I feel like there have always been buggy releases. But I do feel they have gotten more frequent and have become the actual norm, with people being impressed when AAA releases don’t have deal breaking bugs on release

You are making a common mistake of being too literal with headlines! What you described is quite difficult and laborious. Nothing prevents you from doing that. Please try in the future to read headlines knowing the editor has written them to attract your attention, using a provocative word like “impossible”, while the piece itself might still provide useful information. This is an important aspect of media literacy.

I am honestly surprised it took this long! Kindle has been around a long time and it’s not like Amazon was any less evil back then. It makes me wonder if the competition has been starting to make them nervous!

You might try one of the larger Kobos to be able to read PDFs comfortably. The little ones might be a bit cramped with most PDFs. For html I’ve never tried that with Kobo, but a lot of people swear by the Android e-ink tablets from Onyx and Boox, though those are sometimes pricey!

I used this guide from a thread on Reddit. It relies on Calibre and a set of plugins https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide_to_dedrm_kindle_books/

I’m pretty happy with Kobo. I’ve had the same model for about ten years and it’s still working great. They had color temperature changing for the backlight before it was cool. The syncing to Pocket was neat before stupid Mozilla killed it, and now they’ve pivoted to Instapaper. Plus I can install KOreader to also read stuff on my own ebook server, though I find the Kobo firmware is quite nice so I often just stick on that.

They also consistently put their ebooks on sale. I’ve gone cold turkey on buying from them and have noticed they often have the best prices on books. They want people to build a library and be locked in.

I think this explains why Amazon is locking down their books and making libraries non-portable. There is more competition

Fairly intuitive, if you can drag the right file to the right directory on the device.

Between Kobo and Google Books I haven’t had a problem of not finding a book. Are you talking about small authors self-publishing on Kindle? I could see that being an issue

It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it’d be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they’re the same!)

Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).

Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more

Few have the resources or time for that. And Google and Internet Archive were both sued for doing that with even public domain/orphaned/out of print material

Exactly. It’s an very niche library (tmap for R) and just was completely overhauled. Gemini, chatGPT and Copilot all seem pretty confused and mix up the old and new syntax

LLMs are useful to provide generic examples of how a function works. This is something that would previously take an hour of searching the docs and online forums, but the LLM can do for very quickly, and I appreciate. But I have a library I want to use that was just updated with entirely new syntax. The LLMs are pretty much useless for it. Back to the docs I go! Maybe my terrible code will help to train the model. And in my field (marine biogeochemistry), the LLM generally cannot understand the nuances of what I’m trying to do. Vibe coding is impossible. And I doubt the training set will ever be large or relevant enough for the vibe coding to be feasible.

Mozilla is a bizarre Matryoshka doll with a for profit company inside of the nonprofit. If anything, I believe this structure is responsible for Mozilla’s problems

I get what you’re saying, but it’s suspicious how averse they are to other revenue sources. They allowed their subscription offerings to wither away over the years (I should know, I was a big enough sucker to stick with them as they let them rot with no new features), and do not take donations for their browser. They were also sitting on a billion in assets in 2023, so I’m not clear where the money has been going other than executive pay. Meanwhile, Thunderbird was given more autonomy and is thriving with record donation revenue. In fact, several projects that suffered under Mozilla found a second wind as soon as Mozilla gave up management, like Rust, Servo, Firefox OS (now KaiOS). Mozilla really should be totally reconstituted. Something is deeply wrong in the organization

Building a browser engine is expensive. That’s why almost all other browser engined other than Apple’s have joined the Chromium Borg and gone extinct.

When they advocated for Google in the search antitrust case, that was powerful evidence of how captured the board has become. They care more about their fat paychecks

It is classic tech company strategy.

We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors. Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis. Google Photos offering unlimited free storage

If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there’s a rug there.