I wonder what reasons caused commercial libraries to be easily accessible in my home town of Chennai but the general viewpoint in my now home of San Francisco is that they can't exist. I suppose the biggest differences are cost of materials, cost of labour, and land use requirements.
Libraries do naturally arise from the first-sale doctrine here. I think they would not exist in SF but perhaps Walnut Creek etc would have some.
Commercial libraries = private library where you pay a membership fee? I’ve not really heard of that here outside of arguably university libraries and similar.
But SF public library has a couple dozen branches or more?
Yes. I had a membership for years. The place looks 19th century, which it is. There are multiple levels of stacks over two floors, carved dark wood, comfy chairs, and librarians who scold anyone who talks.
Members can go there, plug in a laptop, and type. Quietly. It's never crowded.
It's a well-curated, library. It's most useful if you want historical information about 19th and early 20th century technology. They have a complete bound set of Popular Mechanics, from the days when it was a serious technical publication. The multi-volume engineering study for the Panama Canal, with drawings, is there. Current offerings are well chosen and updated regularly.
Yes, the one I went to as a child had a monthly fee and a per-book fee. It had a far more extensive collection than the SFPL library at 4th and Berry in a much more compact space. Most SFPL libraries appear to be homeless-support centers, which diminishes their capacity to carry books since they assign greater room to support functions. But perhaps that is the source of the value observed in the OP.
As an aside, are there university libraries one can join directly for a fee? I was under the impression they were bundled in with tuition etc. If it’s around $100/month I wouldn’t mind that, but perhaps that is an unachievable target.
One thing worth noting, these accesses do not always include access to electronic resources. Access may only be available from computers that are in the library.
Personally I've never heard of or been to any commercial library before, perhaps it's really good startup idea with internal coffee shop (library first, cafeteria second).
I've been to coffee and books cafe (basically cafeteria first, library second) in France and normally it's full during the day (close at 7 pm).
In the US, there are some private archives. And university libraries with varying degrees of public access somewhat depending upon the degree that you can walk in and look like you belong. But real public libraries don't generally have a lot of restrictions.
Pay fees for access. Pay more fees to "skip the queue" for reserving books. Enjoy ads on your mandatory library app AND in your paid-for library space.
Yeeesh. No thanks. A modern public library is a simple reminder that we CAN have good things.
And they'll sell your reading habit information. And since it'd be commercial the "pen register" jurisprudence applies meaning that the government can use it to put you on a list. This last point is prevented for public libraries because being part of the government they're bound from gathering that kind of information under the first amendment.
These exist -- see the Mechanics Library in San Francisco. I haven't been there in a while, but it's not as bleak as you suggest. It isn't so different from many public libraries, except less busy and quieter.
I think many private libraries like Mechanics are nonprofits and aren't primarily funded by membership dues, so have little incentive to engage in dark patterns like this
It wouldn't be hard to imagine paying a not for profit institution directly instead of via taxes. Then its funding would be unaffected by political vagaries, as it would be funded by people's choice.
Because libraries are often used by the people who can least afford it. They offer resume classes, ESL, computer literacy, some will even have collections of clothes that can be borrowed for job interviews. Libraries should be a public service, not a private institution.
I understand what libraries do, but one doesn't preclude the other. Not for profits and charities are basically a one-way funnel of money from people who have it to people who don't, modulo not for profit salaries.
I was referring to large grants from wealthy donors, which is how nonprofits operate. To be entirely revenue funded a library would have to charge gym membership prices. I don’t see people going for it.
Netflix was still pretty niche in 2009. You’ve got a lot of poor friends? Who were movie buffs?
Legal, reader-friendly digital public libraries are likely to remain very difficult (if not impossible) to create without copyright reform, such as first-sale doctrine for ebooks.
While these explanations are plausible, certain other things I've encountered make me believe that deeper reasons underlie even these reasons. When I lived in the UK in 2017 as a foreigner, all applications for a driving licence as a foreigner on a T2-ICT visa had to be sent over for a couple of weeks and you had to include your passport and Biometric Residence Permit and everything. By comparison, I was able to get my driving licence at the California DMV pretty easily even as a foreigner and my passport and so on were photocopied and not retained. This drastic difference in service ability between the DVLA and a notoriously disliked American government service lead me to believe that the proximal technical causes for this are downstream from organizational choices for how to deliver service.
> downstream from organizational choices for how to deliver service
100000%. They're a monopoly service you must interact with or get fined and (eventually) locked up. They have zero incentive to do a particularly good job. Some orgs in this situation are just well run and do a good job, but there's no competitive pressure for them to do so.
I'm a fan of RSS too. Some people I know use substack to write. I would ideally like to use kill-the-newsletter for that but I had trouble with delivery with substack. Fortunately, these days LLMs are quite quick so I was able to whip up a little tool that does this for myself: https://github.com/roshan/superheap
It's incomplete but sufficient. LLMs drop the cost of software to near zero. I barely had to learn anything.
