well, there is a whole book about piracy, DRM and selling stuff on the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Doesn%27t_Want_to_Be_Free

So I won’t add much to the topic, what I can say is that this is about being pragmatic. There is some people who’s gonna spend their money on books but it requires publicity (polemic topic) and subsidizing creativity with our own money (another controversial one).

Otherwise it’s a difficult discipline /profession /industry

@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me I want to highlight another social problem: People don’t read. Paper industry is a bad moment because people don’t pay for books; it does not matter if it is a physical or digital platform. I have this information because I have a good friend who left the industry after publishing a magazine, books and working in an editorial. DRM is a try to give some more money.

well, that leads to a long conversation.

Piracy is a difficult topic which is very personal, so I won’t say much about it.

On writing books, I’ve tried along with other digital products such as courses and videogames, and I got to confess that it has been hard for me.

If it helps, I think it all reaches our expectations on the activity and the result. If royalties is the expectation, it’s going to be slow. By 5% of royalties, for a rough example, a huge amount of sales will be required to get a decent “wage”, so I’ve understood of doing it by the side of a normal employment although it has been discouraging and a bit sad.

I have reflected about it in Spanish here: https://sembrandojuegos.substack.com/p/sobre-expectativas-al-crear-juegos

@prologic@twtxt.net Fully agreed. I’m far more likely to buy such mediums when DRM-free. I never go near Amazon eBooks etc because of their lock-in, and I have a Kobo eReader which needs to have the books side loaded unless directly from the Kobo store. I prefer DRM-free files every time.

I have just received the royalties for the last book: 98 euros for the four-month period, about 24 euros a month on average. Not even enough for the gym membership.
If you have to keep some knowledge: don’t write for money, the paper (or ebook) industry is in a very bad way, the margins for the author are very small and piracy is devastating.

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@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:

1. Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn’t even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.

2. When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck’s sake, why don’t they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It’s a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one’s actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can’t come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It’s a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you’re able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that’s where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it’s actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer’s target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let’s look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

  _______________________
 /               ________\_______________
↓               ↓         |              \
+---+---+---+   +---+---+-|-+   +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x |   | 23| n | p |   | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+   +---+-|-+---+   +---+---+---+
      |         ↑     |         ↑
       \_______/       \_______/

The “x” indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled “n”) and previous (labeled “p”) elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the “next” pointer in the first element and the “previous” pointer in the last element.

That’s it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.

@prologic@twtxt.net I created a script for your book. i have only done the first two chapters. have to do some adjustments to the text so it sounds ok and that takes time..

https://git.sour.is/xuu/piper

@xuu@txt.sour.is What books do you have?

I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.

I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. The beginning part about the history of life on Earth was fun to watch having just read Dawkin’s old book The Selfish Geene, and now I want to read more about archaea. The end of the talk about what might be going on on Mars made me a bit hopeful someone will find some good evidence.

Just leaving this book here for no reason 🤫

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆

Nouveau billet intitulé “La trilogie Mars est solarpunk” https://si3t.ch/log/2025-01-25-mars-KSR.txt #solarpunk #book #sf

Lowkey planning out a book (anthology. Maybe) of just playscripts in my Greek myth yuriverse. Thank u lord

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Reading “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak

Cancelled Mastodon because the time spent on it could have been used for reading books instead and the level of interaction is not enough to keep me interested.

@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me @bender@twtxt.net I just found:

Equilibrium problems are solved by method of relaxation numerically.

– Manoj Kumar and Garima Mishra, https://www.scirp.org/html/8798.html

Reminds me of deliberately misattributed quotes from a funny German book series “Die Känguru-Chroniken”, like:

How much is the fish?

– Karl Marx

I’m positively surprised there is even an English wikipedia page about The Kangaroo Chronicles. Somebody gathered a list with all of them.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, the Python docs are more like a book. They absolutely shine if you have no idea and read them from top to bottom. The tutorial is baked right in. But they don’t work all that perfect as cheat sheets. I also remember looking for the return types way too long in the past.

I would have thought that this could be easily improved when type hints are in place. And it sure does: https://www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/httpclient.html#tornado.httpclient.HTTPClient.fetch

Way to go F*** Book! With another $263M going down the drains … And people’s lives/data with it.

Brilliant, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, I didn’t think of the keystore! :-D

Me too, @aelaraji@aelaraji.com, I don’t know how many entire books I had to rewrite because of Ctrl+W irreversibly deleting the entire chapter.

An inspiring book on making a life around IT security

Troy Hunt: “Pwned”, The Book, Is Now Available for Free
https://www.troyhunt.com/pwned-the-book-is-now-available-for-free/

The web server in Calibre is pretty cool. Love how the UI was designed and made. Feels intuitive, yet powerful. Now i do need to organise the book collection a bit better.

@prologic@twtxt.net I bet our twts are already being fed to circuit monsters… Remember the other day when I’d snapped out about some nonsense, being an A-Hole and what not? I’ve seen an AI company employee lurking around with not much interaction (if I’m not mistaken), so my mind went on auto-pilot mode thinking “This !#@%$ must be feeding us to the circuit peggy monster!! Arrr 😤” 🤣🤣🤣 but then again, one shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover (or an employee by his title) right?

