Libb

First thing first, check with an eye doctor if you don’t need glasses. I would not be surprised if you needed those.

I’m so tired of TV shows and movies that I’m willing to force myself to read,

Don’t force yourself to read. And I say that as an intensive reader. Reading should not feel like a chore or something someone has to do. It’s not homework. It needs to remain fun, engaging, and exciting.

Let reading slowly become a habit, let it become progressively stronger in your activities. It’s a muscle one needs to exercise. Exactly like one would develop any new skill, progressively. No one ever learned to walk by running a marathon ;)

Edit: as suggested by others already: you may also want to consider reading print more than on screen as screens (even e-ink, but to a much lesser extent) can really become tiring for some readers.

I’m so tired of TV shows and movies that

My spouse and I have not owned a TV set since the early 00s, so you may imagine I understand how you feel about TV: we don’t miss any of it. But we also don’t force ourselves to read, ever.

I do read a lot more than my spouse, every single day (and often at night too), but we have other activities. Sketching, craft, writing (as important as reading, imho), listening to carefully selected music (by hand, not through an algorithm), spending time with one another and with people we appreciate, and so on. Edit: we also watch DVDs of carefully selected movies and series (we watch them on a computer, since we have no tv).

BTW, among those other activities there is one that should help rest your eyes a lot and rather quickly: going out for a walk. This forces your eyes to focus on a different focal point/distance than the one you usually hold a book at. It also give your eyes to get some quality light that should also help rest them (daylight is still the best light we have access to)

Try to make walking as much of a habit as reading. For me, it’s a great help to reflect more calmly on what I have just read. Thinking about the book you’re reading is at least as important as actually reading it and, sadly, is very often overlooked (books being binge read without much time left in-between to let our brain assimilate them what we just read. That part is so important in my own reading that, no matter the type of book I’m reading, I always read pen in hand to take notes and then re-read those notes/reflections to help me summarize the book and my impressions of it.

The moment they accept they don’t know everything/they can be wrong.
Something that can happen at any age bracket, imho…

Thinking about it, that may also mean quite a few people will never turn adults no matter how old they are.

I don’t drive (own) a car, so no. But I also don’t feel any kinship with people wearing the same pants or watch I wear. Or using the same pen.

That being said, I will feel kinda closer to anyone I can see reading a book instead of doomscrolling their phone. But That’s (my) emotions speaking: I worry to see less and less people spending actual time reading books, so I’m always happy to see someone doing just that.

“Work as hard and amass as much money as you possibly can and nothing else matters?” Or do you see something different/better?

The hell with money obsession (I quit a great job many years ago, to get my life back).

But making stuff is not just about earning money. It’s about making. Making something out of nothing or out of some raw material (be it a piece of wood before one starts sculpting it, or some vague idea before one starts making a book out of it). And that, that is indeed hard work. It requires efforts, humility (one needs to be ok with being bad at first), and patience (o learn to get better at doing it).

Imvho, that hard work is the very reason why we’re alive, we just need to re-learn that we don’t have to make a business out of it.

Edit: clarifications.

Surely, unless I somehow manage to forget.

Also, I wash my hands before I cook and before I eat. But I don’t wash them every time I touch whatever else all day long.

A sample journey when trying to install software:

I guess it mostly depends the type of apps one wishes to install.

On Windows: find the msi or exe and be done with it.

Linux is certainly not perfect but:

• sudo apt install list-of-all-the apps-I-need makes it so easy to install all my apps on a new system. And for the rare few apps I need a more recent version than the one that is provided through the official repos, I can just flatpak install list-of-the-few-flatpaks-I-want. I don’t even have to type those commands, I keep a text file listing them and all the apps names.
• coupled with the ease of making backups (and of restoring them), just with with a couple command lines (be it my personal files or settings and config files)…

Well, that plus the freedom I have to do whatever I fancy with my OS, without its maker having anything to say about it, make it so much better in my eyes than the proprietary OS I used to use (I was a Mac user more than I ever was a Windows user, but it’s no secret Mac apps were even simpler to install than on Windows)

I also use a PPA for a rather niche app, never had any issue with it.

I would rater teach younger kids but, no matter their age, it would be history and/or literature, philosophy, maybe even Greek and Latin for the most motivated among them.

More or less, it would be what was once called ‘humanities’. Some people and some interests across the entire political spectrum, including our own are trying real hard to eradicate this kind of education and that is not for the kids good. I would love to contribute my humble part in resisting that eradication.

Europe is not one country, nor is it one democracy. It is 27countries that are all different. You would be better asking for specific countries ;)

Ancient Greece was not that much of “a democracy” either. I mean, there was no “Greek nation”, there were cities and group of cities, and there were many non-democratic cities. Facing Athens, there was Sparta, their lifelong nemesis, which was not really a democratic city. The Athenian democracy itself lasted approx 200 years (a bit less, and with pauses) and its “golden age” (around that Pericles dude who gave it its first real democratic constitution among a few other impressive things) was very short lived: less than 35 years. And even then it was still a lot more… selective to determine who was deemed worthy of being a citizen (there were a lot less of them, only men and only from a certain group of population). Like I said, democracy was not “Greek” it was a “city” thing, as there was no such things as our relatively recent idea of a “nation” (or then, the city was the nation). There were alliances between cities though (but not always… spontaneous, nor reliable: Be it against of from Athens there were many betrayals) and there were almost many wars including against foreign powers.

Those countless wars is what, imho, put the Athenian democracy to the ground and this makes me wonder: could there be any modern democratic nation uneducated enough (and dumb enough to elect one of the most uneducated POTUS ever) to ignore that past experience and think it would be a great idea to start countless wars nowadays, and also to betray alliances?

Just wondering, obviously.

