a lower chance of remembering it. But it was at least over a 50% increase in your chance of remembering it IF you reinforced it by going through it within 24 hours.

I preferred to use homework as practice - not as learning new material (although that might help if it includes reading for the next day's class). I also worked in psych treatment, which meant I taught more than one subject - I had the odd mix of science and math plus English (lit and grammar). So I'd assign reading overnight that gave us more chance for discussion (discussion, not lecture!), and the math I assigned was to use what we had learned in class. For science, I'd actually prefer to assign reading for what we had done that day, compared to what we would do the next day. That way students found the reading easier, it went faster, and they'd bring in a few questions the next day that we could review (before moving on to new material).

When I grew up, I was forced to go to a prep school where we had 3 or more hours of homework a night, plus we were required to stay for some form of athletics, so I rarely got home before 6 PM. With that in mind, I was selective about homework. For the time I was teaching in public schools (as opposed to my time teaching in treatment), the dept. heads and supervisors jumped on me for not giving enough homework or for assigning science material we had reviewed in class - pretty much everything about my homework system offended the dept heads or supervisors.

That fits...

if they had known he'd turn into a raging Nazi.

Then again, they probably would've. It's not like billionaires have any principles...

Mythbusters did an experiment to disprove this. I'd say they are about as credible as these researchers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

...like "Tell me about Tiananmen Square" or "Tell me about Xinjiang".

Is this what you want for the future?

My thoughts back when R1 came out:

https://www.afcea.org/signal-m...