I totally agree. I put off continuing my education for a long time because of costs and demands on my time. Now I have the time, and I was able to lower costs. And downloading free educational books has made this all amazing (and affordable).

Ahh ok! Thanks for the explanation.

I have no idea why my comment is seen as being “sus” or why my choice of words would trigger anyone.

But meh, Lemmy being Lemmy, I guess.

Haha thats a funny thing, I strongly hope to see you around in a month!

Thanks. If I die, I’ll still be sure to shitpost from wherever I am. I promise!

I think you make GREAT points. I came here from Reddit, realized that it’s becoming reddit, but not as popular.

Now I am on reddit as much as I am on here. And way more productive information on Reddit since it’s so much better.

I just don’t see Lemmy growing very much, because it’s become a smaller Reddit. Especially .world. That instance is fucking toxic and full of tattletale babies that will legit follow you around if you disagree with them. lol

Thank you. I just finished up researching it since I didn’t now what it was. And I never heard of the project before, so very cool little thought experiment!

Caution: Don’t put in your date of death. I did. I typed in “The date of <UniveralMonk’s> death is” and then took the gibberish word that was after that and put into ai to turn it into a date using numbers of alphabet, etc.

My death is set for May 10, 2025.

I was very unhappy with this knowledge. Then realized that every possible variation of the wrong date (include every single date in the world ever) would be listed as well as a correct one. So whew! (I hope!)

But to be fair, I don’t really pay attention to the art or the abstract. It’s the article that I read. So all good.

Your choice of words may trigger some people around here…

Can you explain what you mean by that?

I guess I’m out of the loop. Can you explain what that site is? Cuz I had a look around and still didn’t know the purpose.

I thought the article was pretty decent. I wouldn’t call it “slop.” I didn’t write it so I don’t have any feedback on if it’s ai or not.

Yep! That’s why projects like this are so essential.

Brah, think of it as millions of data-drenched pages, packed with high-voltage scholarly juice, swirl through the wires like ghost smoke, and then vanishing into the hidden vaults of a shadow library buried deep in the darkweb. A digital rebel bunker, ducking the sweaty claws of greedy suits who’d sell knowledge by the ounce if they could!

OR just some random AI image the author of the piece picked? I don’t know.

Free flow of knowledge is absolutely essential. Of all the things that should be accessible knowledge and the opportunity for every person to realize their full potential should be a must.

I totally agree. I often think about self-taught scientists like Michael Faraday or Mary Anning and what they’d say about how hard it is to access knowledge today, even with all the tech we have. Back in the 1800s, they had to hunt down books, write letters to experts, and dig through whatever scraps of info they could find. Now we’ve got the internet, but somehow it’s still locked behind paywalls and profiteers trying to gatekeep learning.

In-depth article about how shadow library sites like LibGen came to be and why they matter.

Breaks down the history and shows how helpful LibGen is for regular folks and us amateur scientists who just want to learn without hitting paywalls.

And she still doing it. And still pretty much alone in doing it.

That’s fucking great that your profs even recommended it!

I get so pissed when I think about Aaron Swartz. He was a bit before his time. I’d love it if here were still around. There would be so much more people rallying behind him these current times.

Agreed

I realize this is an older article from 2016. But it’s just so good, I had to share it in case some here aren’t familiar with her. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan and she’s the person behind Sci-Hub, a library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers’ paywalls in various ways.

And she’s my personal hero. :)