Seen from France, I would say the most obvious difference I can see between the US version of a democratic republic and my own is in how quite a few of our own representatives still at least try to pretend they work for us, and not in their own interest or in their friend’s and sponsor’s interests. That is changing, sadly.

It also looks like many US citizens consider the word ‘solidarity’ an insult, whereas it is (or was as, sadly, things are changing quite fast here too) a founding principle of the French Republic: it’s the ‘Fraternité’ part in our ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’.

On the plus side for the USA: up until quite recently, you used to have a real incomparable freedom of expression (which we dearly lack around here, all in the nae of political correctness), but its seems you decided to let go of it, for the same absurd reasons, as we did a few years ago.

You also used to be able to sustain and accept very different values and ideas, within the same space. That too is going away very quickly all in the name of intolerant ideologies (from the right as well as from the left side of your political spectrum)

And now, let the downvote festival begin. I suppose.

As a privacy consciousness individual,

Potentinally there will be some sort of system or software that can monitor my activities

• Don’t save anything personal on that machine.
• And don’t do anything you would not agree to do publicly, on that machine.

Other than that, as already suggested, run some debloat script but I still would not trust Windows. Even less if it was configured with an official spyware from my employer/university/whomever.

no. Full disk encryption is enough to protect my privacy from anyone stealing my computer/disks, it’s what matters to me.

If some secret agency want to access said data, they would just need to ask me, with a smile and a nice warrant. At least here in France, not complying is severely punished.

You’re right, sorry I was not more careful expressing it. And thx a lot for pointing it out.

TLDR: give a pair of sneakers to an oyster, it won’t make it Usain Bolt.

Disclaimer: I’m not a US christian.

Christ was poor, he stood for the poorest, not the richest, he had some brain working, he was oppressed for his ideas, and he died for them… while at the same time forgiving his murderers.

No matter the amount of AI trickery (and wasted energy), Trump looks as much as Christ as he looks like a decent human being (hint: not at all). Imho, he would have a lot more chance to try to pass as Taylor Swift…

I’m lightning fast the moment I realize someone is only looking to either

• be toxic, or worse
• waste my time, troll me.

For the rest I don’t block individuals, nor instances (I can have issue with people, but I don’t want to condemn the entire population of their instance).

Thank you very much. I’m just sharing what I think.

And Netscape was created by?

So anyways… how do y’all detect “AI”, IRL?

I don’t meet AI IRL, I meet people.

And online?

• Too
• many
• useless
• Bullets

Too many titles

used to make

the lack of content look

more serious than it really is

Emoji, too 🎇💫🦧

;)

My opinion is that toxicity can be found in every little gesture in our daily life, no need for an highway. It’s also not somethign ‘external’ to us that appears because of poor decisions. It can and often thrives even in the most ‘humble’ or humane ‘infrastructures’, to use you image. Suffice to look how two people, say two neighbors, can literally hate on one another for petty reasons.

If you build platforms that don’t allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you’ll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.

People can have a fight on the street, or in a pub, in a shop, at work, or wherever, even at home, within a family circle, because “he looked at me!” or because “I don’t like the way he dress” kind of reasons. Do you really think tech is the issue?

But once again, you’re more than welcome to believe what you want to believe. Just don’t try to put words in my mouth that I did not say.

• Firefox (now using Waterfox), I started using when it was still Mosaic and no idea it would one day become Mozilla Firefox…
• LibreOffice.
• In a couple years, maybe three, I’ll be on Mint for 10 years and, yep, I do like it. And I certainly love many GNU apps that came with my distro: they’re lightweight, focused and so incredibly useful <3
• I used to love Mac OS (previous to Linux, since the early 80s I had been an Apple user) and many small third party apps. But I moved away from Apple and have no desire to go back.

I don’t buy this narrative that toxicity is inevitable.

You’re more than welcome to buy what you fancy, I don’t recall saying it was unavoidable. I even think I mentioned why we somehow manged to make it as… present as it is, and how we should try to get rid of most of it (hint: through education).

Can we get rid of all of it? Nope, unless one is to pretend we’re perfect? Don’t know about you but I’m certainly not perfect.

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

We don’t because:

1. it’s a wider issue than ‘the Internet’. Haven’t you noticed how even politics in general, which was supposed to be the epitome of our democratic societies, has morphed into an hate-filled shit show at best, when it’s not effing openly celebrating murders and assassinations of people we don’t like?
2. we’re part of the issue. It’s not a ‘them’ vs ‘us’. It’s us. And most of us, no matter what we believe in, are acting like morons, at best.

but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong.

Lemmy has not “gotten worse” in my opinion. It was worse to begin with and when I arrived a few years ago, the first thing I had to urgently learn is how to filter out what I call its ‘noise’: that constant (and self-celebrating) hatred for ‘the other camp’, the hatred for those who dare not think like ‘us’ (I certainly don’t put myself in that group). I then moved from Lemmy to Piefed, mostly because back then at least it offered me simpler/more efficient ways to filter out that noise.

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

Like mentioned in other comments, the only way is through changing (civil) society itself. Aka through education.

As long as our respective public educative systems (I’m from France, but I know it’s as shitty in the USA if not worse) are allowed to not do their job of actually educating and teaching kids some common values and principles (next to some actual knowledge and know-how), toxicity will thrive.

It thrives because it has been normalized and because those who benefit from it are being regarded as role models. But it’s even worse than that: just publicly discussing this issue and its causes would expose anyone to being… punished by an angry toxic crowd of people that don’t want to hear they’re being toxic (or that their ‘ideology’ they want so hard to believe in have morphed them into assholes). That is a huge loss for any freedom respecting society, and a huge win for those benefiting from that hate/toxicity.

edit: clarifications.