I managed to get through 3 years of college (in a humanities degree, granted) with a dinky used thinkpad running the latest ubuntu distro. Only needed it for note taking, pdf reading, and essay writing, and it got the job done for $50. There were only a few times I was screwed when it came to needing special software...
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
Super cool! I'm just starting to get into very basic html/web-dev, so not only were the 'hidden' messages in your html cute to read via inspect element, but seeing that this was all contained in a single javascript file was pretty eye-opening for me! thanks for making it open source, I'll be sure to give it another look once I get to that.
My only suggestion, alongside everyone else's agreement that text should be faster/selectable: how about trees, so that you can keep track of all the nested parts? for example, when I select any of the parts of the drivetrain, perhaps a tree/breadcrumb element would say bike/drivetrain/chainring. Similarly, maybe any other parts that get mentioned in descriptions could be hyperlinks, which can take you instantly to the relevant part.
Super cool and fun presentation! I've had thoughts about doing something similar but for old film projectors. I'll let you know if that ever ends up happening, maybe I could give you a shoutout!
I'm not sure what a stablecoin is beyond what I can intuit from the name, but the fluctuating prices of crypto seems like a detriment. However, couldn't the prices of materials listed on itch just update live to reflect the value of whatever coin they settle on using?
On the one hand, I'm with you. I went from being incredibly uninformed about most current events to being incredibly anxious about EVERYTHING due to HN. I've since stepped away (in fact, this is my first time back in weeks, maybe, and I approached the feed very cautiously.)
But, on the other hand, I come to HN for its intelligence. Compared to other similar sites, I've scarcely found another userbase that's as consistently sincere, nuanced, and intelligent as the users on here. So, while I agree that politics and related topics can be remarkably anxiety inducing at times, I value HN because I can see what I believe to be the best Laymen's thoughts on it, on a website which isn't nearly as profit-driven and exploitative as the alternatives.
Funny enough, Hacker News is the only place I've been going to get my news for about a year now, and ever since I started experiencing anxiety bad enough to where I needed to start limiting my exposure to it. But like you said, focusing on family, friends, and local things happening in your immediate community definitely help, and only recently have I realized that. A friend and I were discussing this recently, and he put it very succinctly: "the view from high above is great, but it's hard to not worry about falling."
You save 15% but mcdonalds makes millions off all the data you consent to giving them by downloading the app. I also heard that, buried in the T&C of their mobile app, you basically consent to rescinding your ability to sue them? I'm not trying to pull too much of a gotcha though, I use the app myself.
I feel like I've got to read it eventually just so I can be up to speed on all the millions of references to it in other works of art. In a college class recently, we read beowulf, and I was confused what was meant when grendel was described as being from "cain's clan" - I was raised non-religiously by parents who had both been burned pretty bad by institutional religion, so it was pretty much only me and an asian immigrant in that class who needed the reference explained. (Granted, I was one of the few non english majors in that class, which also probably affected my lack of understanding.)
I'd argue that the biggest difference between that kind of "dumb variety tv" and tiktok is that tiktok is essentially endless, and it suits the content to you. There's a big difference between the heads of a clip show deciding what gets shown on tv based off empathy and the occasional focus group test, and an inhuman algorithm which pays attention only to "engagement" - whether that engagement be positive or negative.
Interesting! I'll have to give this a try and see what effect it has on my social media usage. My new years resolution is to use it only 30 minutes a day at max
Apparently the australian kids show "bluey" has been getting popular with adults, and a lot of them are saying that the portrayal of caring family dynamics has been helping to heal their inner child/process childhood traumas. I suspect that mlp might have had a similar hook to some people
I feel the trouble with comparing social media to cigarettes is that cigarettes are kind of their own self-contained "thing". For instance, while you can smoke a cigarette on your own and focus your entire attention towards it, it's kind of technically impossible to use social media alone, even if there's no one else in the room with you. The "content" isn't pre-packaged and finite, it's constant and living, fueled by other people. That's the big trouble with leaving social media for a lot of people. It's a kind of prisoner's dillemma where the only meaningful way to stop it is to organize with your friends to quit it/explore alternatives as well. More than just insecure feelings of FOMO, the trouble with quitting social media is that you become really out of the loop with your friends' activities, since its benefit has always been being able to efficiently update your friends. It seems like unless you have some way of staying in contact with them, you may as well be invisible.
I do love the analogy of a donut which becomes heavier as you reach closer to overconsumption, though. A while back I got tired of all the noise on youtube and installed an extension called "unhook tube" which makes all the recommended videos in the sidebar just disappear. I wonder if there'd be a way to impliment an extension for instagram/facebook and the other 'scrollers', where the longer you use it, the more difficult it becomes to scroll, and the longer it takes for posts to load. It'd be like the benefit of having a fickle water heater, in that it keeps you from staying in the shower too long once the water gets too cold. In terms of facilitating moderation, this seems like the easiest solution.