YMMV, but my local library system has a limit on the number of e-books that can be checked out at a time. Some e-books they only have 1 or 2 “copies” of, other they have 20+ “copies”. Seems dumb to me that there’s a limit, but I’m sure they’re forced to do it for a reason.

If you’re in the U.S., try the Libby app! Connects you to your local library system so that you can borrow audiobooks.

Twisted Veins is my go to. Great quality and durability, much lower price than Monster. I have lived in 9 homes in the last 8 years, and the 4 pack I bought 8 years ago has held up perfectly. These things are outliving TVs, computers, Ethernet cables, you name it.

Not OC, but there’s definitely an AI bubble.

First of all, real “AI” doesn’t even exist yet. It’s all machine learning, which is a component of AI, but it’s not the same as AI. “AI” is really just a marketing buzzword at this point. Every company is claiming their app is “AI-powered” and most of them aren’t even close.

Secondly, “AI” seems to be where crypto was a few years ago. The bitcoin bubble popped (along with many other currencies), and so will the AI bubble. Crypto didn’t go away, nor will it, and AI isn’t going away either. However, it’s a fad right now that isn’t going to last in its current form. (This one is just my opinion.)

I described it to my dad like this: “They don’t need to listen to your conversations because they’re already able to simulate your thoughts.”

Kinda a stretch, but it worked for him.

I actually saw a video once where the argument was that phones aren’t listening. Rather, Google (and Meta and the like) have so many other data points on you that they don’t need to listen. Listening to you would be far less efficient and far less insightful than relying on their vast network of other data they have on you. Even if you don’t use a single Google product, you’re still not safe.

Reminds me of the story where Target knew a customer was pregnant before she did. They started sending her ads for pregnancy/baby products before she even knew she was pregnant, all because they had so much data on her.

In my opinion, this is way more terrifying and problematic than if they were listening to us.

You’re correct. Unless you’re using WiFi on your phone that’s backed by satellite internet (Starlink, etc).

I disagree with your opinion of the integration with Threads, but I agree with you that it should be up to the individual instances and/or users.

Meta is a horrible company and I want nothing to do with them, but the whole point of the fediverse is that it’s decentralized. Anyone can spin up an instance if Lemmy or Mastodon and choose what other instances they federate with. If we were to somehow ban Meta’s instances, we create a pretty sketchy precedent.

Agreed, they probably should have been ordered to stop a while ago.

That said, Apple is the largest company in the U.S. by a number of metrics, so the fact that the government would cross them at all is kind of a surprise.

Oof, right before the holidays too. What a blow to their sales.

I wonder if Apple will use the estimated sales losses as damages when they counter-sue the other party in the patent dispute. Apple is taking “preemptive” steps to comply with an order that is not in effect yet – perhaps it’s a long con to entangle the patent holder in a prolonged legal battle so as to devalue and acquire them.

I didn’t receive it as pedantic or talking down at all. I just totally agree with you as well!

You know, I was trying to tread lightly, lest the Zionist apologists show up to try and redefine “genocide”.

But the reality is this:

• Tens of thousands of civilians are being murdered (shot, bombed, starved, water supply poisoned) by Israel’s military.
• Israel is an ethnostate which believes that their race makes them god’s chosen people.
• One of the Israeli government cabinet members has declared that the Palestinians in Gaza must be eradicated, and that he would drop a nuclear bomb on Gaze if he could.

When you use the U.N.’s definition of genocide (“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”), the picture is pretty clear.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted… Israel an ethnostate, and what we’re seeing here are the early stages of a genocide. Look at any other ethnic cleansing in history, and you’ll easily see the parallels.

I agree, I was just trying to be very conservative in my judgement. Realistically, a scenario in which you could be sure that it was safe to go through an intersection at those speeds is going to be very rare, even if you had a green light. There are just too many variables.

Every jurisdiction I have ever heard of (in the United States, at least) allows emergency vehicles to disregard traffic rules when they can do so safely. This is why you will often see that speeding police/fire/EMS vehicles with lights and sirens activated will still slow down for intersections, and then speed off once they have safely cleared the intersection.

The officer in this case was probably permitted to drive as fast as they were driving, and to drive through a red light, however they had a superseding duty to operate their vehicle safely. It doesn’t matter what kind of an emergency they’re responding to, that doesn’t give them the right to cause harm along the way. If the officer could not know with reasonable certainty that they would not collide with another vehicle (or pedestrian) when going through that intersection, then they shouldn’t have proceeded through the intersection at that speed.

Similarly, police officers are permitted to carry their guns under circumstances where most people would not be allowed to carry a gun. However, if they accidentally shoot an innocent bystander, they are still liable for that shooting. They can’t go waving their gun around just because they’re allowed to have/use guns under specific circumstances. Sounds like an extreme example, but cars can be just as deadly as guns.

Hey man, I’m just another helpless non-billionaire pretending I can make a difference.

If you are in the United States, please use a tool like Democracy.io to contact your representatives and demand that they condemn Israel for these atrocities.

So is the urn!

That’s probably the result of Jerboa detecting that the link is to a Lemmy community and handling it gracefully. While that’s a great feature the Jerboa devs have included, it’s not how Lemmy currently functions with regard to linking to communities. Lots of apps and browsers don’t handle the URLs nicely, unfortunately.

Lemmy devs should probably implement something to natively handle URLs and “properly formatted” links in the same way. If Jerboa can do it, then it can obviously be done. Until then though, proper formatting helps unite Lemmy users across platforms.

TLDR: I get on a soapbox about cross-platform interoperability because I had a bad week at work.

freedom to customize the shell

This is always the issue for me – I ssh into several machines for various clients every day. All of those clients have one thing in common: equally strict and inconsistent policies about what packages you can use from where and for what reason. “I like this shell better” would never fly, sadly.