It gets better, but learning vocabulary at that level is going to feel very slow no matter what. I would recommend keeping a fairly low bar for just ignoring words and moving on, as keeping up the reading habit is by far the most useful. If reading feels tedious it's easy to lose interest.

One to two new words per page sounds high enough where you are bound to get repetition, so you may want to only look up words that seem either important for context or familiar (i.e. feels like something you've seen before) to get the most value. I combine that with spaced repetition (Anki) for words that I seem to look up often, but Anki has a bit of a learning curve so it may or may not suite you.

This comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread

This, and also working part time would become a lot more feasible. I would imagine there would be quite a bit of pressure to improve working conditions as well, which wouldn't exactly be a bad thing. A lot more hours would be spent on things people consider meaningful, and bullshit jobs would have to be compensated appropriately, which to me feels like a win for society collectively.

One caveat though is that for abolishing minimum wages to be safe the UBI has to be high enough to be actually livable, and would likely be a target of constant politicking. A model I've been thinking about would be to set the level of UBI as a percentage of GDP, distributed evenly across the population, which to me would feel fair but may have practical issues I don't see. It would create a sense of everyone benefiting from collective success, which appeals to me.

If you are interested in a rather detailed analysis of Starlink in Ukraine, I highly recommend listening to episode 53 of the 'Geopolitics Decanted' podcast.

A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I've ever seen.

The six so-called “gatekeepers” are: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.

I run Pop_OS with a temperamental Nvidia GPU that is unstable at factory clock speeds, but solid when I reduce the power limit by 5-10%. The only recurring annoyance I have with pop is that the flatpak GreenWithEnvy breaks after every GPU driver update and requires a manual flatpak upgrade to fix.

Similarly for my work laptop also running pop on nvidia, the big frustration is again nvidia related. Battery life is poor since hybrid graphics doesn't work and external displays only work with the discrete graphics card.

This APT has super cow powers

Not only do people generally not do ethical consumerism, but also often ridicule those who do. Quite infuriating, and would be astonishing if it wasn't so predictably human nature. Presumably it is painful to be reminded that one did not go through the effort to make a conscientious decision but someone else did, and so one belittles the decision and the person willing to make it.

Thanks for the BookWyrm recommendation, looks interesting. I have tried LibraryThing before, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I started building my own Goodreads alternative years ago since I couldn't find anything existing that suited my needs, but unfortunately didn't ever have the time to properly work on it.