KoftaBob

> We are a non-profit project with two goals:

> 1. Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.

> 2. Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world (including robots!).

Setting aside the LLM topic for a second, I think the most impactful way to preserve these 2 goals is to create torrent magnets/hashes for each individual book/file in their collection.

This way, any torrent search engine (whether public or self-hosted like BitMagnet) that continuously crawls the torrent DHT can locate these books and enable others to download and seed the books.

The current torrent setup for Anna's Archive is that of a series of bulk backups of many books with filenames that are just numbers, not the actual titles of the books.

It seems more like they're implying it's those at the top think that about other people.

> cannot fathom why we would ever build houses from trees instead of reinforced concrete

Steel-reinforced ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) has become a much more common frame material for homes in the US, especially in the hurricane-prone southeast.

Well I imagine CIA was in on it too of course, having blackmail material on these powerful figures across the world is useful for both of those intelligence agencies.

Him being in jail awaiting trial, which risked him exposing the details of the operation if he felt it could help him get a lighter sentence.

If the choice for Mossad was either risk Epstein exposing that Israel was essentially running a state-sponsored underage sex trafficking ring, or kill him before he can do that, you know what they'd choose.

> most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity.

The iPhone is a much stronger contender for that title. It has probably surpassed $1 Trillion in profit for Apple since 2007.

> Tangles scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark webs and is the premier product of Cobwebs Technologies, a cybersecurity company founded in 2014 by three former members of special units in the Israeli military.

If I had a dime for every time a sketchy "cybersecurity"/surveillance software ended up being developed by an Israeli firm...

Maybe you could have a system where, in the extreme case, a fully automated company with just a few executives gets taxed on a fixed percentage of its revenue. For every human employee they hire, they can deduct 110% of that person’s total compensation (salary + benefits) from the revenue that’s subject to tax.

That way it’s beneficial in both directions: if they stay fully automated, they’re effectively helping to fund something like a UBI through higher taxes on their automation-driven profits. But they’re also strongly incentivized to hire humans anywhere it actually makes sense, because every real job they create directly reduces their tax burden.

You're thinking of Daniel Elk (Spotify co-founder and CEO) and Ludvig Strigeus, who ran uTorrent before building Spotify.

That's essentially what Matter + Thread is. The Matter smart home standard, which can run on the Thread wireless protocol, allows products to work without an internet connection for local controls.

Matter is pretty common on newer smart home products, while Thread is a bit newer so it's only supported on some products right now.

When it comes to state-sponsored cyber-spying like this, take your pick between USA, Israel, Russia, China.

> During Wednesday’s presentation in Seattle, Amazon executives said the economics of commingling no longer worked. With the company’s logistics network now capable of storing products closer to customers, the speed advantage of pooled inventory has diminished. At the same time, Amazon estimated brand owners spent $600 million in the past year alone through re-stickering products, the process of placing new labels or barcodes over existing ones on products.

and for a streamlined way to grab weather forecast data directly from multiple governments national weather service APIs, there’s the library UniWeather.js:

https://github.com/ghobs91/UniWeather.js

> solid alternatives from Asia

That just moves the problem somewhere else, rather than giving the EU homegrown solutions to rely on.

> Whatsapp (and perhaps Telegram) are the dominant messaging/chat apps for example and that is European tech but it was inevitably going to be bought

Nitpick: Whatsapp was American from the start. It was founded in Mountain View, CA by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo.

If you want to skip the middleman and integrate the national weather service APIs that many countries governments provide (and which most commercial APIs base their data on anyway), check out this library.

It unifies weather data from official national weather service APIs across the US, Canada, Mexico, and major European countries.

https://github.com/ghobs91/UniWeather.js

In addition to what others have said, I've had great experiences with LobeChat: https://github.com/lobehub/lobe-chat

> At this point their fabs are a liability.

So we're just going to hand control of the US supply of semiconductors completely over to TSMC, Samsung, and the Chinese fabs in the works? That seems incredibly short sighted and reckless.

What happened is the gig economy inserted a middleman (DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc.) between the restaurant and customer. These platforms take a 20–30% cut, charge customer fees, and still often lose money.

Meanwhile, drivers—now independent contractors—get no hourly wage, no benefits, and absorb all costs (gas, car, downtime). Tech didn’t increase efficiency for workers—it added a VC-funded layer that extracts value.

So despite more demand and better tools, drivers earn the same (or less) in nominal terms, and much less after inflation.

How very European.

> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.

A big reason for that is influence from Edward Bernays:

"Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". While credited with advancing the profession of public relations, his techniques have been criticized for manipulating public opinion, often in ways that undermined individual autonomy and democratic values."

Bernays' mother, Anna, was Sigmund Freud's sister. There seemed to be a talent in that family in understanding the human psyche, and how to utilize that understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

For shopping suggestions, I've had the best experience with Perplexity.

Bluesky/AT Protocol hits a much better balance of mostly decentralized while having an intuitive user experience.

On the other hand, ask the average social media user to try to do the below tasks on Mastodon/ActivityPub, and you'll quickly see how half-baked and disjointed of a user experience it is.

- Search for posts or a user.

- Interact with a Mastodon post that's on a different instance than the one they're registered to.

- Figure out what to do if one day, they wake up and their instance has shut down.

They can ask for Israel's assistance, they managed to (relatively) covertly develop nuclear weapons without a major power getting in their way.

Granted, the US president who was pushing the most for inspections of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility was JFK, who ended up no longer being a problem for them (how very convenient).

Time to switch: https://librewolf.net/

They addressed that in their FAQ: https://obscura.net/#faq-multihop

The way I see it, for a piece of news to hold value, it must have 2 properties:

1. Actionable: can this news inform how you go about your life in some way? 2. Primary Source: it must come straight from the source, to avoid manipulation of the original info

The vast majority of news doesn't have either quality, let alone both.

Just like how "staying fed" often amounts to people eating junk food rather than quality stuff that gives them the actual nourishment their body needs, "staying informed" amounts to people scratching their curiosity itch with global gossip, rather than with actionable information.

You know where

Are you under the impression that their website is hosted on-premises? This ain't the early 90s

I asked ChatGPT to fact check all of this, enjoy: https://chatgpt.com/share/677297b2-6ea0-8013-a376-7c14f78d96...