Yaky

From some philosophical standpoints (determinism, for example), a person is their mind, a brain; so reproducing or simulating the brain to a very high degree would result in reproducing that person. Whether that is true or not is philosophical, and is similar to the Star Trek teleporter discussion.

In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe, the classification is pretty sensible: there are three levels of simulation.

Alpha level is a nanotech scan-copy of a real brain which kills the subject, but the resulting persona is considered intelligent, a human, with rights and all. IIRC there were only 60 people who did that.

Beta level is a model built upon all available information about the person, all audio, video, text, etc. This is pretty much what we might now call a trained AI, but it is not considered intelligent.

And gamma level is a fully artificial persona, usually used for chatbots and what we would use LLMs for now.

YSK that OverDrive (developer of Libby) is a private for-profit company that makes obscene amounts of money. Pretty much a prime example of private-public "partnership" taking taxpayer money.

• Before COVID, they made enough to pay each of their ~300 employees half a million dollars. This figure increased during COVID. Guess who got bonuses? Not regular employees.
• OverDrive charges 30% overhead on top of publisher prices (which are usually already up to 4x higher for libraries)
• They criticize some publishers, but publisher raising prices conveniently plays into their hand. Publishers' abusive "borrowing" models, such as limited "digital copies" or "pay-per-borrow" still work for OverDrive (see above)
• They were one of the first to market and are vertically integrated: they own the marketplace to purchase titles from publishers, hosting of titles, and the application. This is easy for clients (libraries), but difficult to switch away from.
• They partner with LexisNexis, who has been collaborating with ICE for deportations.
• Many of their employees are former teachers, and with miserly teacher salaries in Ohio, it's another convenience to hire knowledgeable people for cheap.

I am not too familiar with animism either, but as far as I understand from the book, it's the belief-idea-philosophy that humans are a part of nature, including both living and non-living things. (Contrary to modern idea of separating the "human" and "natural" worlds). In addition to awareness and careful choices, it believes in reciprocity, giving back what was taken from the ecosystem. Similar to what was/is practiced by many native communities.

(Please correct me if I am wrong)

Not just about climate, but Less Is More by Jason Hinckel. It is anticapitalist and pro-animist (!), and I found the historical parts interesting, particularly the philosophical angle of how separating the human from the rest of nature happened (and how it played into abuse of both nature and humans)

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by Thor Hanson is about climate change, how animals adapt to it, how forests can migrate, and local climate anomalies.

I miss blinkenlights on smartphones. They went out of style circa 2015, and now all you get is the screen turning on momentarily, or some variant of a dim always-on view that wastes battery.

A lot of them are getting blocked too, presumably by datacenter IPs. I suppose it's possible to run it off a residential IP.

The article matches my experiences.

I knew a guy, not MAGA, but a self-identified libertarian, with very bigoted and bad takes (racism, misogyny, general lack of empathy). His responses for being called out or criticized were:

• This is a joke
• You are too stupid to understand the joke
• The joke I made is supposed to be making fun of people who say the same offensive things seriously (except the joke has no hint of irony or self-awareness)
• You are too stupid to understand the point I am making
• You don't know stuff about life
• You lack EQ to understand my situation
• General insults about intelligence
• Why are you being an asshole to me?

Eventually, I also figured out that the only way to win is not to play the game. Shame, we were good friends back in the day.

IMO tech terms evolve a bit faster and are more accepted with their new spelling and meaning. Older words are less prone to such adjustments, but "alot" puzzles me as well.

Here are a few more to add to the confusion:

• From your own post, we now type "website" not "web site"
• We use email now, not e-mail, and definitely not "electronic mail"
• "Blog" is shortened "web log"
• Is it "username" or "user name"? They could mean different things, but might not
• It's always "password", not "pass word". Same with "passphrase".
• Is it "filename" or "file name"? In software, this becomes even more confusing since "filename" could imply a full path to the file, or just the name (sometimes without extension)

FYI Annihilation novel has the same premise and setup as the movie, but is quite different plot-wise. It's more emotional, introspective, and has very vivid imagery. Much different from what I usually read, but I loved it.

Mailbox.org

Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:

• Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don't need custom domains, €1/mo)
• More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
• Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
• Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn't happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
• Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)

Ukrainian "не лізь поперед батька в пекло" ("don't rush to hell before your father") - a mix of "don't be foolish / try to prove yourself / hurt yourself doing so" and also "let experienced people do their job / lead".

Also Ukrainian "або пан або пропав" ("Either [you become] a lord, or you disappear"), an important risky choice, or sometimes used as YOLO of yesteryear.

AFAIK as close as you can get is PinePhone or Librem5. But both have pretty poor battery life, an IPS display (technically could be OLED at the expense of even more battery consumption), and pretty jank camera (drivers for good cameras are proprietary, and a lot of modern smartphones rely on postprocessing for quality too).

Don't get me wrong, PinePhone made fantastic progress in 6 years, but your experience may vary (some people use it as a daily smartphone, some as a dumb phone, others are just turned off immediately)