Because calibre also allows me to convert other formats into epub.

Some files are unreadable garbage because of bad OCR or bad formatting or whatever. I use calibre to preview files in its built-in viewer, to see how they would be rendered on my actual reader. Helps a ton.

Some files have messed up metadata. Calibre helps with fixing that. I have encountered files that would appear as documents on my Kindle rather than books, for example. Easy fix with calibre.

Even if it is not messed up per se, I still sometimes use calibre to sometimes edit metadata to tidy them up. So that the author information between different books of the same series is the same, for example. “Banks, Iain M.” for all the Culture books, rather than a wild mess of various different variations of the same name. I have also added missing pieces of information to help group books in my library etc.

It’s a super useful tool. I just wish it didn’t spam so many system notifications though.

It’s not easier to that on the ground. Those analyses are done by large radars slapped on top of satellites. They can scan huge tracts of land in very quickly with very high precision. More precise than airborne systems. They work regardless of the weather. The same satellites can keep track of river flows, forest growths, volcanic and tectonic activity, floods, structures like bridges, whole bunch of things. They can be used for extremely accurate mapping. They are insanely useful tools.

They’re in such a low orbit that they’re barely staying in space already. You could explode all Starlink satellites right now and all their debris would naturally fall back into the atmosphere and leave the orbit clean in just a few years at most.

Xiaomi bootloaders used to work like that. You’d have to jump through some bullshit hoops to register your phone for bootloader unlocking, and then wait a few days to finally be able to unlock it. Then they made that worse and worse, and afaik it’s so insanely difficult and inconvenient right now that it’s practically impossible to unlock your Xiaomi phone’s bootloader. This applies to all the brands under that umbrella.

I am about 97.37% sure Google will do the same over time and at some point you just won’t be able to install any APKs.

They didn’t. They agreed to buy them. With the money that they don’t yet have, and probably can’t ever earn.

Which makes this whole thing so much more insane.

Also the guy’s last name is Poon.

Super silly take. Those aren’t stories, they’re themes. Very vague, general themes.

Eh. I’ve seen enough 300+ HP cars with 10+ year old bald tires and paper thin brake discs to believe otherwise. I personally know two people whose cars have broken wipers that simply don’t work. They don’t care. I know one guy whose car’s passenger door can only be opened by sticking the designated door opening pliers, which are stored under the seat, into the door panel through the hole of that door lock indicator peg thing and then fishing for some lever or whatever. You’re simply not gonna be opening that door in an emergency. One dude at my office has an old manual BMW with a shifter knob that just loosely sits on its lever, and can easily come off if you are not careful. Gotta blindly maneuver the knob back onto its spot underneath the leather cover when that happens. He drives it like that daily. No shortage of hideously dirty diesel engines. No shortage of badly misaligned headlights, nonfunctional brake lights, overly loud engines etc.

In short I not only think state inspections are a good idea, I even think they should be even stricter.

They are used for that kind of applications already. You put one of those on, and some technician remotely guides you in doing some maintenance while looking through your eyes. They can mark things in your fov, show you diagrams, whatever. Pretty neat actually.

LLMs can’t learn. It’s one of their inherent properties that they are literally incapable of learning. You can train a new model, but you can’t teach new things to an already trained one. All you can do is adjust its behavior a little bit. That creates an extremely expensive cycle where you just have to spend insane amounts of energy to keep training better models over and over and over again. And the wall of diminishing returns on that has already been smashed into. That, and the fact that they simply don’t have concepts like logic and reasoning and knowing, puts a rather hard limit on their potential. It’s gonna take several sizeable breakthroughs to make LLMs noticeably better than they are now.

There might be another kind of AI that solves those problems inherent to LLMs, but at present that is pure sci-fi.

An A-B repeat feature. Member when media players had that? I member. Back in my day you could listen to the ooga booga section of Freak on a Leash 162 times in a row with just two clicks.

You underestimate big tech. Judging by the headache inducing track record of AV technology, this would end up as yet another garbled mess of eleventeen different competing codecs with bad implementations, inconsistent specifications, misleading marketing, horrible licensing, and predatory DRM.

In my company we have a very modern agile workflow where QA is top priority.

At least that what we advertise. In reality it’s all an unorganized clusterfuck where I’m pretty sure I am the only one who bothers to write automated tests. Who’s got time to write tests bro just push that shit out ASAP we’ll deal with it when the client calls us in the middle of the night to complain about previously-working shit being broken now.