My concern is very much those two concerns plus the fact that I value being able to be anonymous. We're increasingly losing that in the real world with CCTV and AI that would eventually allow people to be tracked (like in China), I do want to have one last bastion of privacy.
That said, I fully support laws that ban phones at school, I chose my kid's school because they do not allow any electronic devices on campus outside the computer lab where kids can go to to do research. Every day when I bring my kid to the school bus, I see that children say hello to each other and start chatting. There's another very well ranked school that picks up kids in front of my apartment and they allow phones. The kids all stare fixedly on their phones as soon as they sit on the bus. Having a country wide ban of mobile devices in all schools would I think serve most of the same purpose as the social media ban while having a lot less externalities.
In middle school, I had good grades but was considered a bit of a teacher's pet and was not well liked (especially since I sucked at sports). So I stopped doing homework, I showed that I didn't make effort to try and be better accepted. I still did any graded homework (less than 20% of the homework given) but didn't bother with anything else. Luckily school was easy for me so I still got good grades but I got very habits from that that I have needed to unlearn after.
I strongly believe that peers are important and choosing school based on the type of peers is a valid choice. As another (more positive) example, we live in HK in a multilingual family (I speak French, my wife speaks Cantonese), my son goes to an international school in English and Mandarin. Most of his classmates speak at least 2 languages, many speak 3. In that environment, it's easy for my son to see value in speaking multiple languages and he's never rejected one language. I have a friend whose daughter is in France in a monolingual school where her peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.
I mostly like it when writing quick shell scripts, it saves me the 30-45 minutes I'd take. Most recent use case was cleaning up things in transmission using the transmission rpc api.
I like perplexity when I need a quick overview of a topic with references to relevant published studies. I often use it when researching what the current research says on parenting questions or education.
It's not perfect but because the answers link to the relevant studies it's a good way to get a quick overview of research on a given topic
That said, the person you're replying to is right. Synology has mostly stopped supporting their apps, they've removed features in cost-cutting features (media codecs), hardware is now hopelessly outdated and both kernel and docker are completely out of date.
It feels like any technical leadership completely disappeared and now only bean counters who don't understand the product or their target market are making decisions.
Cult indoctrination could be explained by this but could also be explained by the fact that a certain number of formerly gifted kids, who have been ostracised during their childhood and have low social skills tend, to gravitate around the rationalist community. I do believe that those people are more likely to be indoctrinated.
From my readings of the Zizian, they also don't seem to easily change their mind, they instead have had a tendency towards very radical opinions that progressively become more extreme.
For some reason, I find the ANC of the quiet comfort to be very uncomfortable. When I turn on the ANC, it feels like there's a sort of pressure and I really dislike it.
On the other hand, I don't mind the ANC from my sennheiser momentum.
It's such a pity that bitwarden's client doesn't work offline for modifying vaults (need to be online to be able to access the server implementation). I would switch from my old local vault 1password in an instant.
20 years ago when I was living in Shanghai, my girlfriend was a member of the communist party (meritocratic she was enrolled because she had great grades). She had regular meetings with a small group of members of the party and they had regular discussions after being told to watch certain movies.
Lawrence of Arabia was one of those movies she had to watch to later discuss with other members... So we watched it together, had great discussion about it. Later when she went to meet with the other party members, they discussed the cult of personality surrounding the character and the use of guerrilla tactics.
(Another movie they all watched like this was 7 years in Tibet)
That saying in France is usually understood to be for cities outside of Paris and only referring to "Gares" (that word is used for train stations, not for subway stations). Anecdotally, I'd say it holds true in general in most cities I've visited (with Paris being an exception)
I regret deeply investing in some of Musk companies (xAI, spaceX) in the past. Especially for the last investment xAI, I should have had a wake up call before that.
I used to just buy whatever tool I needed to do hardware jobs and collected a hodge podge of poor quality tools like this. One day I decided to research, buy a bunch of high quality tools, sell all the old ones I had. I wish I had done that sooner, it makes hardware jobs so much easier when you have the most common tools needed and you know they just work.
I mean Project Hail Mary is also far from being exceptional. I didn't dislike the book and it was enjoyable but I would never think it deserves an award. In particular, the scenes with the alien fell really flat. Now I haven't read the winner for best novel of 2022 and to be honest I haven't read any amazing novel published in 2021.
In my experience, the positive attributes you list tend to be more associated with middle class than upper classes. At a certain amount of wealth, you can see very problematic behaviour.
As someone who was bullied in middle school (highlight includes being held down by 2 guys while someone else peed on me), trauma does stay.
I mean, I'm a relatively well balanced individual, I have a job, a family etc... But that doesn't mean that I didn't have to have therapy over it, that I didn't commit self harm and that I didn't experience trauma.
I'd rather my son not be a social outcast and experience that. And I do think that past a certain age, there's a need to conform a bit to society in order to integrate with it even if that means using social media at that age. That'll be with my guidance and strict limits but I don't think total abstinence is a solution.
I absolutely hate cloudflare for the same reason you have. Besides traveling and using a VPN, I like in Hong Kong, a country that many sites have decided to block completely. It's very frustrating that cloudflare easily enables those kind of blanket bans for no reasons.
That said, I fully support laws that ban phones at school, I chose my kid's school because they do not allow any electronic devices on campus outside the computer lab where kids can go to to do research. Every day when I bring my kid to the school bus, I see that children say hello to each other and start chatting. There's another very well ranked school that picks up kids in front of my apartment and they allow phones. The kids all stare fixedly on their phones as soon as they sit on the bus. Having a country wide ban of mobile devices in all schools would I think serve most of the same purpose as the social media ban while having a lot less externalities.