I use Kobo, which uses a slightly different method. Some publishers already don't use DRM. Great! You're good to go. Most others will be listed as using Adobe DRM. For that, you'll need Adobe Digital Editions.
Download the DRM file. This will be an ASCM file (Adobe Content Server Message) called 'URLLink.ascm'. This isn't an ebook, it's basically just a link.
Open in Adobe Digital Editions. It should automatically download the ebook.
Locate the actual file location. By default, this is Documents > My Digital Editions. This will give you the epub file, with DRM.
Follow the above instructions to install DeDRM in Calibre.
Drag the epub file into Calibre. If you've installed DeDRM correctly, there'll be a button up the top labelled 'Convert books'.
Up the top of the window, there'll be 'Input format' on the left, and 'Output format' on the right. Input will default to EPUB, select whatever you like (including EPUB again) for output. Select 'OK' (bottom right).
Locate your Calibre file. For me, this was Documents > Calibre. By default, books are listed in subfolders by author, then title. Open the folder for the book you converted, and you should have four files - a cover, an OPF file with metadata, your new EPUB file, and an old version with the file extension of .original_epub.
Not necessary, but I prefer to do this for organisation - you can now place the DRM-free EPUB file wherever you like. I have folders for my own library that I can back up as I wish.
You may want an ereader not tied to a particular platform. I use one for my phone called Moon+ Reader. It has a free option with unobtrusive ads (which only show when you close a book). Otherwise, using Calibre on my PC has its own epub reader.
Anyway. Not hyperbole. Microsoft closed its ebook platform in 2019 and people lost their entire libraries. Back your books up.
Amazon is ending the ability to download/transfer ebooks from Kindle devices via USB connection on February 26 2025!
You should still be able to use the PC and mobile apps, and in browser reading, but your device will be entirely reliant on WiFi (which isn't always available or reliable!). Here's 1 article on it.
I've been using Epubor Ultimate to remove DRM from all of my ebooks so I can convert and save them, able to read them either in Kobo or Kindle, or in Calibre. I can save them as Epubs, PDFs, or what have you.
Also keep in mind Bookshop.org, an online store that interacts with independent booksellers, now has an ebook app and options from those indie stores. You can even set it specifically to your own favorite local bookstores if you want.
I get a lot of ebooks due to space issues, being a rental/apartment dweller. So the cracked and converted books are saved to my PC and external backup drives. I bought them. They're mine. I ought to be able to read them, and not worry about them being "updated" or removed on some whim*.
-
(*I noticed that Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass has a different cover than when I first downloaded it, not sure what else has changed yet. Good Omens also went from the classic black cover to the TV show tie in cover.)
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Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!
Update I have had Pi-Hole successfully installed for two (2) hours and have since learned that 40% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. FORTY FUCKING PERCENT. We live in hell. This is the greatest gift I have ever given my family that they will not understand or acknowledge or feel any gratitude for.
Update #2: it was rising all night but the number it finally settled on was...60%. 60% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. I can't tell if this high number is bc I live in Silicon Valley and probably am subject to the Algorithmic Internet in ways people outside of Silicon Valley are not or it is normal to have 2/3rds of your web traffic be ads, but it did make me set up a recurring donation of the EFF lmfao.
Okay I have had multiple people ask, so here are the useful websites that me and Beryl used to muddle our way through:
Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)
Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)
Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)
Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)
Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)
You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.
Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.
(And here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, if you, like me, were presented with cold hard data about your personal internet usage and suddenly realized that our internet is fully a dystopia. haha.)
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
[ID: the first two images are screencaps of Qifrey and Olruggio from Witch Hat Atelier. The images added in the reblog are of the post's replies, where 10 different people have all said "Worse". End ID]
idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????
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This is the second time I've seen a video of this technique and this explanation is so clear! It does use more fabric than English paper piecing (EPP) but you end up with a double sided hexagon so don't have to source fabric for the backing.
I'm doing EPP at the moment but I have a hole punch to make the papers and just use leaflets and junk mail, so it doesn't feel wasteful. I don't think it's difficult either- in the video she mentions it's not for beginners, but I don't have that much experience with hand sewing or EPP and I've been finding it pretty easy so YMMV
I saw this video yesterday and was seized with the need to try it out immediately. Lookit my cute lil' hexagon baby!!
Here is what the backside looks like. OP notes this takes more fabric than paper piecing, but that excess fabric makes it already triple-layered. Besides not needing backing fabric, I don't think you'd need batting for this quilt at all. It's already thick and soft just from folding all that fabric into a hexagon.
Hexagon quilt tutorial video by tiktok user camelscrafts. Method:
Each hexagon begins as a 6" circle. camelscrafts does this by creating a paper template using a compass. According to the video, a 6" circle will create a hexagon that is 2.5 inches tall.
These hexagons are hand-sewn. Thread the needle.
With the fabric right side facing, find the center of the circle by folding it in half right sides together, then folding it in half again (wrong sides are facing). The top of the triangle shape is the center of the fabric circle.
Make a small stitch into the center of the fabric. The wrong side is still facing.
Unfold the circle. There will be a small stitch in the center.
