It’s a big question and I don’t think I can give an answer that will cover everything. A lot of it will depend on what they want to do, too. As long as we can have a real discussion about things beforehand, I don’t think there are many technologies or services that I would flat-out ban.

I’ve realized lately that a lot of the problems I have with how society at large uses technology is it’s not deliberate/intentional or thoughtful. I think if you’re going to buy a smartphone, or download an app, and click “Accept” on all the permissions, you should at least have a goal in mind before you use it. What specifically are you intending to accomplish with it? If it’s to stay in touch with your friend, that’s fine, just have that goal in mind when you’re using it. If it’s to follow the goings-on of your favourite celebrity, okay, as long as that’s your intention. But I think too often, people buy something or download and install something just because of FOMO or without any idea or understanding of what it’s going to do. It puts you in a passive position of allowing a large tech company to decide your use and your experience for you, and that might not be what’s best for you. That kind of passive exploratory attitude I think worked well up until the introduction of “dark patterns”, but it’s a bit dangerous now.

The other major thing is I want is to introduce them to community-developed technology first. Before they get to the point where they have to decide if they want to install Instagram, I think they should have experienced the Fediverse first, that kind of thing. I think they should understand that there is still technology out there which is completely good (by which I mean free/open source software and community services are sometimes useless, sometimes buggy, sometimes lacking in features, sometimes cumbersome to use, but they’re never antagonistic or evil or deceptive). At the very least they should know all of what kind of technology is out there for them.

Ideally I would also like them to understand how things work. My oldest is 4 now and can read a little bit. Not complete sentences or even long words, but enough that I know it’s not going to be too many more months before she’s capable of reading properly, and maybe typing, and maybe even some programming. A fair amount of software depends upon ignorance (remember when SnapChat claimed your pictures/videos “disappeared”?) and I think understanding of technology can help navigate bullshit a lot easier. But, a lot of that will depend on her and what interests her…

Nobody is forcing you.

That is not really true, I mean depending on your definition of “forcing”. Okay, it’s true, nobody is holding a gun to your head.

But depending on where you live, it may be impossible to use a taxi. It would be impossible to work at a lot of workplaces. I work at a university where thankfully faculty are not required to own a smartphone, but students are (if you do not check in for attendance with the university’s app, you automatically fail the course). Soon here it might be impossible to have a bank account without a smartphone app. Any event that requires tickets, forget about it. We’re also getting closer to it being a requirement to see a doctor (some doctor’s offices here already do not allow any patients that haven’t installed their app, and the number is growing).

There’s a lot of soft pressure, too. The supermarket by us doesn’t require you to install their app. You can pay cash without a smartphone…if you’re willing to pay 2x the usual amount for groceries (which are already quite expensive).

I agree with your assessment. I have a lot to say about this, and I’m glad to have found this article, as I’ve been having some serious inner turmoil about this lately, and this makes me feel a bit like I’m not totally alone or crazy. (But also I can’t find a link to the original survey, which makes it hard to trust, as I can’t find any description of the methodology or the exact wording of the questions)

I’m an older Millenial (sometimes consider Gen X, depending on the terminology used) with young kids. It’s true that I would rather have them brought up 30 years ago than today. Sometimes when I see posts about parents letting their young kids (like let’s say 10) have their own smartphone and then complain about, people get snarky like “You’re the parent. If you don’t like it, just take their smartphone away.”

But it is a tightrope to walk. I don’t want them expose them something like Instagram, which gives them eating disorders, depression, anxiety, chips away at their sense of privacy, etc. But I also don’t want them to be “the weird kid” who can’t relate to any of their peers. When I was growing up, I remember "the weird kid"s who weren’t allowed to watch TV, weren’t to play video games, etc. I can recognize that in many ways they probably benefited from not sitting in front of the TV for hours each day, but I can also recognize they probably didn’t benefit from not being able to talk to any of the rest of us about the latest episode of Fresh Prince. I do see it as a balancing act between teaching them that there’s a lot about their generation that sucks, but also letting them experience enough of it to see for themselves, and relate to the other kids around them.

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Don’t come to Korea. Every banking transaction requires you to punch in your PIN at least twice with a randomized numpad. Well actually it’s a 4x3 numpad with 2 spaces randomly inserted into it.

He’s not completely wrong with the powermod=landed gentry analogy (and the implied spez=king analogy, for that matter). People have been (weakly) protesting and trying (not very successfully) to leave over the powermod situation for years, and it’s true that the powermods aren’t friends of ours.

But he seems to be suggesting that the protests are just the actions of the powermods, as if other users (and smaller mods) aren’t also leaving. I think he’s going to be disappointed when he discovers that the peasantry are also upset. They just don’t have has his ear because he’s so removed from them, so all he hears are the powermods.

This is what I’m expecting. A year from now someone will mention “reddit” to me and I’ll be like “that’s still around?” and I’ll check it out and it’s just turned into TikTok challenges.

