It is probably worth noting that I am removing the DRM so I can read them on devices that do not have Kindle apps.

Nothing is certain, but it looks like you will still be able to download books into local memory so you can read them. As long as the apps still work that way, it will be possible to access the book files.

You do need a tool that can remove the DRM from the books files the Kindle uses. DeDRM used to do this nicely, but it has not been updated to handle the most recent version of Kindle DRM. It will not works on any books published since early 2024.

There are commercial options that can remove even the latest DRM from Kindle books. I use Epubor Ultimate. It was the first to handle the most recent Kindle DRM, but I’m sure there are others by now.

Well, they have almost always circumvented them instead, but that impacts the bottom line too.

A lot of people don’t seem to get that social media services are almost entirely about their userbases, not their companies. Facebook and Meta are unbelievably terrible, but that is where most of the people you know can be found. Switching to something else is easy, but pointless, if your reason for being there is the people.

I have slowly convinced friends and family to begin using MeWe, but only a small number. And most of them still primarily use Facebook. At least recent events are pushing a few more away from it.

I suggest that you spend the up-front money to consult with a lawyer. A lot of them will do an initial meeting for relatively little. They will be able to give you some idea of what risk, if any is involved in this. Then you can make a better informed decision about whether to ignore this, fight, or conceded and change the name.

I find out a few years ago that there are whole law firms out there who basically just send threatening letters for low fixed fees. They don’t litigate or even provide real legal advice. It’s one step above selling pages of their letterhead.

You won’t know how serious these people are, or how serious their complaint is, without consulting a lawyer.

Best of luck!

Chording keyboards are never likely to become mainstream because they have a steep learning curve. That doesn’t mean they aren’t a great idea or that they don’t work quite well. This looks like an unusually clever implementation of the concept.

The particular application makes a lot of sense. The combination of a wearable keyboard with extremely fast typing and text-to-speech would solve a real problem for people who can’t talk.

Personally, I’ve played around with chording, but came to the conclusion that I actually don’t need that much typing speed. Most of my typing is either coding or writing emails. In either case, I stop to think about what I want to write often enough to keep my maximum word rate quite low. I can type around 90 wpm on a regular keyboard, which is still faster than I can compose.

You can be certain that if you’re upsetting Trump, Musk, and Zuckerberg, whatever you’re doing is making the world a better place.

This is an encouraging development. Decoupling development from server management will help level the playing field.

I think that’s a clever idea. I’m inclined to agree with the majority that it probably isn’t something I would want, but I would be interested in trying it out before I passed judgment. The Trackpoint would be the main competition, and it would be hard to beat.

I would not want a printer built in. It would add size, weight, and cost for something I do not need. I’ve pretty well stopped using paper, both at home and at work. I print something maybe once every couple of months.

I like you.

Yes. I, my wife, and several friends have had intermittent problems with long-delays in message delivery. In some of those cases, neither of the phones involved moved, which rules out most of the common explanations. I’ve considered disabling RCS entirely, but a recent move to Signal has made this less of an issue.

Just bear in mind that nothing involved in “refurbishing” a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn’t tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.

If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won’t be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.

Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.

I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.

Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.

Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.

This could be considered a trojan.

I love the idea!

The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.

The sad thing is that the corporate sociopaths who made the bad decisions all made huge amounts of money doing it. The fact that they destroyed the company means nothing to them. And it will not mean anything to the next corporations that hire those same people as executives.