Its time to brush up on your competitive programming skills!

https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf

If all Orange Face Elefant party voters would take them on their words and make them actually do whatever insane world they invented, then perhaps people will realize the grave mistake that was made today. Many people have to feel consequences before they believe it. I hope there will still be history books in the future to disclose the insanity for future generations. But whatever happens, the World will keep spinning…

i’m so glad i gave up christianity. i might be a little less glad when i get purged, but at least i won’t be doing the purging. jesus of nazareth has some chill teachings, but the whole thing is poisoned by the actual history of the religion. genocide, book burnings, and ethnic cleansing are not exactly noble teachings.

Inversion by Aric McBay was another random library pick. Like The Fall of Io, it’s the most recent in a series, though I think this series is pretty loosely connected. In contrast, the villain in this book is simple and cartoonishly evil. The book presents a design for utopia which was interesting but a little cloying. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to want to live there, but I don’t think I do. I enjoyed the book as easy reading, and might try the others in the series some time. (4/4)

I read Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Enjoyable, like his other books that I’ve read. Somewhat sillier. (¾)

Lol, this is actually a good thing by Apple. Doesn’t kill social apps at all, just prevents some harvesting of your entire address book by abusive apps like WhatsApp.

Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?
Apple’s iOS 18 update has introduced changes to contact sharing that could significantly impact social app developers. The new feature allows users to selectively share contacts with apps, rather than granting access to their entire address book. While Apple touts this as a privacy enhancement, developers warn it may hinder the growth of new social platforms. Nikita Bier, a start-up founder, called it “the en … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net It’s the experience of an ordinary person in a strange place where memories are disappearing with the help of the Memory Police. The setting feels contemporary (to the book’s 1994 publication date) rather than futuristic, except for some unexplained stuff about memories.

Recent #fiction #scifi #reading:

• The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. Lovely writing. Very understated; reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro. Sort of like Nineteen Eighty-Four but not. (I first heard it recommended in comparison to that work.)

• Subcutanean by Aaron Reed; https://subcutanean.textories.com/ . Every copy of the book is different, which is a cool idea. I read two of them (one from the library, actually not different from the other printed copies, and one personalized e-book). I don’t read much horror so managed to be a little creeped out by it, which was fun.

• The Wind from Nowhere, a 1962 novel by J. G. Ballard. A random pick from the sci-fi section; I think I picked it up because it made me imagine some weird 4-dimensional effect (“from nowhere” meaning not in a normal direction) but actually (spoiler) it was just about a lot of wind for no reason. The book was moderately entertaining but there was nothing special about it.

Currently reading Scale by Greg Egan and Inversion by Aric McBay.

Book of Shadows - Sacred-Texts | https://sacred-texts.com/bos/index.htm

If some of you budding fathers want to know how I created a computer nerd to one day work for Facebook in the big USA, well you purchase a $1000 Xmas present, an enormous thick book with C++ programming, and say, you can play as many games as you like kids, but James has to create them using computer software.

SO James created once a 3D chess program with sound, took 6 months or so, really hard to beat, not based on logic moves point by point like other chess programs, this one was based on the depth of looking for patterns, set it to 5 moves ahead and you were toast every time. Nice program too, sadly gone over the years, computers suffer from bit rot. We used to try and mark rotten hard drive discs once as bad sectors, not sure how UBuntu does this these days, I see a dozen errors on the screen every time I load.

Today I would purchase for my kids AI CAD simulation software with metal 3D printer and get your child to build fancy 3D models and engines from scratch. This will make them an expert in the CAD AI industry by the time they are 14 years old. Sadly AI is here to stay and will spoil the Internet.

Does anyone else digitize their print books like I do? Scanning and OCR (Tesseract) is tedious, but I still like digital copies.

Thank “Human Goodness” for the Gutenberg Project and all the books I’ll get to immerse myself into, especially in such hard times 🙏

I’ve been thinking about a new term I’ve come across whilst reading a book. It’s called “Complexity Budget” and I think it has relevant in lots of difficult fields. I specifically think it has a lot of relevant in the Software Industry and organizations in this field. When doing further research on this concept, I was only able find talks on complexity budget in the context of medical care, especially phychiratistic care. In this talk it was describe as, complexity:

• Complexity is confusing
  
• Complexity is costly
  
• Complexity kills
  

When we think of “complexity” in terms of software and software development, we have a sort-of intuitive about this right? We know when software has become too complex. We know when an organization has grown in complexity, or even a system. So we have a good intuition of the concept already.

My question to y’all is; how can we concretely think about “Complexity Budget” and define it in terms that can be leveraged and used to control the complexity of software dns ystems?

Picked up Altered Carbon again on Netflix. Really need to read those books.

I wrote a letter to the owner asking him to restore the guest book so that I could continue read the gossip. But instead, Gopher disconnected. Bad…

The last time I did so, I ended up injuring my neck reading an old stash of books we’ve had laying around at home. It took months to heal. xD

UDF is where its at. Not some silly red or blue book that cant even have more than 8+3 filenames!

More basement:

I completely forgot that DVD-RAM was a thing once. Found my old disks and they still work. 🤯 The data on them is from 2008, so they’re not that old. Still impressive.

The disks are two-sided. On the photo, that particular side of the disk on the left appears to be completely unused. 🤔

And then I read on Wikipedia that DVD-RAMs aren’t produced anymore at all today. Huh.

(I refuse to tag this as “retrocomputing”. Read/write DVDs that you can use just like a harddisk, thanks to UDF, are still “new and fancy” in my book. 😂)

All #dune to read and enjoy original story: https://archive.org/details/frank-herberts-dune-saga-collection-books-1-6-by-frank-herbert

Asked an “AI Assistant” (Perplexity) to summarize my introduction of my homepage and then I asked it to give me some book recommendations I might like, and the thing actually nailed it.