Books

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/25392452

Isobel: I’ve been working on a lot of stories about tech elites, the technopoly and so on. And something I’ve come across again and again is a “bunker mentality.” This idea that the tech bros have that they want to create their own jurisdictions, their own walled-off communities that will protect them from government regulation — but maybe in the future will also protect them from apocalyptic climate chaos, or the ravages of societal breakdown. Can you explain this mentality?

Atossa: I think these tech leaders have convinced themselves that they’re victims, that everyone hates them and they need to protect themselves at all costs. It’s a classic persecution complex seen throughout history among monarchs and dictators. With power comes paranoia.

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?

Thomas Dybdahl: The Brady rule, the legal requirement that in a criminal case prosecutors must disclose favorable evidence to the defense, was intended to make sure trials were fair. But in the decades since it was enacted in 1963, prosecutors have regularly failed to comply with the rule; sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. And judges have been reluctant to enforce it.

As a result, prosecutorial misconduct — hiding favorable evidence — has become the single leading cause of wrongful convictions in this country. Of 2,400 documented exonerations between 1989 and 2019, Brady violations helped to convict 44%: 1,056 innocent people.

As a public defender in Washington, D.C., I saw prosecutors routinely break the rule, and judges routinely look the other way. I wrote this book to focus attention on the problem, and to show how we can fix it. It tells the winding history of the Brady rule through the cases that created and defined it. The book is anchored by the odyssey of the Catherine Fuller murder case, which shows just how easily Brady violations occur, how difficult they are to uncover, and the terrible human cost they exact.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241111124310/https://coloradosun.com/2024/11/03/sunlit-thomas-dybdahl-when-innocence-is-not-enough/

any suggestions are more than welcome

I'm trying to find any redeemable qualities that make me feel better for the time I spent reading it. I could have put it down, but the raving reviews made me think that it would get better.

It didn't.

I loathed it. With passion.

I am looking for suggestions on how to tackle a large reading list (currently at 556). A big part (maybe smaller than I think) is a collection of Ann Rule, Stephen King and Star Trek novels (currently just the Pocket TOS and movie novelizations). The way I go about things is to just read whatever I am in the mood for. Makes it hard for me to keep a consistent reading progression. I do read by publication date.

I want to hear how others pick what to read. My current idea is to take a chunk of one selection and alternate with others in between.

Reposted from Lemmy.worlds c/politics because of violation of its rule 1.

Now that the fascists have taken over, what books, academic studies, and pieces of knowledge should take priority in personal/private archival? I'm thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany, especially with the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science(Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) and what was lost completely in the burnings.

Some of us should consider saving stuff digitally or physically. Redundancies will help preserve stuff.

The Slow Cancellation of Online Libraries

On the probable demise of #Libgen and the need for private offline #libraries.

https://networkcultures.org/blog/2024/09/22/henry-warwick-the-slow-cancellation-of-online-libraries/

#books #DigitalSovereignty

@books @libraries

Paywall removed https://archive.is/wK5sZ

Drag showed the Artemis Fowl movie trailer to drag's dragon right before it started reading Artemis Fowl. So far:

Artemis is clearly an evil white collar criminal
Artemis is the bad guy in the story
Artemis is NOT a surfer.

If so, what did you think of it?

I'm curious about it, but I have too much other stuff I want to read first.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5845995

Check it out.

Hello! I am currently making a reading tracking website (a la Goodreads, StoryGraph, and LibraryThing) as a personal project and have hit a bit of a wall, so I've come to the internet for ideas.

What do y'all like about your tracking service of choice. What features do you think are cool or important? Are there any things that your service doesn't do that you wish it did?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

So many books have characters remark "it was well past moonrise", or something else equally ridiculous, to show the passage of time at night. ~~The moon cycle is a month long (~27 days), not some paltry 24 hours.~~ If you know any authors please spread the word. Together we can stamp out this astronomical disillusionment!

[EDIT]

A smarter than me commenter below pointed out that, due to the way days work, it does indeed rise and set once a day. Hard to do a complete rotation and keep a celestial body in the sky. Womp womp, I am silly.

I should have instead argued that moon rise and set are not linked to sun rise and set, and that the moon doesn't exclusively rise and set at night. It is possible to have the moon out during the day time. They are on different schedules is all.

What's some books with an interesting vision of the future? I don't just mean more advanced technology, I mean the way it's organized.

I find often people can't envision past the society we have now. There's that quote, "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", and it seems more and more true, but sci-fi authors seem best equipped to actually imagine beyond that.

I've heard some sci-fi authors mentioned in this category before, like Heinlen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

I haven't read any of them lol. Would have no idea where to start within them that fits this category, or what other choices there are that people would suggest.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5600161

Thoughts on this book?

Thoughts on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit?

I might watch The Rings of Power but I've heard mixed things on it. What do you all think of it?

Mostly though: I'm hoping that some people here can expand on what I'm reading so far.

'Cause honestly, I do like what I'm reading, I do, and that's because I genuinely like the mythological tone that the world-building takes. And Numenor as an "Atlantis" is a fine way to do things, but honestly, I doubt they'll be able to do much with it in whatever Amazon property they decide to make of it (which, I mean, is fine). I wonder if there are other shows or serials besides The Rings of Power that are coming out? Either way: I really like the beginning and how everything started with music and song.

Your thoughts?

When libraries across the country temporarily closed in the early days of the pandemic, the Internet Archive, an organization that digitizes and archives materials like web pages and music, had the idea to make its library of scanned books free to read in an online database.

The question of that library’s legality became a long-running saga that may have finally ended on Wednesday, when an appeals court affirmed that the Internet Archive violated copyright laws by redistributing those books without a licensing agreement.

The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan, is a victory for the major book publishers that brought the lawsuit in 2020, and could set a precedent over the lawfulness of broader digital archives.

A federal court ruled against the Internet Archive in March 2023, and the archive removed many works from its online library of books. It appealed the decision last September.

A final appeal could potentially be taken to the Supreme Court. In a statement, the Internet Archive said it was “reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend and preserve books.”

In its appeal, the nonprofit argued that its Free Digital Library was protected by so-called fair use laws, and that scanning the books was a transformative use of the material done in the public interest. The court firmly rejected that claim.

“People are worried about book bannings and the defunding of libraries, but I don’t know that there is really an awareness of what’s going on in the movement toward license-only access to electronic material,” Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, said in an interview on Wednesday.

Libraries are “not just a Netflix reseller of books to their patrons,” he added. “Libraries have always been more than that.”

Unlike traditional libraries, which pay licensing fees to publishers to make their books available for lending, the Internet Archive acquires copies through donated or purchased books to scan and put online. The nonprofit is also known for the Wayback Machine, a popular database of past web pages.

Archive link

Recently I decided to start writing a science fiction novel. I reserved a desk in my room for this purpose, I also picked up an old Thinkpad X200 on which I installed Lubuntu 24.04 and plugged in a gaming keyboard for night writing. I chose to install a minimum of applications in order to stay focused.

My main writing App for the moment is Joplin

And you?

Are you writing a book or have you already written one?

What type of tool do you use to write?

Do you have some advice to share?