You mean here on Lemmy? I think they disabled them on reddit anyway.

Here’s an another uncomfortable statistic: most of ASOIAF was published before 9/11.

Personally I gave up after AFFC, which I read around a decade ago. The quality of writing had plummeted, and it was increasingly obvious the series is going to take way too long to be finished.

The guy should just give up, relive himself of the duty and the audiences of the frustration, and spend his remaining years peacefully writing Dunk and Egg stories.

That’s true, but organising and managing such a distributed form of IA would probably be a nightmare of a job. I’ve seen many people suggest that to IA, but they seem to be very very reluctant about the idea.

If we’re going to stick to ancient Greek references, one of these is closer to the modern day Augean stables.

Huh? The public can store data on IA just fine. I’ve uploaded dozens of public-domain books there.

If you’re thinking of American right-wingers and fascists who are currently celebrating Trump’s victory, I must say their view of the world is so dark, negative and pessimistic, that nobody could really describe it as utopia-like. This is a brief respite for them, nothing more.

If you’re thinking more abstractly, or of some very specific incredibly lucky people, then I guess it could be so.

clbottomt when the chtopt shows up [imagine this as that popular GIF meme]

Thanks. It’s a part of history I know very little about.

I meant the “for over a hundred years” part specifically, I bolded it but it’s not as noticeable as it should be.

the US a terrorist nation for couping democratically elected leader in favour of dictators for over a hundred years

Is this really true?

Admittedly that sort of censoring has been used online since forever. Stuff like “pr0n”, etc.

(Sorry for the late response.) Well it depends a lot on the site. Since I focus on books and scholarly articles, the ideal way is to find the URL of the original PDF. The website might show you just individual pages as images, but it might hide the link to the PDF somewhere in the code. Alternatively, you might just obtain all the URLs of the individual page images, put them all into a download manager, and later bundle them all into a new PDF. (When you open the “inspect element” window, you just have to figure out which part of the code is meant to display the pages/images to you.) Sometimes the PDFs and page images can be found in your browser cache, as I mention in the OP. There’s quite some variety among the different sites, but with even the most rudimentary knowledge of web design you should be able to figure out most of them.

If need help with ripping something in particular, DM me and I’ll give it a try.

I never said I follow the law, I’m just wondering what the law says ;)

Honestly much of your reply is confusing me and doesn’t seem to be relevant to my questions. This is what I think is crucial:

Just because a file is cached on your device does not mean you are the legal owner of that content forever.

What does being “the legal owner forever” actually entail, either with regards to a physical book or its scan? And what does that mean regarding what I can legally do with the cached file on my computer?

This so much. Years ago I’ve had it push Moon landing denial videos in my recommendations, even though I’ve never watched videos on conspiracies or anything of the sort at the time. The closest I got were pop-sci channels such as Vsauce, Numberphile… It’s just trying to hook you onto the garbage content and garbage ideas because they have good and loyal viewership.

Man I miss the times when Google used to trick us into helping make knowledge more easily accessible to everyone. Now we just train fucking AI for luxury cars.

I don’t get the impression there are even precise definitions of these generational labels.

And I don’t think they make any sense at all outside of USA and maybe west Europe.

So, uh, what is the difference?

Something of the sort has already been claimed for language/linguistics, i.e. that LLMs can be used to understand human language production. One linguist wrote a pretty good reply to such claims, which can be summed up as “this is like inventing an airplane and using it to figure out how birds fly”. I mean, who knows, maybe that even could work, but it should be admitted that the approach appears extremely roundabout and very well might be utterly fruitless.

Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough

We probably wouldn’t consider them nearly as weird if they were more numerous than any other mammal species and lived all over the world. So their comparison to catholicism is weird.