This kind of stuff is why I no longer use a kindle. I use a kobo which IMHO is not as good of a product but it's worth not supporting this behavior.

Where do you buy your e-books?

I've stuck with Kindle, but that's 80% inertia (Amazon has most books, the device works well enough) and 20% existing library is Kindle e-books.

Kobo has a bookstore that’s pretty comprehensive - I haven’t found anything missing. Not sure that gets you out of DRM land, but at least you’re not giving money to Jeff Bezos.

One could buy a physical book, and then "find" digital version of it. Seems fair to me?

Seems fair to me too. I have done and continue to do this. I have no ethical qualms doing so. Should I?

I don’t. I just don’t want physical books. I don’t have the space to store them. And the kindle is far more portable.

You can throw the physical book away or recycle it as paper. Buying them is just to make payments for the pirated books.

Please don’t do this. At least donate to your local library or thrift store.

For public domain books, I use Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive, generally in that order.

For copyrighted books, anywhere as long as it provides DRM‐free EPUB or PDF.

• Humble Bundle introduces a nice sale every few days. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Use on Any Device”. Representative recent purchases: complete Peanuts (42 vols.) for $25, complete Wheel of Time (17 vols.) for $18, complete Malazan (17 vols.) for $18, complete Lone Wolf and Cub (28 vols.) for $18… I check Humble pretty regularly now.

• Kobo Store. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Download options: EPUB 3 (DRM-Free)”.

• Google Play. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Content protection: This content is DRM free.”

• Barnes and Noble. Key marker for DRM‐free: “At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.”

Amazon rolled out DRM‐free ebooks (for some books) earlier this year, but at this point they’ve permanently lost my business.

Also, sites to purchase DRM‐free audiobooks:

• Libro.fm

• Downpour

Because Amazon stops supporting devices after 14 years? (while they can still be used to read books already downloaded)

Really?

In this case the reason for dropping support is most likely that the only DRM they can support on that older hardware has been broken. There's no technical reason why it can't be supported, and I doubt it would cost them much (or even anything) to continue support.

Meanwhile, I can still read physical books I've had since I was a child, 40 years ago. The Kindle is undeniably more convenient than physical books, but this is absolutely an unnecessary sunset of these devices.

In my post I said "this kind of stuff" which also includes their DRM policies (which is the real reason they are ending the users' kindle support).

Houston has quite a few software company billboards. It’s just that in SF it’s 100% software billboards so it’s really noticeable.

I'm surprised he would admit that publicly on a podcast.

After deal is done it becomes rational to describe how good it is in comparison to completion to promote it.

It's also possible that it's a post-facto rationalization that only seems prescient in hindsight.

People like to brag

He's signal maxxing so he gets a bigger bonus.

The HN of old is no more unfortunately. Things get up or down voted based purely on political alignment.

Maybe it has always been this way but it seems like these days it's only a matter of time before anyone "authentic" (or at least seems authentic at first) turns into some type of grifter. If you have a big enough following there is too much money to be made not to grift.

There are a lot of people with incentives to hype the AI industry (VCs, founders, CEOs, internet personalities that need clicks, people that sell courses, etc). Last week everyone was hyping Claude Cowork, this week it's Clawdbot. Don't get me wrong I think there are a lot of cool things going on but there is a lot of hype (similar to the original internet bubble).

Agreed. If no one uses gymnastics to traverse a laser filled room it's actually pretty lame.

I switched to kobo for a while but I thought the hardware itself was inferior. Maybe they fixed it but I couldn’t dim the screen low enough to not annoy my wife while she tried to sleep. It felt cheaper too. I begrudgingly switched back to my old kindle.

My work laptop and personal laptop are the same model for this reason. Switching between two different keyboard layouts is very frustrating.

Not the OP but I used to do breathe hold training for surfing and bought a pulse oximeter. I don’t think I ever got below 90%.