this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

That was a good read. I did think it was interesting that he decided to solve the randomized alphabet problem with the complex character recognition and image matching system he used. I mean, that was very clever and it clearly worked, so great! But an alternate option would have been the cryptographic method. There's a lot of software designed to crack replacement cyphers (especially in English) it probably would have been trivial to drop those characters into one of these and have it spit out the results.

Admittedly it would likely struggle with the other three alphabets, the italic, heading and italic heading alphabets, where there may not be enough words to be certain about success.

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 37 points 1 day ago

This is a good look under the hood on why so much mainstream software actively sucks these days. They put so many fucking resources into dark capitalist shit, and zero into making it a good user experience.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 82 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That was an interesting read.

If you wanna own your audiobooks you might wanna check out https://libro.fm/ - they allow you to download the bought audiobook without drm.
I gladly accept tips for similar sites when it comes to buying ebooks.

[–] radieschen@slrpnk.net 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In case you already got some books from Audible, there's Libation.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

I've never used it, but bookmarked the github. Cheers. :)

[–] felsiq@piefed.zip 29 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Kobo does drm-free ebooks when the publisher allows it, so it’s on a case-by-case basis but I have got a lot of them drm free

[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 32 points 1 day ago

Not the most ethical, but kobo is also very easily de-drm'd with calibre.

Actually no this is not even unethical, I did actually pay for those books.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 day ago

22 out of 22 books i checked at Kobo had Adobe DRM. :(

[–] Nima@leminal.space 17 points 1 day ago

that was such a great read no joke. I love it when people use spite as a motivator.

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago

That was a fun and interesting read.

When we buy an ebook, they are selling us a "license" to use it on their terms. We technically don't own the book. Which is horseshit. Kudos to Pixelmelt for oursmarting their obfuscation techniques.

I use Kobo and Calibre because A-Z sucks so bad. And if an ebook is exclusive to A-Z, I'll just never read it. Fortunately 99.9% of the ebooks I've wanted are on Kobo.

[–] hummingbird@lemmy.world 43 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I bought my first ebook from amazon

Just don't do that. If you give money to this company, they'll continue to go down the path they're on. Enshitification.

[–] plm00@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That's doable until you need a book that's an Amazon exclusive.

[–] HejMedDig@feddit.dk 20 points 1 day ago

Torrent, PayPal author

[–] waldo_was_here@piefed.social 13 points 1 day ago

Anna's archive is the answer for you

[–] The_v@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I have "purchased" thousands of books from Amazon, but never given them money for a book.

They run free specials all the time. FreeReadFeed scans for them. It's a great way to discover authors to purchase their books at another site or use the library apps.

[–] jherazob@fedia.io 13 points 1 day ago

Spite: The greatest motivator!