The discussion wasn't about freemium products though. Someone mentioned that they paid 20 bucks for OpenAI's API already and then they were asked for more verification.
Shout out to the developers of KOReader. I love this application so much.
Saves me so much work in having to convert EPUB files on my Kindle. I also love how great it is at handling PDF files and cropping margins out of pages. I don't think I would ever want an e-reader that couldn't run it at this point.
It's so obviously the phones. How is a child who grew up watching YouTube shorts supposed to sit through an entire novel without getting bored? They're used to quick and easy dopamine hits.
If you want literacy to come back, stop giving children YouTube shorts, TikTok, or Cocomelon.
At a certain age they will make that decision for themselves - you can't micromanage or monitor your kids' activities all the time. It's the same in every generation, it was TV at one point, then games, then youtube, then tiktok, and I'm sure the next generation in 10 years or so will scoff at whatever the younger generation does to get their distraction / dopamine hits.
That said, in the Netherlands there's been a ton of schools that have banned phones on the premises for various reasons. It's IMO ineffective as long as they also get laptops or tablets from the school, but it's a step in the right direction. There was just too much distraction and abuse; in a local example, there were anonymous "gossip" accounts on the various social media that would record and publish loads of random shit happening at school, often leading to cyberbullying and whatnot.
I bought a Kindle Scribe recently because it was around $250 secondhand. That makes it the cheapest of all of the 10" e-readers available. It's perfect if you want to read textbooks, PDFs, and manga.
Jetbrains uses Swing not JavaFX from my knowledge. And yes, the performance can get slow for a Java app on the scale of Android studio but that shouldn't be of concern to a beginner.
No, but nothing else does either - you'll need to ship runtime environment in any case. And packing JRE is more cross-platform tested than most other solutions.
