I’ve run into exactly the same issue with my large ttrpg ebook/pdf collection (+100k file data hoarding… it’s not a problem, I swear) and I’ve not really found a good option I’m entirely happy with. Calibre duplicates everything and I don’t like the thought of having my collection’s organization tied to a specific piece of software if I just delete my duplicates. Plus I’m elitist and think the UI/logo are gross to look at.

Zotero is the least worst option I’ve found, but it’s geared towards scholarly journals and such, so not great, but serviceable. Not sure if it’s on linux though.

Jellyfin is apparently able to handle ebooks with a plugin, though I didn’t particularly care for it when I tried it months ago.

There’s a handful of other ebook software out there, mostly geared towards comics/manga, so depending on what you have those might be worth looking for.

I’d like to use Obsidian for it and just turn the directory into a vault and let it automatically scan the folders for files, but that doesn’t work great either.

The best piece of software I’ve seen that could potentially handle it is an app called Stashapp… which is unfortunately geared towards adult film. But it’s feature-set if it could be applied to PDFs seems like it would be ideal.

Except for southern “blue dog” Democrats, Abortion is a relatively “safe” topic to pander to single-issue voters on because the only people hyper-opposed to it are single-issue voters on the other side who were never going to vote liberal anyways. There’s virtually no down-side.

Israel is a more thorny & nuanced issue for Democrats though and not as clear cut. Israel is committing genocide and we shouldn’t be supporting them, but there’s alot of Jewish-American voters in key states, you’ve got AIPAC and a plethora of other Jewish/Israeli lobbies with alot of influence, you’ve got big military contractors who like Israeli money, and then you’ve got bigwigs in the military who see Israel as a strategic partner. Completely dropping support for Israel risks upsetting alot of interests and handing them over to Republicans to be used against Democrats. It’s shitty, but I’m assuming that’s the calculus going on with Democratic leadership.

Also, Israel is much much less reliant on the US for aid than in times past, and I think there’s a fear that if we stop supplying them, somebody else will and then we’ll have absolutely no influence over anything they do. We have much less influence over them than alot of people think. If they saddle up with China or Russia, the gloves come off and I think we’d see it much worse than it is now. As hard as that is to imagine, it can always get worse. And if we let Republicans get control, it will get worse.

Wow, an incredibly basic feature only available to Premium subscribers? How far the mighty have fallen.

I think AI art is comparable to photography. Photographers do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything set up, the equipment, lighting, angles, lenses, etc, But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button, it’s not nearly the same amount of work that a painter or a musician puts into their art. So I think the idea of “capturing” art is still a valid thing. Sometimes a photographer can capture an award-winning masterpiece with a spur-of-the-moment photo on some shitty disposable camera. Maybe it took them 1000 bad photos to get that one photo, but they still just captured it from somewhere else, they didn’t create the work.

Similarly with AI, a person may have to work with the AI software to setup and craft the prompt that will eventually generate the art, then there may be dozens of iterations of that and fine-tuning to get the result they’re imagining, and even after that there may be some photoshopping involved to get it to where they want it. They’re capturing artwork from a source that may not be their own creation, just the same as photographers. I think AI art is just as legitimate as other forms of art, it’s just open to a wider range of people that can participate because many of the physical hurdles (equipment, space, time, lighting, etc) are not as much of an issue.

I have encountered this issue before when I tried using Obsidian my RPG pdf collection (10,000s of files), would not recommend. I do still like Obsidian and will keep using it, but would something like Trillium work as a sort of PDF library software for a massive amount of files like that? The main need is to be able sort/categorize game systems using tags, link to pdfs, and maybe have some sort of Dataview-esque query capabilities. Zotero is the least worst option, but it still has some annoyances for me and I’ve still been looking for something that could help me organize better. I know this is billed as a note-taking app, so it’s a weird use-case, but Obsidian was pretty close to being a decent solution, if not for the slow speed issues.

That’s how we’re still using my Dad’s account, it’s mostly used by my brother, but shared with the other gamers in the family

For the price, pizza always seems like the cheapest “eating out” option compared to others. Our cheapest I’ve seen is $7.99 at Little Caesars for a pizza (“large round”), along with $3.99 for breadsticks. With 3 kids, that’s one of the best deals compared with everything else around (only ~$12). It doesn’t seem universal with all pizza places though, some are worse than others.

What did your order in seems to be the stuffed cheesy bread, dips, and the delivery tip, those ate up half your costs right there, but food prices in general have gone to shit. ~$12 for a combo meal at a fast food place is pretty typical in my area and made me question my receipt a few times during the pandemic when I first started seeing them that high. I just stopped eating out at most fast food places altogether and get by on a salad, shake, and protein bites for around $6 a day.

They’re evolving

We never knew her name is Susan. They’re building lore onto it with their artistic vision.

I noticed the tail first, but then the woman holding the cheap flower vase is when it clicked. Just not something anyone would do at a table or draw.

Because using previously established meme templates is considered high effort?

“What if we put lanes on top of the other lanes?”

Harambe, Blessed be thy name.

That storm is wet though, just looking for a nice, stiff rod to unleash itself on.

The only thing that comes close to the greatest sci-fi quote from those three franchises is Luthen’s speech in Andor, otherwise this one from G’kar in B5 is one of the greatest bits of prose in sci-fi:

It was the end of the Earth year 2260, and the war had paused, suddenly and unexpectedly. All around us, it was as if the universe were holding its breath…waiting. All of life can be broken down into moments of transition, or moments…of revelation. This had the feeling of both. […] G’Quan wrote, “There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.” The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born…in pain.

If anything, HR depts will use AI to pre-sort candidates based on some algorithm that looks at arbitrary measures, the presence of certain buzz words, and whatever else, anything to cut down on the amount of work HR needs to do screening candidates.

I’d love if it could apply to jobs for me. Just take my resume, figure out the job position I’m applying for and go through their dumb application site, pull all the same data off of my resume and use it to fill in the duplicate fields that they have that are in my resume. Just let the AI handle all the applying for me and it can tell me what jobs I have an interview for so I don’t have to waste all my time with the application part.

This kind of reminds me of the state of the mobile gaming space with respect to these sort of “idle” games that are out there. I’m not sure if most are like this, but I’ve been experiencing one lately for shits & giggles. I started playing one a few weeks ago that’s almost like a tower defense-ish game, you’ve got waves of enemies coming at you and you need to erect various defenses to stop them, comprised of heroes from various roles.

The basic gameplay itself is ok-ish, BUT the developers have inserted so many goddamn currencies and roadblocks and things to slow the game down, I guess to make it a fucking grindfest. You’re basically required to grind and level up your heroes in order to advance past some levels, BUT they give you the option to do “Auto-battles” where you just let the game run on auto-pilot. So, in order to get arbitrary amounts of experience to level up my people and to proceed past some gameplay roadblock, you can run through X auto-battles and level up that way, so I just let my phone run this stupid thing for ~10 min just so I can advance. Or you can pay money for shortcuts, that’s their business model I guess.

Are we eventually going to get to that point with social media? We won’t really be maintaining friendships with people, we’ll just have our AIs maintain relationships with other people’s AI, and we just sort of let it run on auto-pilot while we’re off doing whatever. Then you’ll run into a Facebook friend IRL and have no idea who they are, despite your AI’s being best friends with each other. I’m just wondering how they’ll eventually transform it into the Freemium business model.

I keep a collection on Steam of the games I’ve beat and just add them into the collection as I go. Going back through prev pre-Steam pc/console games I’ve beat probably wouldn’t take that long to remember I guess, but I don’t know where I’d store it or who else would care in my life.