> I would ideally like to use kill-the-newsletter for that but I had trouble with delivery with substack.
Substack does indeed seem to have kill-the-newsletter banned, but (at least for free posts) it actually provides an RSS feed out of the box, so you should be able to just chuck the address of the blog’s home page into your RSS reader and have it figure things out for you. I haven’t seen this capability advertised anywhere (and the days of the RSS icon in your address bar are sadly long gone), but it does exist.
(Incidentally, Buttondown also has RSS feeds built in.)
I blog the fun of it. Back in the day, random traffic would land on your site. That happens less nowadays. It was very straightforward for search engines to pick up on you with no effort. Nowadays you have to put some effort into it. And the more effort you put in, the more effort you put in. So I don't put in much effort and just write whatever I feel like writing. Sometimes it's a couple of lines and a photo. Sometimes it's long. And it's mostly not code and stuff.
Haha, what an end to an era on the brand. Some 16 years ago, my parents bought me the only XPS laptop I'd own: an XPS M1330 [0]. I've still got in a closet here, but I used it for eight years or so. Six years after purchase, it looks like it was still a pretty good machine[1] and had near perfect Linux compatibility. The real wonder for me was that the bootloaders for the Power button on that laptop and the MediaDirect button were separate, so I actually had it set up so that if I hit the MediaDirect button it would go to Ubuntu and the Power button would send it to Windows!
Pretty neat trick. The only thing is that something about the way the video framebuffer was set up when you hit the MediaDirect button made the GRUB interface laggy. After that, the kernel resets everything and all is well!
This particular laptop was part of the infamous batch of bad G84 series of Nvidia graphics chips. The BGA soldering on the GPUs would crack under thermal stress, but you could reflow it with a heat gun or using the oven (crazy for a semi-plastic device!). In my case, it happened early enough that XPS support replaced my motherboard a few times. They actually met me wherever I was with the part to replace the board and the tech would do it for me at home. Overall, that was the finest customer support experience I ever had. I'm a fickle guy, though. It wasn't enough to keep me with the brand and I eventually ended up with a Macbook.
It's funny. After posting this I googled my name and XPS M1330 and found a post where I was trying to boot off the SD card. I was fascinated by this idea back then that I could just carry my OS on an SD card and then people couldn't see any of my stuff unless they had that specific SD card: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/laptops-gene... . Sadly the XPS M1330 didn't work for that, but I think I did it with a USB stick (which is unfortunately more noticeable - back then they were bulky!).
I’m sure it will come to bite me in the ass one day but my personal site is a wiki written in the style of website that I’d write as a teenager: random updates about things and my life without any overlying theme or brand. I just write what I think, sticking my Blog entries under the Blog category and posting things haphazardly otherwise.
Other things I do that one doesn’t these days but you’d be eager to do in the past is that I’m public about my life. Funnily enough, it was someone else’s comment about Wikipedia deleting their article (which I did manage to recover) that pointed me to a Japanese mathematician. His website filled me with such nostalgia. There were all these stories of his life and things like that.
We used to put things like that on the Internet. The one thing I did miss back then was the ability to make small updates to people’s websites to fix typos and so on. So my website is a wiki (it’s just Mediawiki).
It’s been vandalized before by bots but I make nightly backups to R2 so I just dump and restart if things get ugly. Otherwise, it’s been fine.
One thing that might be fun is if someone one day happens upon my site and feels that sensation of looking at someone’s lived life.
Hey I enjoyed reading your site! Also, notably, it made me aware of the word "Bundeshausfrau" which is my new second-favourite German word (after the un-dethroneable "Sitzpinkler").
I like saying "sitzen, nicht spritzen" to amuse myself, which is a close relative. But the funniest thing is that I thought I'd coined Bundeshausfrau in that post but it's apparently the most obvious choice to express the concept in German because it's been used at least a decade ago (and possible more)! Well, TIL.
Some of us still do. But I think it was always very much a minority even on platforms that encouraged it. See Similarworlds.com, a successor to the Experience Project.
"Y'all" has been common for a while among Anglo-Indians in South India. I was quite surprised when I first went online among the predominantly American early-Internet community and discovered that y'all consider it a peculiarity of the American South. I've always liked it, though I don't use it anymore now that I live in the US (where it is a marker of the South).
If you'd like to replicate, the sign-up process was very easy and I was easily able to run a single generation attempt. Maybe later when I want to generate video I'll use prompt enhancement. Without it, the video appears to have lost a notion of direction. Most image-generation models I'm aware of do prompt-enhancement. I've seen it on Grok+Flow/Aurora and ChatGPT+DallE.
Prompt
A pelican riding a bicycle along a coastal path overlooking a harbor
Seed
15185546
Resolution
720×480
If you find it aggravating to use, then it’s not likely this will make you happy but just in case it helps, you can just bake it into your image and be completely airgapped and the only real factor is storage because the actual functionality is easy.
Libraries do naturally arise from the first-sale doctrine here. I think they would not exist in SF but perhaps Walnut Creek etc would have some.
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