I can't recommend PIA anymore after the acquisition. It used to be my choice ever since using a VPN became a necessity, but these it's Mullvad for me. They're relatively transparent, allow me to pay anonymously in cash, and are based on a VPN protocol already included in my kernel.
I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms and "block" ads to the best of my ability, in real life as well. I do not view ads that reach me by mail, and as for billboards and posters I see around town, I make a note to avoid the products they advertise. I know this doesn't make a difference but it's an ideological thing. If my actions could in theory cause a tiny little dent in a graph somewhere, I make a point to do it.
Junk mail is particularly frustrating because companies are generating so much paper waste only for someone to deliver it to your door, and you to put it directly in the bin. No, Dominoes, I don't give a fuck about your shit pizza, and sending junk through my letterbox 5 days a week isn't going to change my mind.
Sports Illustrated recently started sending me their full monthly magazine with my name on it, without a subscription. It also goes straight into the trash.
(For anyone thinking once a month doesn't sound too bad: Sports Illustrated has so many pages it stacks up to almost a centimeter thick)
> I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms
So, you think “Show HN” is unethical, too? If so, how are people with a new product going to find customers? Word of mouth? How do they find their first customer?
I suspect your opinion on advertising is strong, but not that strong.
"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."
I agree with everything but the latex part. Something like HTML 3.2 is a better fit for hypertext documents. There's no need to re-invent anything, only remove the feature creep and cancerous bullshit.
That's easier said than done though, with everyone so invested in this modern game of "emperor's new clothes" that is the modern web.
For those who may not know, this is a front-end to LibGen. I like the search feature more and use it now and then, but for me the 5-downloads-per-24h limitation is usually quite limiting.
I have hundreds of books I want to dump if I substitute the digital version on my disk. When in discard mode, I easily hit the 10/day limit of a free account. But that is what the favorites list is for, to spread things out over days.
Collect (I presume you mean download?) is an easy part and I agree one can download thousands of books in 24h. Skimming is very different from reading is very different from learning. If you want to skim titles/headlines then yes it's a limitation. I'd just argue it's not what books are for.
Who are you to decide what books are for, especially on a pirate site? I use libgen for research. Trying to figure out if a book is good for what I'm looking for is hard! In a traditional physical library, I'd sit in the stacks and scan through sometimes dozens of books before finding what I'm looking for. Then I'd check out those few books and read them more in depth.
From my experiences with it, in LibGen you have to search exactly what you want. A simple typo ruins it. Z-library is a better in that regards, so typos don't really ruin the search, allowing you to find stuff more easily.
I don't know whether they have a different dataset of books, but the search engine is definitely vastly superior. Not only in looks, but most importantly in terms of results.
I dunno. I had my doubts for the longest time but recently I've started, little by little, placing my bets on Flatpak. Snap can go to hell, for reasons exhaustively discussed here and elsewhere, but Flatpak is reasonably solid, open and performant technology that fits the problem it's trying to solve. I wouldn't mind if it takes over the distribution of big, GUI desktop apps on linux.
The fact that Valve ships the Steam Deck with a read only root managed by ostree and user apps installable via Flatpak to me shows the direction of future Linux desktop, and I welcome it wholeheartedly. I am done with distro managed packages for desktop apps, custom patches and the impossibility to ship closed source software on Linux because it's a mess.
Flatpak in my book rocks, and it's ahead of macOS DMG files and light years ahead of the Windows .exe downloaded from the Internet strategy.
I've read about this so much, I wonder if B/W printers have anything similar? Is there a secret yellow cartridge somewhere in my printer that I don't know about?
I used to use scanners, until I bought a new Brother laser printer and discovered that the scanner feature requires a proprietary driver on the computer end. It's sad as Brother printers tend to work really well with linux, for printing at least.
Since then I've written an ImageMagick script that converts phone photographs of documents into reasonably convincing "scans."
