It’s still possible, but only with a physical Kindle device and I believe only one of the older ones. You can copy files off those devices to your PC and crack them that way.

Otherwise I’m not aware of any other method. It really sucks too as my favorite genre literally only exists in the Amazon ecosystem (small indie authors that rely on KU and so don’t publish anywhere else)

You’re specifically paying for an agreed upon amount of time with the product. The negotiated price reflects this limited access to the product.

‘Licensing’ something with no stated time frame that one side can arbitrarily choose to end at any time makes little sense and they know it. They were perfectly happy with leveraging the assumption that you owned a copy of the product up until it became inconvenient to them.

I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.

‘How to treat a sprained neck’

So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else

I’ve spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It’s a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off ‘recommendations’ show up).

Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it’s best to recognize that. I’ve been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who’s privileged enough to get away with it. It’s not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.

Many of us would like this, but it’s dangerous or even illegal to get to some places by walking in large parts of America. And zoning laws make it really difficult to change.

As an American this is gross to me too

Honestly I assume most people with an American flag in their yard are racist trump fans these days

See this game documentary for more details: Cricket through the ages

My introduction was the old Call to Power game. Still waiting for a Civ-like game that has a near-future age of gameplay. That was always the coolest part to me.

Feels like most of the similar games today are either historical/current or purely scifi. I like the transition point. To play out possible ways of advancing forward. How do we get from today to entering the stars? Those were fun scenarios to play out.

There’s a couple of mods for civ that covers this I know, but they’re all abandoned and somewhat buggy these days. Plus this sort of thing works best if the game is balanced around it to begin with.

I don’t actively use it, but I don’t see the point in deleting my account? My HOA is only on a Facebook group, so it’s the only place I can go to check for updates on some stuff (typically trash day getting moved, neighborhood pool stuff, etc). That’s the only use. My understanding is that Facebook tracks me even without an account so doesn’t really seem like I’m gaining anything other than good feelings by deleting my account.

It’s not like I’ve gone out of my way to delete my old Myspace or xanga accounts either, I just stop using them.

Pretty sure since it’s a layoff they’ll argue it wasn’t specifically targeted as a form of discrimination. America is full of things that feel like they should be illegal, but aren’t.

Like how my state has absolutely zero laws enforcing access to bathroom or food breaks at work. Totally baffling.

I’ve honestly been really surprised that this was the only ‘real’ assassination attempt in recent memory. I was surprised that no one went after Obama, nor Trump after him and Biden after him. The rage was so high, yet it’s only now that anyone from either side makes a real attempt.

That’s called Sims expansion game pack stuff pack kit #3452.

I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.

So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?

Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.

I mostly agree, with the caveat that 99% of AI usage today just stupid gimmicks and very few people or companies are actually using what LLMs offer effectively.

It kind of feels like when schools got sold those Smart Whiteboards that were supposed to revolutionize teaching in the classroom, only to realize the issue wasn’t the tech, but the fact that the teachers all refused to learn and adapt and let the things gather dust.

I think modern LLMs should be used almost exclusively as an assistive tool to help empower a human worker further, but everyone seems to want an AI that you can just tell ‘do the thing’ and have it spit out a finalized output. We are very far from that stage in my opinion, and as you stated LLM tech is unlikely to get us there without some sort of major paradigm shift.

Same. I want more physics, more depth to character dialogue, more animations, etc. High res graphics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making games feel immersive. At this point a bunch of older games feel newer or more modern to me because they actually include this stuff.

For like 99% of people arguing that ‘voting is useless’ they are also not working towards any other method of improving society. Either by working towards unions, or effective means of protest or even violent revolution. They’re just opting out and doing nothing of value while feeling smug about being ‘above’ such petty squabbles.

If you are the 1% actually doing something of value that isn’t voting. Congrats, I guess? But I think I’m far more likely to convince someone to vote, which is at least somewhat helpful than I am to convince them to join a revolution.

I was responding in general to the concept, not specifically this implementation, which as you say is not the worst implementation for sure.

We’ll have agree to disagree on pay2win not being predatory. Again, this specific implementation may not be as bad, but the market as a whole absolutely has examples just as dangerous as slot machines. They’re built on the same psychology.

As for regulation, it doesn’t strictly have to come from the government. Both movies and games have rating boards specifically to avoid government intervention and I think they are failing consumers here. The threat of government intervention might see the ESRB and the various gaming marketplaces adopt more strict rules and warnings. Things like preventing the sale of games with specific, predatory mtx dark patterns and mechanics from sale to minors, stronger warning labels on games containing these sorts of practices and penalizing companies from adding MTX in a deceitful manner (such as after launch). A game would be heavily penalized for adding adult content this way and perhaps MTX should be treated in a similar manner.