Last year I set out with the vague goal to improve my relationship to food and honestly had a lot of success.

This year I'm choosing another vague goal which is to improve my relationship with leisure time / entertainment. Hoping to take on reading more, vegging less, and trying to do more artistic endeavors etc. basically trying to move towards digital minimalism.

Getting of reddit about 2 months ago was tough but now I don't miss it much at all and I get on Lemmy for maybe .5 hours a day. I switched to graphene and my Google stuff is in another user profile so no more mobile email checking. I'm shooting for more of that this year.

Fourth most visited site in the world.. he wants to install ads on it and own it.

I have a weird optimism that grassroots tech might make a comeback after everything enshitifies. I got on here 6 months ago and it was so refreshing.

I really wish we had politicians with integrity. I think I could grab a random person off the street and have better odds of them being a good person.

Would love to get out of the US with my partner but unfortunately as Americans nobody wants us

I'm not sure that vaping inside is better than smoking outside. You're right about it being more pleasant and likely right about it being healthier, do you know of any research comparing second hand smoke on clothes to second hand vape (comparing smoking outside to vaping inside)

I did, not sure it made it easier though. It took away two negatives for smoking for me, it didn't smell bad to others and I could smoke inside.

If anything it made it harder to quit, but they're supposedly much better for you

What do you think would help overcome that obstacle to unionization?

On a bright note I'm optimistic that ai bloated garbage and advertising will eventually push a critical mass of people to using decentralized and open source tools, or possibly that non-profits and co-ops will start to spring up to manage more ethical services that could potentially replace the mainstream ones.

When you're not trying to make some dude disgustingly richer, you don't need a ton of advertising (imo).

I also think tech workers should unionize. On a darker note, I think outsourcing/offshoring post-covid is going to kill any unions viability. You need bargaining power (withhold your labor) and I'm not sure that will exist for this trade because of how easy it will be to find workers.

I've ran some college hw through 4o just to see and it's remarkably good at generating proofs for math and algorithms. Sometimes it's not quite right but usually on the right track to get started.

In some of the busier classes I'm almost certain students do this because my hw grades would be lower than the mean and my exam grades would be well above the mean.

I'm from US and I re-read "developing countries like us or India" like 3 times and then I realized that you're absolutely right.

How lazy cryptographers do ai

I really got swept up in the stop trump fever the last 5 years and really forgot about this. For some reason I was convinced they were the good guys.

What do you think can realistically be done, or will likely happen

I'm about to be one of those grads, career changing in my early thirties. Whoops. Got into Berkeley CS so hopefully that carries my foot into a door somewhere

I think this is meant to highlight how expensive it is to be poor, not to serve as financial advice for purchases.

I completely agree with you that it's unhelpful as financial advice but I think the idea behind it is to point out that because poverty forces people to buy substandard products or not products in bulk, it ends up more expensive in the long run

Yeah for sure. You could get an all in one inverter battery bank, but I prefer piecemeal systems because of repairability/replacing parts/upgrading parts.

Basically you'd get a battery, when I was shopping around I found eg4 or gyll batteries to be the cheapest. Small Texas company. That could have changed. Some ppl make their own or use them from a car, but soldering plus making a management system seemed like more than I wanted to deal with.

You need a way to charge the battery (panels etc) and also a way to get the power into the battery safely and efficiently (charge controller).

And then you need a way to get energy out of the battery to your apploances. You can get DC appliances that match your battery voltage or get an inverter.

For all of those parts you need to run some simple calculations for efficiency and compatibility and use case (how big of a system etc), as well as some fuses and possibly lightning arrestors and grounding.

Totally doable and a good bit of fun

I honestly don't know enough about it but I'm sure there's a way, maybe get isp's to flag traffic going to known vpn servers and fine them if they connect users or something like that?

Why, is it impossible or difficult to enforce?

Don't want them to ban vpns

Cool so it actually sucks, it's not my incompetence

I use discord but i can't stand it as a platform for discussion. Forums, even reddit, seem so superior to me as a format for discussion and storing information. Maybe I haven't figured out discord yet