There were many crazy things, but the one that affected me the most was my RE teacher’s insistence that all non-Catholics would go to hell. My best friend’s dad, who was an atheist and a very kind person, had died a few days before and it made me really upset. My parents complained to the school about it.

Personally, I donate less to more projects. But, if you don’t have a strong opinion of what to donate to, you can get the best of both worlds by donating to NLnet.

They fund open source projects up and down the stack, from open source CPUs all the way up to applications like Lemmy, and everything in between. Some are quite speculative and others are tangible improvements to existing projects.

I used Language Transfer and Michel Thomas’ courses when starting to learn Italian and found them really helpful in getting a foothold into the language.

The Michel Thomas course was longer and went in more depth, but I preferred the vibe of language transfer. The Michel Thomas course seemed to be aimed at people looking to cheat on their wife on a business trip, because a lot of the conversation was about inviting women to get a drink :( Despite that, it was still useful.

Unlike the language apps, these courses did a good job of getting me to think in real-time. Despite only being able to express and understand basic things, they gave me confidence to try and say things. Even without much vocab, I was able to express myself in a simple way: “I like that red thing over there”, and I was able to pick up new words with “what does this part mean?” or “can you repeat?” etc. So far, it’s the best method I’ve found to bootstrap enough of the language to start talking and picking up the rest by osmosis.

Ooooo, someone’s getting worried!

For me, the problem is not all screen time, but big tech proprietary software companies. I don’t support regulating screen time, but I do think governments should regulate big tech companies harder, while investing in free software - that genuinely serves user interests and has no incentive to be addicting or harmful - as an alternative.

Big tech explicitly tries to keep people addicted, whatever the consequences. They don’t support user agency. Even if you want to make Facebook/Instagram/TikTok etc. less addicting, you are limited to a “show less like this” button that probably does nothing. On iOS and Android, companies abuse the notification categories, and yet there’s no way to filter out keywords or work around this, despite the widespread abuse of user attention.

If everyone had full control over their own (or their child’s) devices and algorithms, I doubt there would be such a backlash against technology as a whole. But, despite all the bad the techbros are doing, technology can be so empowering when it serves the users. To regulate screen time seems to me to treat the amazing parts of technology the same as the worst parts.

It is not OP claiming that. It is the description from the link preview.

It’s an alternative to Lemmy with some different features. Since it uses the same protocol under the hood, its instances federate with Lemmy. There’s more info on the differences here.

You can trust the software in your distro’s repositories (if you run a distro with well-maintained repositories). This is because, generally only well-known software gets packaged, the packager should be familiar with both the project and the code, and everything is rebuilt on the distro’s own infrastructure, to ensure that a given binary actually corresponds to the source.

It might still be possible for things to slip through, but it’s certainly much safer than random programs from online.

This might be a silly question, but in what ways did it get worse? Is it the size of the keyboard changing, the predictions not being as good anymore or something else?

With my knowledge of tech companies, I’m not exactly surprised, but I’m not an iPhone user and struggling to understand how a keyboard of all things could get worse.

Wait is this how you get up to date when your system is past long term support?

Pretty much! You just modify the apt sources, and upgrade incrementing by each stable release until you reach current stable. Each upgrade guide has a section that points you to the guide for the previous version if your version doesn’t match.

Would not recommend doing backups drunk.

:D in my experience, there’s a certain amount of drink-inspired overconfidence that can be helpful, but it’s very easy to go over. I need more testing to find the exact line - it might also wrap around again if you drink more. More investigation needed :)

There were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it’s a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.

I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry’s dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I’ve always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.

There’s something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it’s that they’re happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.

By dumbing down the suite, are you talking about things like flatpak / atomic distros?

If so, I am also not a fan of those things - give me Debian stable and the software in the repos and I’m happy - but I also don’t think I will be harmed by others coming in and trying different approaches. From what I can tell, with each paradigm shift, the old approach doesn’t go away, but stays powered by the volunteers who care about it.