Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn’t particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.

In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn’t keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.

The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn’t positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.

I am not going to pretend that boredom can’t factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?

Sure, and using the AUR is something to pay attention to when you do. You are right on that¹.

But, here is the thing: I just don’t have to update anything if I don’t want to. There is no Windows Update saying “next reboot we’re going to update and you don’t get a choice”. That is what I meant when I said that I just don’t worry about it.

Though I guess that says more about what one gets used to when dealing with Windows, than necessarily being high praise for Linux. My work machine has been having issues with a bt headset for reasons I cannot phantom despite working for years, so forgive me if the joy of being able to leave well enough alone has got me excited.

¹ I would argue that updating in general has become more fraught with danger, so I don’t really see the AUR as particularly dangerous in comparison, but my tolerance for danger may just be out of whack. See Notepad++ vulnerable versions, or just npm in general, for non-Linux cases.

I got tired of Microsoft. I had seen that Linux was now good enough for what I wanted to so, so I decided to jump ship.

It wasn’t a quick decision. I only transitioned from Windows because I finally got around upgrading the PC.

So far? I mean, there was the kerfuffle with the AUR recently. And I still haven’t figured out a few issues here and there. But damn it just works and there is no worrying about updating or not updating or anything like it.

I’ve been slowly setting up my own services locally, and one of the issues I quickly ran into was simple: what’s the point of running the uptime monitor in the same machine? Granted, it still serves is purposes, but…

So, if you do find a way to get something going, I think it’d be really cool. My biggest concern would be, though, on how to ensure you don’t accidentally build a DDoS network instead. A though issue I have no idea how to solve, but which should be solvable!

I really don’t think the article makes a good case for why they are using “withdrawal symptoms” (which clearly evokes drugs) beyond being a nice quote. Could the behavioural issues be, say, kids figuring out what to do (or what they can get away with) now that what they used to do is no longer available? The article certainly doesn’t say so.

The other thing is that these are things that are taking years to play out, which suggests to me that there may be more than just cellphones in the classroom. There is certainly a point to be made that if the smartphone is still used at home, you may up in a wash anyway. A reductive scenario I could think of, for example, might be that a student may say they are more attentive, and they may look more attentive, but if they aren’t really engaging with because they will just go home and ask an LLM for the answers to the homework.

People keep saying that they verify your age at the super market and I keep trying to remember the last time that happened to me and I just cannot. Nor, for that matter, at bars or coffee shops (for after lunch chat chilling before returning for the afternoon stint).

It may just be my corner of the European Union being much more lax than others.

I think that with enough community effort, it could.

Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don’t reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).

The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path… the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.

I missed not having to think about Samba to share a drive with a Windows machine.

On the other hand, I was rightly pointed to better alternatives for my use-case, so perhaps the learning will make the pain worth it?

I’m on the transition phase, but I think I have settled on CachyOS for my Desktop/Gaming Rig, and Debian for the NAS/Server. The logic behind the choices can be summed as:

I want my desktop on the as recent as possible because of games and drivers and performance. The less friction there is when it comes to games and playing with other people, the better.

For the NAS, though? Once it is setup, I plan to only touch it for upgrades and the less of a headache I can make those, the better. I am trying to do my best at writing things out so that when, in three years, I have to inevitably solve an issue or three, I remember whatever it is I did and why. More importantly, Debian promises to make upgrades of in-pattern software easy, and I will be throwing docker at everything else, so I am hoping I can just update the packages/distro on a schedule and minimize the maintenance burden.

We will see how it goes, though.

That is silly, though, since that’s something that each developer should be arranging for as part of obtaining the rights to use the music. Either the developer has the rights to use the music as part of the game (and thus sell the game with the music), and by extension Valve can be granted the limited right by the developer to transmit and/or perform the music (in trailers), or the developer does not have such rights and they should not be selling the game in the first place.

There is much to critique Steam for… This? This is nothing but a cash-grab, in my opinion.

Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.

Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don’t see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I’d be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.

* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that’s a social issue, not a technological issue.

Facebook tried the whole real name thing, and it did not do much to stop people from being cunts with impunity. We have been over this.

Never mind that you also have to account for people who would rather not be under their legal name for a variety of reasons, ranging from being victims of stalking and abuse, to artistic reasons, to simply preferring another name than the one their parents chose for them.

I am not sure Spain is the right country to make considering the laws they have and how they have been used (spanish wikipedia).

We have had similar reactions to things like tracking by websites and other such cases. And to a certain extent, I get it: sometimes you just want your tools to work and move on with your life. And if that means that something you don’t particularly use or immediately care about is worse, then that’s just the cost of doing business.

Specially around “NSFW”, a lot of people just don’t engage with it in “public”. They leave “NSFW” stuff to one on one conversations with people they are close with, if at all.

The thing is, I say “NSFW” in quotes because we have seen, repeatedly, that what might be NSFW is not just porn. It has been extended to things around identify, sexual health and so on. Never mind that “you don’t care about privacy” until you realize that you were in a data breach and you now have to worry about malicious people getting you into financial peril by abusing your identity. Or worse.

I’m not sure how you get people to care, though, before things get bad enough.

While I understand it is non-standard, I am currently stuck with having a two person server, so this would certainly impact me.

And why do I have a two person server? Because we like to share things about a variety of subjects, and you don’t really want to get a face full of porn in public transit, all because you got a notification about the noodles I had for dinner. It’s something that has not been solved elsewhere (unless you want to deal with group chats as a workaround, but that’s more of a hack than using a server for 1:1), so Discord was the better option here in that regard.

I love this! I love that it’s getting more attention and cross-platform support.

I just wish it wasn’t yet another launcher, and that all these companies got together to develop the one Open Source version everyone writes adapters for. Galaxy, at the time it was released, promised to be a way to have all of them… and then I discovered playnite (which worked better and has more options) and I cannot help but wonder if GOG’s efforts wouldn’t be better directed that way. Specially since my understanding is that the tool is undergoing a rewrite for cross-platform support.