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Books have been declared dead several times of the last quarter century, yet in the EU alone it's still half a million new titles every year and a 40 billion Euro market.


I've read a few of those articles in recent months, both in English and German, and I did read any book title that was rare. The Rare Book & Special Collection Div at the Library Congress considers books published before 1801 as rare. Searching for old books on abebooks is surprisingly hard but I didn't find any for less than 10 Euro and nothing in those articles suggested they were buying up anything but cheap books.


I had a neighbour once who was quite unhappy about how short their lawnmower cut the grass, I did show them the two adjustment screws to raise the ground clearance...


bbc.co.uk still allows listening to all stations live and yt-dlp has no problem to download shows, you just got to find your way to the correct page that doesn't trigger a redict to bbc.com e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qng7/episodes/player


BBC 6music has a lot of great DJs, Chris Hawkins being my favourite with plenty of banter for a 5am show. While it's just a Friday late night show: Ashley Storrie on BBC Radio Scotland and don't be surprised if you hear the same listeners sending in messages on both stations. But then, they aren't commercial stations with less pressure. Whenever I have to listen to an Austrian (where I live) station I get bored. Even the public funded stations have commercials or, even more annoying, un-labeled advertising for the lottery.


You might want to ignore politics all day long, but rather sooner than later it's politics that will creep into your life and take an interest in whatever things that politicians mis-understand about your little niche.


Christ. This again.

Sometimes people just want to geek out and talk about technical things, this isn't rocket science, is it?

Yes, those people mostly do realize the importance of understanding and discussing politics. But that doesn't mean _every single_ thread must devolve into a political discourse, especially when those discourses have a general tendency to lead to nowhere. It gets real tiring real fast...

I am willing to bet my 20 cents that you don't talk about saving the environment every single time you eat. And the reason is much the same -- it gets tiring.

Anyway. If you want to make a political statement, why not do it in a more suitable thread rather than a thread simply about the release of a model? It's not like HN strictly bans political threads.


> I’m a developer from China.

From China as in not any longer living in China? Welcome to the rest of the world (small exceptions apply) where you can openly discuss things that go wrong in China and even criticise the CCP. If you can't deal with all this freedom, I'm sure a covert Chinese police station hear you will help you. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/explainer-chin...

If you are still IN China, please be a respectable Citizen and stop using a VPN, after all Hacker News is blocked by your infallible government https://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=news.ycombinator....


Please don't reply to anyone like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here, and none of us would like it if we were spoken to this way due mainly to our nationality. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I'm getting a lot of calls recently and don't give them more than a Hello and whatever music, radio show or Tour de France broadcast I'm listening to. Sometimes they hang in there for half a minute.


Sometimes if I’m suspicious about the number now, I just answer and say nothing. A human will get confused after 5 seconds and say “Hello?Hello??” But the very shitty bots that usually call, just wait patiently for a long time for your hello, and don’t seem at all fazed by it.


You get actual humans calling you from unknown numbers? Lucky! I only ever get "Chase" from "Home Security Solutions" or whatever.


Yeah, recently I've had quite a few legitimate ones, mostly having to do with home renovations or other transactions.

I like most am deeply unsatisfied with the archaic system though of a basically unchangeable 10-digit number granting permission for anyone to fill up my phone with messages and interrupt me with calls, and hate that I have to ever answer calls from a number I don't know.

I really would like a mutual opt-in system, where you have to pre-establish consent before it's even possible to message or call you, but it seems impossible to get there from here. We can't even get the stupid cell phone companies to strongly enforce that caller ID isn't spoofed!


How do you meet people if it's pre-established consent. Eventually someone needs to say 'hi' without the consent of the other person. In all things.


Sure, I'd answer with an example of it done well. When "Instant Messaging" was a huge deal circa 2000, if you got a message from a new person on most platforms, you'd get a chat invitation. You could accept and allow them, or dismiss them and never hear from them again. (Of course this had a vulnerability if you could generate new accounts too easily, so spam activity varied depending on how easy it was to have bots sign up).

Phone calls and SMS should be like that, which, they almost could be today just with the phone OS keeping track of who you've previously "accepted."[1]

Except.

The identifiers (phone numbers) are nearly infinite, and nearly free, so the scammers just use a "new to you" number every time they call you, allowing each one to generate a new 'invitation.'

And of course to make it worse, the "numbers" are actually truly free since they can spoof any number they want all day long and to this day, most of those calls will go through and not even show a big red flag.

That last part is entirely reprehensible that our carriers haven't solved it by now, but apparently they don't want to.

[1] and also there's that sticky problem that some arbitrary company like say, a health insurance company or the state government, has 1000 departments who might call you, and they couldn't give you a full list if they wanted to.


In person or online.

How often have you met people over the phone in the past decade?

I will say that blocking all unrecognized numbers, though, is an unworkable idea. Any parent or caregiver knows that they need to be able to occasionally receive calls from a number they've never heard of before.


They only do if you give your container that file system as a volume.


The DOT has a list of interesting studies on the active transportation in the form of walking and cycling https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/active-transpo...

You can also search for studies that compare the societal cost/benefit of using a car vs a bicycle. The generally accepted conclusion is that cars have a cost while cycling has a benefit for society.


That's not what I'm saying. Based on OPs phrasing, their specific bike was marked as a health hazard. Maybe their bike is painted with lead based paint. There could be a million reasons a specific model could be unhealthy.


Oh sorry, I missed that CA over-cautious warning label nonsense.


> Oh sorry, I missed that CA over-cautious warning label nonsense.

See, that's the thing... what "over-cautious warning label nonsense"? What are they actually warning about? Which chemicals/products?


Who’d know. It gets slapped on all sorts of things and you can’t tell which matter.


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