"Generally, MAU [monthly active users] fluctuates over the course of a year, dropping in the summer months and during holidays"
That seems to fit what's happening here. Longer term, firefox seems to have lost 15-20% of users in the past 3 years, which is substantial but not catastrophic. On the other hand, that probably means a much steeper decline in market share.
For me, a folding bluetooth keyboard was what made the difference. It really tilts my default time-to-fill behavior from consuming towards producing. I'd also recommend having a ring on the back of your phone, so you can prop it at a good viewing angle.
I've been writing with obsidian, coding via ssh. Jupyter notebooks and other browser-based environments are also good, though much smoother with a tablet-sized screen.
[Publishers claim sites like Sci-Hub] “have no incentive to ensure the accuracy of scientific articles, no incentive to ensure published papers meet ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct articles if issues arise.”
The correct response to this should be to always note in citations when a paper was accessed through sci-hub. Then the reader is warned, and can compare against the canonical version if they are worried.
Book prefaces commonly acknowledge the libraries where the author has done research; sci-hub deserves to go there if they have been using it.
It's a shame Elbakyan hasn't written a paper about sci-hub that people can cite. Many software packages do that, to give academics an obvious way to cite them.
On nominations: the Nobel nomination process is very open (iirc, any relevant professor can make a nomination). For that reason it is also largely meaningless, but that doesn't stop many people boasting about it, and chunks of the media enabling them. So this is leaning a long way towards fake news, but is also something a single person could do.
I do something like this, though generally just in the situations where I don't have my notebook.
For me, it's a bit more adhoc than the suggested above. Recent uses: jotting down measurements of some furniture; writing for somebody the name of a book I was recommending them; shopping and todo lists; doodles and sketches. notes tend to be odd phrases from conversations.
The reviewing is minimal -- under 10% of what I write needs preserving, the cards mostly get a quick glance and then go straight into the recycling.
I use the same index cards when I'm writing something, for paragraphs or ideas which I can visually arrange on a table.
I've been doing this in some form for a couple of years, but just as a low-key background thing. For me it's just the minimal viable equipment for being able to write things.
I could use my phone for almost all of this, but index cards are a lower risk of distraction.
Meet 'multi-ocular o'. This is the fever-dream of some 15th-century Russian scribe. He was writing about 'many-eyed seraphim', and decided that no ordinary O could do justice to them. Somehow, his doodle found its way into unicode.
For the more sedate eye-lovers, there is also Ꙩ (monocular o), and Ꙫ (binocular o)
Nostalgia, really -- I have fond associations of these with childhood train journeys.
I could just about imagine a genuine use case in some kind of hostile environment. You could probably make one of these very resistant to water/temperature/radiation, with the controller kept safely out of the way.
Suppose you are optimizing for the fastest average time to display a complete word/phrase. That means you will be limited by the slowest letter in each word. But the letters are flipping in parallel, which means you can use the time waiting for the slowest letter to move the other letters to an optimal display.
So have the alphabet ordered in descending frequency. But put a second block of the most common characters half-way through. For each word you first calculate the slowest letter, which gives you a 'budget' of how many flips you will take. Then each letter uses that budget to get to the optimal location of the character it needs to display, probably as early in the alphabet as possible.
If you know which word is being displayed _next_, you can also try to get into the best position to move to in preparation.
The ideal alphabet ordering might be different depending on position in the word -- for instance, some letters are more common at the start of a word. And you could think about digraphs, taking advantage of Q usually being followed by U.
Similarly, there is an early-90s Russian version of The Wizard Of Oz. Watching it with the help of Youtube's auto-translated subtitles was...quite an experience.