I saw this coming when they stopped allowing downloads of purchased books. When that happened my Kindle got KOreader and after it broke I replaced it with a Kobo.

I’m much happier with my new device

You can transfer over USB until you have to factory reset the device. At that point it won’t re-activate and you’ve got a nice brick

What does it even mean?

I’m so happy I downloaded all my Kindle books when I still had a chance and then moved to the Kobo ecosystem, which albeit not perfect is much much better

I was kinda amazed to find out how hard it was to buy a kobo libra colour in .de -- apparently there's some kind of cartel thing going on where amazon somehow convince entire markets not to sell their competitors products. I had to order it from Hungary or something iirc.

That's because Kobo's sister company Tolino operates in Germany. It has nothing to do with Amazon.

Ah that makes a little more sense. Do they jut rebrand kobo devices to tolino? I see they also have a colour e-reader but i can’t really tell if it’s the same device or not…

I don't know if that is Amazon in Germany. Here all the book stores sell Tolino devices, even my local libraries loan them out.

Would you mind elaborating on the problems you have with the Kobo? I'm thinking of getting one of these once my kindle dies.

It works well and I haven’t had any issue. It doesn’t get full marks because it’s not an open device itself but more a device that’s easy to hack.

For example, most books in the kobo store have DRM (to be fair I don’t think it’s entirely their choice), albeit an easy one to break.

You see people here recommending “get a Kobo and install koreader”. That works and there is a one-click install process but it’s still an hack.

Another common thing to do is to keep the stock reader but tweak a file to point the store API to a self-hosted Komga/Calibre Web Automated/Grimmmory instance to get your own books in the system. Again, it works well enough but it’s not like these are documented API.

The bottom line is: it works very well and you can very easily tweak it but the way you tweak it are hacks (reasonable clean ones) rather than officially supported features. Thats why it loses a few marks

Said that, if you are not in the business of self-hosting, you can easily load books via USB or and it even has Dropbox or Google Drive integrations that work out of the box if you prefer network synchronisation

No issues here. I liberated my kindle library and put it in Google Drive. The Kobo can download books from there out of the box. The Kobo store works fine too, although a lot of books barely have any reviews if you’re into that. I have the Kobo Libra Colour and it’s by far the best reader I’ve ever owned.

I’m in Canada. I’ve had a couple of Kobos and I’ve loved every single one of them. The Kobo bookstore works fine. No complaints.

Im in NZ, no issues.

Setting up syncing with a home library is a bit messy first time, but very doable.

The only other e-reader I’ve owned is a Kindle Paperwhite and it’s similar.

Same here. I really hope in a near future local model will be good enough and hardware fast enough to run them to become viable for most use cases

No need to hope; it is inevitable.

Is it inevitable though? Open-weight models large enough to come close to an API model are insanely expensive to run for con/prosumers. I'd put the “expensive” bar at ≥24GB since that's already well into 4 digits, which gives you quite many months of a subscription, not including the power will for >400W continuous.

Color me pessimistic, but this feels like a pipe dream.

A decent amount of software developers and gamers do spend 3000 USD on a PC. That kind of hardware is going go get more and more capable over time wrt genAI models.

Of course there will always be a gap to frontier closed hosted models. It is not an either or proposition.

I read good things about https://omlx.ai but I don't really know enough of the ecosystem to know if there are better options.

If someone has opinions please let us know!

I like this direction. The approach of letting LLMs figure out stuff on their own is flexible but inefficient and getting more structure can be very beneficial.

Well done for actually parsing the shell commands the LLM wants to execute. Another case where doing things “the old way” is both more correct and secure

This looks cool. Does it support working with local models?

Yes, you can use the dynamic provider to work with any local model you want (see scripts/providers)

It’s still capped at £1/kWh, which is a lot but also a price I’ve seen maybe for a few slots on a couple days in the last three years.

The price was known ~1 day in advance so I had the choice to fill up the battery with cheaper (but still high) prices overnight and reduce the impact

The framing of the article is very odd.

It says that Ubuntu increase the requirements not because of the OS itself but to have a better user experience when people have many browser tabs opened. Then it compares to Windows which has lower nominal requirements but higher requirements in practice to get a passable user experience.