Because calibre also allows me to convert other formats into epub.

Some files are unreadable garbage because of bad OCR or bad formatting or whatever. I use calibre to preview files in its built-in viewer, to see how they would be rendered on my actual reader. Helps a ton.

Some files have messed up metadata. Calibre helps with fixing that. I have encountered files that would appear as documents on my Kindle rather than books, for example. Easy fix with calibre.

Even if it is not messed up per se, I still sometimes use calibre to sometimes edit metadata to tidy them up. So that the author information between different books of the same series is the same, for example. “Banks, Iain M.” for all the Culture books, rather than a wild mess of various different variations of the same name. I have also added missing pieces of information to help group books in my library etc.

It’s a super useful tool. I just wish it didn’t spam so many system notifications though.

Xiaomi bootloaders used to work like that. You’d have to jump through some bullshit hoops to register your phone for bootloader unlocking, and then wait a few days to finally be able to unlock it. Then they made that worse and worse, and afaik it’s so insanely difficult and inconvenient right now that it’s practically impossible to unlock your Xiaomi phone’s bootloader. This applies to all the brands under that umbrella.

I am about 97.37% sure Google will do the same over time and at some point you just won’t be able to install any APKs.

They didn’t. They agreed to buy them. With the money that they don’t yet have, and probably can’t ever earn.

Which makes this whole thing so much more insane.

Also the guy’s last name is Poon.

Eh. I’ve seen enough 300+ HP cars with 10+ year old bald tires and paper thin brake discs to believe otherwise. I personally know two people whose cars have broken wipers that simply don’t work. They don’t care. I know one guy whose car’s passenger door can only be opened by sticking the designated door opening pliers, which are stored under the seat, into the door panel through the hole of that door lock indicator peg thing and then fishing for some lever or whatever. You’re simply not gonna be opening that door in an emergency. One dude at my office has an old manual BMW with a shifter knob that just loosely sits on its lever, and can easily come off if you are not careful. Gotta blindly maneuver the knob back onto its spot underneath the leather cover when that happens. He drives it like that daily. No shortage of hideously dirty diesel engines. No shortage of badly misaligned headlights, nonfunctional brake lights, overly loud engines etc.

In short I not only think state inspections are a good idea, I even think they should be even stricter.

They are used for that kind of applications already. You put one of those on, and some technician remotely guides you in doing some maintenance while looking through your eyes. They can mark things in your fov, show you diagrams, whatever. Pretty neat actually.

LLMs can’t learn. It’s one of their inherent properties that they are literally incapable of learning. You can train a new model, but you can’t teach new things to an already trained one. All you can do is adjust its behavior a little bit. That creates an extremely expensive cycle where you just have to spend insane amounts of energy to keep training better models over and over and over again. And the wall of diminishing returns on that has already been smashed into. That, and the fact that they simply don’t have concepts like logic and reasoning and knowing, puts a rather hard limit on their potential. It’s gonna take several sizeable breakthroughs to make LLMs noticeably better than they are now.

There might be another kind of AI that solves those problems inherent to LLMs, but at present that is pure sci-fi.

An A-B repeat feature. Member when media players had that? I member. Back in my day you could listen to the ooga booga section of Freak on a Leash 162 times in a row with just two clicks.

The software that’s made to escape Microsoft’s ecosystem is being hosted on Microsoft’s GitHub.

Because for phones they kinda are custom. The smartphone hardware landscape is an absolute clusterfuck of proprietary blobs and closed source drivers and all sorts of shit that makes it so you need a lot of work to customize the base os to work on any particular device. ROMs have rather short lists of compatible phones, and each one of those had to have a build specifically developed for them. You can’t take, say, grapheneos and slap it on any phone you like.

The 3DS screen kinda sucked though. It only worked well when your eyes were inside a very tight cone straight in front of the screen. Move your head just a little bit and the image went to shit. And even when it did work, it looked more cool than good, if that makes sense. That narrow fov thing is an inherent limitation of the technology that can hardly be worked around, and it makes it practically useless for TVs. Multiple people can’t view that screen because you can’t expect everyone to be in the vision cone at once. You can’t even properly view it alone because you won’t be staying inside that narrow vision cone the whole time you’ll be sitting on your couch watching Avatar.

I never saw mine as anything more than a cool gimmick, and kept its 3D-ness turned off 95% of the time. There’s a reason Nintendo didn’t pursue it further.

You know exactly how Greek fire was made. You just don’t know that you know the exact recipe for the ultimate naval weapon. Yes, you in particular. Tell us.

Because whitespace sensitivity makes it very easy to make a whole bunch of annoying mistakes when shuffling code around, or copying it from one source to another (from text in one application to the editor in your ide for example). I find it supremely unpleasant to work with. Looking kinda a little bit slightly messed up should not be a critical syntax error that breaks the whole code.

These things are very heavily optimized for the singular purpose of reading books. They can’t do much of anything else, but they do that one thing very well and very efficiently. They run a custom, lightweight Linux OS that’s very aggressive with its battery management. Coupled with an e-ink display, they sip power and can run for weeks on a single charge. That’s not something a simple android can provide.

That’s a corpo problem, not an EV problem. They could very easily make a perfectly fine EV that isn’t a shitty motorized “smart device”, if they chose to. But they aren’t. The EV push just happened to coincide with the global ramping up of automotive enshittification that had already begun for all cars regardless of their energy source.

Meh. I would not take either. In fact I actually didn’t. I went to a showroom and got inside their EVs and PHEVs while looking for a car. My immediate reaction after sitting in the driver’s seat of their PHEV was “I don’t want to drive this”. Same thing with the pure EV. I’ll give you the wheel, but those A/C controls next to the “shifter” are touch surfaces instead of actual buttons, and they’re just as annoying and worthless as touchscreen controls. Which is sad because those cars have fantastic stats on paper and very competitive prices. Unfortunately most EVs on the market have fucking stupid interior designs. Very often you have to choose between affordable and well designed. Not very many that are both.

In the end I decided not to buy a new car at all. Still got my 2015 Leon.

BYD cars don’t have very many buttons either. See here. They’re tablets on wheels too. I quite dislike BYD interiors.

That was said by some random Microsoft employee who had no official capacity to say something like that, and the whole thing sounded like they meant to say “latest” anyway. It is and was a worthless statement that got way more attention than it deserved.

Limiting the bandwidth use of individual devices is pretty easy, and basically standard procedure for public networks. Even cheap consumer routers that come with ISP subscriptions can do that.

The water thing is just a quirk of capacitive touchscreens. The same happens on the most expensive watches too, which is why there is usually a water mode that you can put the watch into. It sorta locks the touchscreen until you disable it using one of the physical buttons.