Now the hexagon is created by folding the circle into itself: Take the needle to one of the edges of the fabric (it doesn't matter which one). Pull the needle through and pull the thread tight. This will fold down the fabric and create an edge of the hexagon. Crease the fold with your finger.
This fold has two corners, one at the top and one at the bottom. Put the needle into one of the corners and pull the thread taut. This will create another fold.
Continue this going around the circle until all of it is folded down, creating the hexagon. camelscrafts notes that the last corner pulled in may be a little bit "wonky" (no precise point in the corner) if the corners were not done precisely. However, that corner is pulled into the back, so is not visible from the front.
The hexagon is now formed. Sew around the folds in the middle of the circle to hold the folds in place. Tie off and cut the thread.
Attach hexagons to each other along the sides. With right sides together, whip stitch the sides together.
When you have a large family, and to me our chickens have always been family, there is room for a great deal of love. But there are also many painful goodbyes.
We have had Aron ever since he was a tiny chick peeping beneath the protective wings of his mother, Selma. He grew up here in Käxsundet, going from a fluffy ball of down to a magnificent rooster with the most beautiful iridescent plumage.
For several years, Aron, together with his little brother Jack, was perfectly content to let his father, Rufus, be the head rooster of the flock. But when Rufus grew old, it was Aron who took over the role. To be perfectly honest, he was not always entirely suited to the job. It did happen, from time to time, that he would call the hens over after discovering a particularly tasty treat, only to promptly eat it himself while they looked on in apparent disbelief. But in the grand scheme of things, that was a very small flaw indeed.
He grew into his role and spent many happy years strutting proudly around with his flock. He was especially fond of Ellen and Ester, both of whom have passed away relatively recently. And I do believe that age finally caught up with Aron after he lost Ester just a few weeks ago. Even so, he continued bravely watching over the chicken run. During his final weeks, he grew particularly close to Hedda and Klara, two of the newer members of our family. It warmed our hearts to see, although he never courted another hen after Ester was gone.
A few days ago, he stopped crowing. It was clear that he was approaching his final farewell. Yet until the very end, he continued to patrol the chicken run and keep himself impeccably groomed, as befits a proper rooster. He thoroughly enjoyed standing in the sunshine, having grown a little stiff and chilly with age. And he loved eating sweetcorn and blueberries directly from our hands.
Last night, when I went out to close up the henhouse, he was standing there waiting for me just inside the hatch. He received a few kernels of sweetcorn, and then I lifted him onto his perch because it had grown dark inside the coop.
During the night, he fell asleep for the last time, leaving behind an enormous emptiness.
Now he is reunited with Ester and Ellen, resting beside them after a very long and very beautiful life.
I think that Murderbot is unintentionally sandbagging itself by slowing down its processing speed with all the media it has downloaded and over time that has trained its circuits to run even faster.
Image description: art showing a person holding a small figure, text above them reads: "Thinking about the character", the words "the character" are the same color as the figure the person holds. In the second image the person still holds the figure now their mouth is wide open. In the last the person is biting down on the figures head, while holding it, stretching its body. end Image description
[image description: a drawing featuring the same characters, in the position of the painting Saturn devouring his son, in which the impossibly large figure of the Roman god Saturn, wide-eyed, devours a much smaller silhouette. End image description]
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I love imagining that every eridian welcome committee comic takes place in the same universe and that grace just never said anything about it.
He doesn’t call them out on it cause that might mean that they will actually research phrases more and second guess themselves a lot. And that would mean the cards would stop. Which would be a shame.
But like this he gets a fun little puzzle every week or so where he tries to guess what the committee is trying to say this time. He can rate the cards on funniness and clarity!
I’d like to think that he explains what a lot of them sound like towards the end of his life after having received thousands of cards filled with innuendos and catcalling. The committee doesn’t emotionally recover for the rest of their lives.
The whole movie scene where Grace calls Stratt to say that Carl and him made a baby is made 1000% funnier when you remember that this was the scientist she selected to be the first to study the completely unpresidented and unknown alien life form, and if this alien lifeform had a horrifying and unprecedented effect on human biology then Dr. Grace would have been the first to have shown any symptoms.
Do you think she had a moment of terror? of belief? Do you think her fingers twiched over her tablet ready to give the orders to quarentine everyone who ever interacted with the apperently slow acting mpreg microbe? Did her mind go to every Alien movie and ao3 trope that could have explained the situation? Did she wonder briefly about the ethical and political implications of keeping a maybe sentient maybe alien child? with human parent(s)???? in a pseuto-governmental lab?
Did she wonder exactly what Carl's role in this is? Because even if shes only known Dr. Grace for three days max and cannot yet be certain of the immence aroace vibes the man radiates Carl is a professional on the job so how was he involved?? Is he just the embodyment of the "not the step father but the father who stepped up"???? should she buy him a t-shirt with that phrase?????? Is he biologically involved in a way that only a biologist of esoteric slime molds or insects or sea cucumbers would recognise?????? Is she going to have to kidnap a mycologist to understand this????????? What exactly is her policy on paternity leave according to Project Hail Mary's closest orginizational structure to an HR department and how is she going to explain this to the UN.
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