UK as an adult you often have to pay for this per request and there is a limit on the number you can request at once. As it can take weeks or even months to complete while you wait for your turn in the queue so it makes it very hard to stack requests.

As a kid I used to love this service as it was free without real request linits and a lot faster. I could just pre order books that hadn’t come out.

I stopped using my local library because of it as their planned fiction book selection is basically large print romance or war stories or westerns.

And I think that at some point enough people will have had enough that they take on production of that themselves via open source projects.

Sure, some will always be driven by cost, thats never going to change, but self sustainability will become more desirable as main stream brands, not just temu tat, drops in quality.

All of which is true but it doesn’t matter if the product is crippled by the designer. Whole point of my model is that you are the designer so its only shit if you are.

Open source devices will become more mainstream as a push back by consumers against enshitifcation, privacy invasion, disposable products, ever rising subscription costs.

Not just things like phones and laptops but things like mice, keyboards, headphones, even tvs and kitchen appliances. I know some of these are possible now, I use a ploppy trackball and qmk based keyboards but a wider spread of these across the home and more than just hobbyists like myself.

Large chunks will be 3D printed, moving the large component parts of manufacting to the local area. Plus things will be endlessly fixable and upgradable.

I love my pocketbook colour three. The extra screensize is very much appreciated for comics

If you really insensitive to lactose then yeah its going to be very painful, milk is in just about everything baked or with most sauces that isn’t stamped vegan. At least most reputable places will take it seriously and have a proper allergen book.

I am Coeliac, and its like me going to Japan, just about everything has wheat added to it. Soy sauce? Gluten. Miso? Gluten. Whats annoying is that traditional Japanese recipes for Miso and Soy do not use wheat, it was added later after the American occupation. You can buy both soy and miso gluten free outside of Japan very easily, but in Japan, even though they made by Japanese companies? Ha good luck.

The worst part is that nobody in Japan takes it seriously as there been like two people in the last five years who were diagnosed with a gluten intolerance let alone Coeliac, so even if you take a Japanese speaker along and they explain it politely to the chef, you still get gluten.

It reads like she didn’t check ahead of booking, if you have some sort of allergy, she she appears to, its essential to check ahead.

It also reads like excluding tax, they paid about £600 for flights, transfers, hotel and all inclusive, each. I am not surprised that the food and drink would be closer to the budget end for that price.

Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.

I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high

I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.

I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?

I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.

Yeah its a super paranoid process, I would just rather take a traditional person exam

Question difficulty makes no difference whatsoever with proxying, these are already long form questions in the main. The whole point of it is you are paying somebody else to take the exam for you, either directly by something like screen sharing or indirectly by relaying questions and answers. The AI voice assistant is another form of this, its higher risk as LLMs aren’t always right but its still proxying.

I personally know of half a dozen people who used Cheggs to indirectly proxy their engineering degree exams as they weren’t proctored and had 12/24 hour exam window. The uni was meant to require an in person defense of similar questions from anybody getting unusual results, something people who cheat simply cannot do, but because they had done it the whole way through they never triggered the flag. This is why proctoring is so important.

One of the reasons so many companies use Pearsons for their exams is because they have centers everywhere, they are by far the largest. If you cannot do it online then you have to go to your nearest center. Simply too much cheating is attempted otherwise. As always the actions of a minority ruin it for everybody else as rules have to be put in place.

Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.

Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.

I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.

I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.

I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.

Nope as you have to show the room before the exam starts andusing the second computer shows up in the webcam. It’s what the webcam if for.

So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn’t help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.

Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That’s still needed for open book.

Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.

Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.

What subjects are you comparing it to? At its fundamental level math is a building block same way your native language is a building block to learn other subjects such as history or biology or cooking. I am splitting out language from literature the same way I would split Maths from engineering or physics, theory vs. application.

I can only speak for English as that’s the only language I have ever really studied but for the average student whose native language is English you simply do not need to study English language to the same level as somebody looking to apply Maths to Biology or Physics to a advanced high school level. You simply do not need to do this to the same level, high school English language simply isn’t as deep a subject. High school literature is potentially, but again, that’s application not theory.

On top of this, you use English far more often than Maths both in school and out of school. Average kid isnt going to use much Maths day to day other than wondering about basic fractions for sharing a pizza/cake, or simple addition/subtraction for pocket money type stuff. Sure, there will always be exceptions but I am talking about the majority.

Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.

First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.

Qobuz has professionally curated playlists, often from actual artists or experts on that genre. It’s also French rather than American, and they often the highest payer to the artists.

Having actually been rushed to hospital when I was a kid by my friends after a big accident on my bike I would say the number is higher than you might think. They even walked by bike back home, which considering it was miles from home was pretty mad for teenagers.

I would say at least 20 people I know who are close to me either have done something I would consider above and beyond for me already or I know for sure would do so. Thats not counting any relatives.

Another starship user. Mostly want it to summarise useful stuff for folders pulled from git or whatever so it’s pretty plain rest of the time. I use the same on all my boxes