Here are 20 websites where you can download books for free:

Project Gutenberg .com

Open Library .org

Google Books .com

ManyBooks .net

PDF Drive .com

Bookboon .com

Free-Ebooks .net

Smashwords .com

DigiLibraries .com

GetFreeEbooks .com

Obooko .com

Baen Free Library .com

Internet Archive .org

HathiTrust .org

Standard Ebooks .org

ReadPrint .com

Bookrix .com

Librophile .com

Online Books Page .edu

What's the predominant file format for this?

I know all you folks are too smart to be drinking fluoridated water, right?

Please say yes.

I've noticed a major difference between X and Nostr.

People here don't seem too bothered when one talks about spending Bitcoin, in fact, here it seems to be encouraged.

Whereas on X... Holy shit! People get soooo triggered if one just dare mention that sats may be spent.

What's your favorite app that's unrelated to Bitcoin or Nostr?

If it's an obscure one, give a brief explainer.

GO 👇

#AskNostr

BREAKING: The Reserve Bank of Australia confirmed the existence of fake #Gold bars being held at the Bank of England.

Don’t trust, verify. #Bitcoin

Does everything work perfectly? Of course not. Is it for everyone? Lmao, no. Will it get better still? 100%

You can bitch and moan and dismiss it all you want, but to me the path ahead is quite clear: freedom-loving builders will continue to make this thing more awesome, more rugpull-resistant, more useful, and easier to use every day. The legacy web will have more rules, more friction, more KYC, cookie banners, sign-ups, deplatforming, and demonetization as time goes on and the walls close in. Innovations in freedom tech will REMOVE friction, tiny baby step by tiny baby step.

JUST IN: The CDC Has Approved Adam Back Podcast Interviews As Safe, Cost Effective Alternative to Anesthesia For Surgery Patients 😷💉

Does listening to the creator of hashcash talk help you fall asleep?💤

1045. But what?

Are there any down-to-earth practical reasons to use Bitcoin over there? Like a 10% discount, no tourist tax, certain places don't accept anything else? Or do the reasons pretty much all fall into the abstract domain (you're contributing to a worldwide effort to...)

I read Empire of Silence recently.

Pretty solid overall. It's the start of a 7-book Sun Eater series (plus novellas) about a space opera set 20,000 years in the future, where humanity has colonized a third of the galaxy.

And this is not a spoiler since it's from the first page: the protagonist blows up a sun at some future point in his story, resulting in the deaths of billions of people during war against aliens. It's written from his perspective in the future, as he goes into his life and how he got into that huge decision.

It's a slow-burn read. Excellent prose. Subverts a lot of expectations, while also having clear influences from books like Dune, and maybe Name of the Wind. Some of the characterization and plot details could be a bit stronger, at least for this opening book (can't comment on the full series yet).

Solid 4/5 stars imo.

When it comes to AI, philosophical people often ask "What will happen to people if they lack work? Will they find it hard to find meaning in such a world of abundance?"

But there is a darker side to the question, which people intuit more than they say aloud.

In all prior technological history, new technologies changed the nature of human work but did not displace the need for human work. The fearful rightly ask: what happens if we make robots, utterly servile, that can outperform the majority of humans at most tasks with lower costs? Suppose they displace 70% or 80% of human labor to such an extent that 70% or 80% of humans cannot find another type of economic work relative to those bots.

Now, the way I see it, it's a lot harder to replace humans than most expect. Datacenter AI is not the same as mobile AI; it takes a couple more decades of Moore's law to put a datacenter supercomputer into a low-energy local robot, or it would otherwise rely on a sketchy and limited-bandwidth connection to a datacenter. And it takes extensive physical design and programming which is harder than VC bros tend to suppose. And humans are self-repairing for the most part, which is a rather fantastic trait for a robot. A human cell outcompetes all current human technology in terms of complexity. People massively over-index what robots are capable of within a given timeframe, in my view. We're nowhere near human-level robots for all tasks, even as we're close to them for some tasks.

But, the concept is close enough to be on our radar. We can envision it in a lifetime rather than in fantasy or far-off science fiction.

So back to my prior point, the darker side of the question is to ask how humans will treat other humans if they don't need them for anything. All of our empathetic instincts were developed in a world where we needed each other; needed our tribe. And the difference between the 20% most capable and 20% least capable in a tribe wasn't that huge.

But imagine our technology makes the bottom 20% economic contributes irrelevant. And then the next 20%. And then the next 20%, slowly moving up the spectrum.

What people fear, often subconsciously rather than being able to articulate the full idea, is that humanity will reach a point where robots can replace many people in any economic sense; they can do nothing that economicall outcomes a bot and earns an income other than through charity.

And specifically, they wonder what happens at the phase when this happens regarding those who own capital vs those that rely on their labor within their lifetimes. Scarce capital remains valuable for a period of time, so long as it can be held legally or otherwise, while labor becomes demonetized within that period. And as time progresses, weak holders of capital who spend more than they consume, also diminish due to lack of labor, and many imperfect forms of capital diminish. It might even be the case that those who own the robots are themselves insufficient, but at least they might own the codes that control them.

Thus, people ultimately fear extinction, or being collected into non-economic open-air prisons and given diminishing scraps, resulting in a slow extinction. And they fear it not from the robots themselves, but from the minority of humans who wield the robots.