At least in some countries authors get a compensation every time their book is borrowed from a library. So you might still be indirectly supporting the author when borrowing from a library. Also if there’s enough demand, the library may acquire additional copies and the prices for libraries are higher than for consumers.

https://equityatlas.org/how-do-authors-make-money-from-libraries/

Conversely, when you are borrowing a book from an author you like, you probably are supporting them and do not need obliged to purchase it for yourself.

Not that it makes it any better, but the billions they have are mostly imaginary. It’s not cash or even concrete numbers on a bank account. It’s just a speculative valuation of what they own and most of the value comes from stocks on a company. Stocks that only have value as long as they are desirable for someone else and there is no surplus of them on the market. They could never cash out that value and even trying to cash out a significant portion would crash the stock price and their wealth. But as long as they possess this assumed wealth, they are granted almost unlimited credit to cover any purchase.

I guess they were referring to this.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my_new_hobby_watching_ai_slowly_drive_microsoft/

In one of the Tantacrul’s videos he says that UI/UX people do try to help and share their expertise, but the programmers running the projects ignore them or are actively dismissive, so they give up.

https://youtu.be/12TJ-zTgiH0 Around 16:20

While more donations and contributors are always welcome, the thing open source projects really need to break through are project leaders and UX designers to polish the software to make it more appealing.

Blender has come a long way in recent years by concentrating on these. There are also excellent videos by Tantacrul about his work on Musescore and Audacity after he made a video about Musescore and they got in touch with him to fix the problems he brought up.

Finland has (vappu)sima, but it is only produced and sold around 1st of May. Or you can make your own at home with white sugar, molasses, lemon and baking yeast.

Delta was first one I have heard of, but when you think about it, it would be surprising if it was the first one when email over network has existed over 50 years. What other ones are there?

I guess that’s why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.

https://delta.chat/en/

I wish it would just be these small scale maintenance tasks with clear purpose and results. But instead it’s endless uncertainty and insecurity about your health and job and finances where you never know if you have done enough or if your efforts even matter. Keep grinding every day just to be rug pulled by something you could not have anticipated or have no control over. Descaling coffee machine is simple and rewarding: you see a problem, you have the means to address the problem, you do the thing and you have the satisfaction of a job done also reaping the benefits immediately.

You ask an LLM to code something and then just run the code blind without reading it and if it seems to work, publish the application. You can imagine how many performance and security problems it produces.

Notice the absence of division. It’s not watts per hour, but watt(s times)hours. So power multiplied by time which is energy. Just like the video explains.

Watts are analogous to velocity, so if you were to divide watts by time, the result would be the increase of power i.e. acceleration of energy consumption.