Übercomplicated

None of these are accurate. The only shell trick that genuinely saves your sanity is fish. (/jk)

Also, these are genuinely very basic tips. It’s much more useful to learn about tmux, plugins (e.g., atuin), and useful commands like sed, grep, fd, awk, etc. Pretty much everything this article mentions becomes second nature in fish, leaving you to focus on more important things. Like learning neovim or emacs!

Great examples include making people wait until adulthood to smoke nicotine or cannabis, or to drink alcohol.

I mean, I agree with you, but highschool is a thing… these laws are basically useless to my knowledge. I think about 50% of my grade had smoked weed by tenth grade, and half again were addicted to nicotine by 12th. The only reason I didn’t fall victim to those (as many of my friends did), is because I was educated, by my parents, from an early age, about addiction and these substances. I never even tried them, because I knew better, thus never got addicted.

The beginning of the article is pretty weak, especially Masnick kinda defending addictive design:

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying. Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing?

Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver. The “addictive design” does nothing without the underlying user-generated content that makes people want to keep scrolling.

But I gotta say, it does seem like this could set a dangerous precedent. If it becomes easy to file cases for design decisions on the platfor

Because lemmy and mastodon don’t have manipulative algorithms! Maybe we should just outlaw those kind of algos? /showerthoughts

Does anyone still talk about Keeper password manager? I feel like I used to hear about that one a lot, and now it has just disappeared off of the face of the earth.

The beauty of open source

Well, I unfortunately failed.

Do they install DNS filters locally on the machines at all?

No, the kids are allowed to bring their own laptops, because some rich parents insisted on their kids using MacBooks. I tried pushing Linux for the kiddo, but turns out whatever CISCO wifi system the school is using actively blocks Linux (including, for some reason, black listing the arch repos). A lot of stuff is blocked — though easily bypassed by VPNs or the wireguard router proxy I set up — by wifi black lists, including random stuff like duckduckgo and dict.cc

Actually, I did get an ad for a vibrator on dict.cc once, so maybe that makes sense after all. I, a man. Not sure what I’d use it for.

I’m unfortunately not a parent, just a relative, so there is only so much I can do to harass the school about it. I also live abroad, so 🤷 — I try though.

Nah, I managed surprisingly well. In third grade I did really intense dyslexic-specific tutoring (9h a week), and it helped massively. I actually ended up scoring the highest reading comprehension score in my random regional school’s class in 5th grade, I think because of it. There were struggles, but nothing I couldn’t live with. One of my best friends was trans (not publicly back then, ofc), and trust me their school experience was far, far more difficult. I just felt some camaraderie, finding someone else with a audio processing disorder; I didn’t mean to fish for sympathy or anything like that.

Fountain pens for the win, nothing as nice as writing cursive with a good, wet fountain pen. I learned in primary and hated it, and then got obsessed with calligraphy in 10th grade and got a proper fountain pen and good ink and fell in love with the experience.

Learning to write well is really wonderful. I wish I had learned properly in school, instead of having to teach myself. I will teach my offspring, though! If I ever have any — not looking so promising in the current climate. As in political, but also climate change.

There’s an argument to be made against standardized testing. Very neurodivergent individuals, for example, can suffer a lot under bad standardized tests. Idk, though, it would be better to just make a better system, rather than letting people opt out. As long as that’s not happening, there is, however, an argument against standardized tests.

Same!!! I have the auditory thingy and dyslexia, so writing (words, not math) was hell on earth for me for most of highschool. Getting to use a laptop in 11th and 12th grade was a godsent.

But in 10th grade I actually did something that mostly solved my hatred of handwriting: I taught myself calligraphy and whole-arm-writing. Now I love handwriting, don’t have pain doing it anymore, people compliment my writing, etc.

Though I still can’t listen to stuff while writing 🤷 luckily I was able to use a laptop in lectures (philosophy is very notes heavy), and after college it becomes irrelevant, thank god.

I did! The IT department literally laughed at me. I also tried to get them to let teachers install uBlock Origin, because they apparently will watch educational YouTube videos in class sometimes, and then get random ads for everyone to suffer under. But uBlock Origin doesn’t have their support… Ironically, they only support Windows computers and iPhones on the school network. Android, MacOS, and Linux are all officially unsupported.

This is why I switched!!! I don’t use streaming services much, but I hated spotify’s shuffle and general music suggestions. So I tested qobuz and tidal, and can confirm that tidal’s suggestions are far superior to Spotify’s. I still prefer collecting albums and listening to them individually though

Nowadays, it’s about how they mastered it. I can tell you for a fact Ozzy’s no more tears CD sounds like shit and the double record mix is FARRRR better, because it doesn’t have the life squished out of it from brickwalling. Is that digital vs analog? No. Its mastering.

This is 10000% true!! I worked as a mixing and mastering engineer for a while, and lemme tell you… the loudness wars never ended. This is why I still collect vinyl, the medium is kinda shit, but the masters are so much better that it’s hugely worth it for a about 2/3 albums I own (1/3 are duds; I can live with that).

I don’t about you, but in my country Tidal is cheaper than Spotify. But that might be placebo

/jk, though tidal is actually cheaper here. I can’t tell the difference in blind testing between 320 kbps mp3 exported in Reaper and the original wav; they’re indistinguishable to me. Actually, I can tell them apart with some airwindows dithers, but that is a pretty esoteric exception.

Fiio is excellent, 100% agree. Everything I’ve ever owned from them has had superb build quality. I don’t like their headphones or desk amps much, but all their portable stuff is, in my opinion, the best available.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-games-ceo-tim-sweeney-argues-banning-twitter-over-its-ability-to-ai-generate-pornographic-images-of-minors-is-just-gatekeepers-attempting-to-censor-all-of-their-political-opponents/

I am a small indie artist. I earn nearly no money from streaming services, but I do from Bandcamp, SoundCloud (though fuck Soundcloud, they also suck), actual LPs and CDs sold, etc.

If someone decides to listen to my music over Spotify, or really any streaming service, they are also “stealing” my music. Because I get no money from that, and listening to my music over those platforms strengthens their monopoly (this mostly applies to Spotify).

I need to publish my music on Spotify et al (fuck you discogs) for discoverability, because they have an evil fucking global monopoly, but the moment anyone finds my music there, I would ask them to listen to it elsewhere.

It will literally benefit me, and indie artist, more, if you bootleg my music instead of listening via streaming services, as this weakens their monopoly. Seriously.

I have a different job, I don’t need to live from my music right now, so the stakes are fairly low for me. But it still sucks to see streaming services ruin independent music like this. I would ask everyone to bootleg music, and then support artists like me through Bandcamp (especially CDs and LPs) and donations (or merch, though I don’t have any), if you appreciate the art.

I don’t expect anyone to immediately buy niche music they don’t know, so bootlegging until you become a fan seems reasonable to me. I’ve discovered many of my favorite albums like that, eventually buying LPs online and donating to the artist; that is far more beneficial to those artists than listening over any streaming service (including the slightly better tidal and Amazon music).

/rant over

Em dashes are considered informal, I have had several professors scold me for using them in academic writing. Like contractions.

I did the tidal ABX test, which I prefer since it’s comparing FLAC, and the difference is almost negligible. I do hear a slight difference >15k, and I can only year up to 18.5k, but on most tracks it’s not noticeable. Also slightly worse transients, but again, only noticable on a few tracks. I also can only hear any of this on HD600s with very, very high volume, which is not how I usually listen to music. I really like this test :)

Lossless is still nice to have though, mostly because I can then rip FLAC files to do good remasters, which is why I happily use tidal (also for a number of other reasons).