That was a fun and interesting read.
When we buy an ebook, they are selling us a “license” to use it on their terms. We technically don’t own the book. Which is horseshit. Kudos to Pixelmelt for oursmarting their obfuscation techniques.
I use Kobo and Calibre because A-Z sucks so bad. And if an ebook is exclusive to A-Z, I’ll just never read it. Fortunately 99.9% of the ebooks I’ve wanted are on Kobo.
They never learn. This is what happens when clueless MBAs make your strategic decisions.
Too many people equate AI with LLMs only. LLMs are mostly bubbled bullshit, with a few limited use cases. But AI is a much broader topic. The really scary AI is the stuff we hear little to nothing about.
People also forget how dramatically tech can advance over time. Spoiled impatient Americans in particular want a finished product or they quickly write it off as “garbage”. They forget every product we own and use was once “garbage”.
It’s frustrating how many non-joiners are completely turned off by the part where you hunt for an instance to join. They act like it’s super confusing and scary (when in fact it’s ‘super easy, barely an inconvenience’).
Meanwhile these same people will scour the internet looking for a recipe or bootleg movie or whatever.
It’s really frustrating when you remember what a huge PITA it is to get your account going on reddit. Sure, the first part is easy enough, it’s just registering on the site. But then you find you can’t do jack shit because you don’t have enough karma and every sub you visit has 10,000 arbitrary byzantine rules to deal with because the mods got picked on in high school.
Lemmy is actually EASIER than reddit. But here we are.
This is a good look under the hood on why so much mainstream software actively sucks these days. They put so many fucking resources into dark capitalist shit, and zero into making it a good user experience.