Did you watch the video? YouTube Premium lets you watch a video offline if you’re online. If you’ve been offline for 3 days, however, you cannot watch any videos offline, which makes the usage of the word “offline” a little strange.

When you power on a computer, before any software (any operating system) has a chance to run, there’s “firmware” (kind of similar to software, except stored directly in the motherboard) that has to get things going (called “Platform Initialization”). Generally the two jobs of the Platform Initialization firmware: (1) to detect (and maybe initialize) some hardware; and (2) to find the operating system and boot the operating system.

We have a standard interface for #2, which is called UEFI. But for #1, it’s always been sort of a mysterious black box. It necessarily has to be different for every chipset/every motherboard. Manufacturers never really saw much reason to open source it. The major community-driven open source project at doing #1 is called “coreboot”. Due to the fact that it requires a new implementation for every chipset/motherboard and they are generally not documented (and may require some reverse-engineering of the hardware), coreboot has very very limited support.

So what AMD is open sourcing here is a collection of 3 C libraries which they will be using in all of their firmware, going forward. These libraries are not chipset/motherboard-specific (you still need custom code for each motherboard) and do not implement UEFI (you would still need to implement UEFI/bootloader on top of it), but they’re helper functions that do a lot of what’s needed to implement firmware. I just took a cursory look through the source code, but I saw a lot of code in there for detecting RAM DIMMs (how much RAM, what kind of RAM, etc.), which is useful code. (Edit: I just read through the Wikipedia article on coreboot and it says “The most difficult hardware that coreboot initializes is the DRAM controllers and DRAM. In some cases, technical documentation on this subject is NDA restricted or unavailable.”. So if they can make use of AMD openSIL’s DRAM code, that could be a very big win!!)

The fact that AMD is going to use this in their own firmware, and also make it available for coreboot under an MIT licence, means that coreboot may* have a much easier time in the future supporting AMD motherboards.

* we will see

Yeah I think it’s a good option for a lot of people.

As a counterpoint, I recommend watching Louis Rossman’s take on why he recommends people pirate instead of paying for YouTube Premium. His general philosophy on things is that you should pay for things unless you’re getting an inferior service to the pirates. In this case of YouTube Premium, he considers it restrictive enough (won’t let him watch videos offline) that he cancelled his subscription and now recommends piracy.

Facebook did too! Facebook Chat was one of the best XMPP servers around, actually, in terms of client support.

Sadly most people CAN’T connect through dial-up, even if both parties have all the equipment. A lot of telcos have redone their entire network in VoIP stuff (with heavy compression) which makes it hard to keep a connection even at 300.

telnet or ssh (usually telnet)

If you’re connecting from a modern computer, you just get a telnet client that does the appropriate code pages/ANSI/zmodem/etc. If you’re connecting from a real vintage computer, you get a little dongle that pretends to be a modem (and often accepts AT commands, including fake phone numbers), but secretly connects to WiFi and relays through a telnet connection.

Some BBSes do still have landlines, and there’s the occasional ham radio BBS, but 99.999% of it is through IP-based telnet or ssh these days.

Slashdot -> kuro5hin -> reddit -> Lemmy for me.

Any old k5ers on here?

I hate when people use passive voice in these things. It’s such a slimy way to try and avoid responsibility.

“We have blocked you from using a mobile browser.” is the active voice. It includes a subject (“we”) and a verb (“blocked”). It says that someone made a decision, executed that decision, and is responsible.

"It looks like … “, " … is currently unavailable” is so fucking weaselly and irresponsible. You are 100% a complete piece of shit if you ever say something like that. You are not responsible enough to handle a Wendy’s drive-through order, let alone a large organization.

That is a good point actually! That means they would have the freedom to move over to a new platform.

Are you thinking of it as a centralized replacement to YouTube? If you’re centralized, yeah, you probably need a data centre the size of Malta. There are decentralized alternatives (like PeerTube) where the cost is also distributed. If you’re using PeerTube, you literally can “just throw it on a cheap VPS”, and lots of people do, with no problems.

I think the real reason decentralized video isn’t going to catch on is because video (and YouTube in particular) has not been a community thing for many years now. There are very few YouTubers who make videos to build a community or connect to a community. YouTubers are on there for money, and there’s really no alternative that can both host the videos and pay out big cheques to content creators.

I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I’d be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren’t the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.

If I remember my Lemmy history right (someone correct me)…

In the early days of Lemmy, everyone was on one instance (lemmy.ml). The founding Lemmy developers (and their friends, I guess) were tankies. At some point they decided to make Lemmy more attractive to the general population, and make the flagship lemmy.ml less overtly Marxist-Leninist/offputting. So they split lemmy.ml into 2: lemmy.ml for non-commie stuff, and lemmygrad.ml for commie stuff. Since the bulk of Lemmy users in the early days were still tankies (or their friends), they were still generally using both instances very heavily.

The day that lemmygrad.ml ceases to be the #2 instance and becomes just another niche-interest instance is the day we can say Lemmy has truly become mainstream, I think.