Major Areas of Concern:

I am looking for an ebook reader which can highlight text in various colors. Everything should get synced across iOS and desktop. By sync, I mean that highlights I make in a PDF on one device should be treated as an editable highlight on the other device, and not as a permanent part of the PDF. This is to be used for textbooks.

Currenty, I use Apple Books but it is very slow and I cannot sync it outside the Apple environment.

I am okay with free options, self hosted options and one time purchases. I am not so keen on subscriptions but will consider a cheap one.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

It’s called “off-site training”??

As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done

we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce

Are we done for?

Guided by spies and artificial intelligence, the Israeli military unleashed a nighttime fusillade of warplanes and armed drones smuggled into Iran to quickly incapacitate many of its air defenses and missile systems. With greater freedom to fly over Iran, Israel bombarded key nuclear sites and killed top generals and scientists. By the time Iran mustered a response hours later, its ability to retaliate — already weakened by past Israeli strikes — was greatly diminished.

“This attack is the culmination of years of work by the Mossad to target Iran’s nuclear program,” said Sima Shine, the former Mossad research director who is now an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies.

Israel’s element of surprise was enhanced by Iranian officials’ apparent assumption that Israel wouldn’t attack while talks over its rapidly advancing nuclear program were ongoing with the U.S.

A 4" e-ink phone that I hadn't heard of before. Seems like a promising low-distraction semidumb phone.

Unfortunately, it seems to be based on Android 12 (eol) with no upgrades in sight.

I previously posted this at https://lemmy.world/post/30816595

I really appreciate all the feedback from the community! I haven't had time to address everything yet, but I thought I'd share the redesign as I continue to make this a useful tool for everyone who needs to find a new home for their articles. For anyone who saw the old version, I think you'll agree it has come a long way!

Six hours after Israel’s air strikes in Iran last Friday, farmers in Iraq could have looked up and seen Iranian drones traveling west: more than 100 of them flew on a 1,700-kilometer journey to Israel, with their propellers buzzing like Weedwackers.

Among them was the Shahed-136. Composed mostly of foam and plywood, each Shahed-136 drone is 3.5 meters long and has a 2.5-meter wingspan and a 40- to 50-kilogram warhead at its nose. The drone’s “brain,” a sensor the size of a cough drop, measures every movement while a credit-card-sized GPS onboard listens for microwave chirps from navigation satellites. The Shahed’s route (its waypoints in latitude, longitude and altitude) is uploaded before a booster rocket fires it into the sky. And it is loud: its 50-horsepower motor is slightly more potent than that of a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle and would be as noisy as a lawn mower or a moped at full throttle—now multiplied by 100 in what military strategists sometimes refer to as a rudimentary swarm.

Iran’s recent launch of drones at Israel—or Russia’s use of them against Ukraine, where Shahed drones are nicknamed “flying mopeds”—the swarm’s power is in its numbers. One missile with a similar range can cost upward of $1 million, but a Shahed can be knocked together for $20,000 to $50,000. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fires them from portable rails or from racks on trucks, and the small pulse rocket on the bottom of each drone slams it to cruise speed before falling off. The Center for Strategic and International Studies describes such drone salvos as tools “used as much to saturate air defenses as they are to attack targets, cluttering radar screens and forcing command centers to make decisions about where to fire their more capable surface-to-air missiles,” exactly the situation Israel faced.

Last Friday, as the more than 100 Iranian drones flocked toward Tel Aviv and were shot down by fighter jets, Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system and a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Mediterranean, they couldn’t adjust their course based on what was happening on the battlefield. 

The Shahed, which means “Witness” in Persian, is generally a “fire and forget” drone: it cannot transmit information back or receive updated trajectories (though it is often modeled in different ways, and some Shahed drones used by Russia have reportedly had communication equipment). Rather the swarmlike power of such attacks is based in their cost: in the one late last week, the IRGC could afford to fire drones in a wave so dense that fighter pilots, radar operators and Iron Dome crews had to sort through a moving cloud of identical radar blips.