Mint is a great OS. I love its simplicty.

I love this approach.

Nit: “If you can find prior art that describes such a system before June 13, 2013, you could be a winner.” … 2013 is a typo I’m guessing?

I want to say this kindly–perhaps you’re joking or part joking when you say “people suck in general”–but I wonder if this is more of a reflection of your outlook than people in general. I mean, we’re internet strangers so I’m not exactly insulted by being one of the people out here who suck in general, but I’d like to think that if we crossed the chasm, and actually got to know each other, we’d see humanity and goodness in each other (without diminishing the reality of individual weaknesses, poor skills, and bad habits).

Cool, let’s keep each other posted. You keep me off Reddit, and I’ll tell you what I hear from Nirav :)

Fedora seriously impressed me when I tried it out. It was by far the most polished and stable OS I’d seen after a string of distrohopping beauties-lacking-substance for daily driving. Good choice!

I’m sorry for your suffering and heartache. I wish you the best.

I’ve been running Pop!_OS 22.04 and more recently the 24.04 build with the new (alpha) Cosmic Desktop Environment. It’s been wonderful to use–solid hardware, solid OS. For 3 years I built a company called Relm (a 3D world with video and audio, similar to gather town) and failed at the business, but it was the 13" Framework laptop that gave me a sense of freedom, ownership, and confidence that I could replace parts if needed, as I built the business and codebase.

Great questions! I hope I can jump in without being too short.

I wonder if something like debatemap.app or kialo-edu.com would offer a better UX (“user experience”) than Lemmy. I’ve also heard that substack.com has done a good job of attracting high-quality discussion (but I worry, what’s stopping them from traveling down the enshittification path like all the rest?)

OTOH, I think online discussion itself has some weaknesses that can’t be easily overcome–perhaps in-person, local discussion is (usually/almost always?) better. For example, one study indicates that engaging in political discourse with people online leads to an “uncivil comment rate” of 10%, while a “mixed political / non-political” discourse has a lower uncivil comment rate [1].

Personally, I find it to be generally true that I need to trust someone in one or more non-controversial areas of life before I take their controversial (to me) opinions seriously. Simple time and familiarity also helps.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.741605/full

This is almost completely true, but I would add the caveat that PWAs (progressive web apps) are not as easy to discover and less familiar to install as an app in an app/play store. It might also be because it’s in Apple and Google’s best interest to not streamline that. But it’s still an obstacle nevertheless.

What would a good incentive structure look like? For example, would working with public school districts and being paid by them to ensure safe learning experiences count? Or are you thinking of something else?

I wonder if some of our intelligence is artificial. Being able to drive directly to any destination, for example, with a simple cell-phone lookup. Reading lifetimes worth of experience in books that doesn’t naturally come at birth. Learning incredibly complex languages that are inherited not by genes, but by environment–and, depending on the language, being able to distinguish different colors.

It’s still in the todo list: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-launcher/issues/135

A coffee bean is a seed from the Coffea plant and the source for coffee. It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit. This fruit is often referred to as a coffee cherry, and like the cherry, it is a fruit with a pit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_bean

I appreciate the candid analysis, but perhaps “nothing to see here” (my paraphrase) is only one part of the story. The other part is that there is genuine innovation and new things within reach that were not possible before. For example, personalized learning–the dream of giving a tutor to each child, so we can overcome Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem–is far more likely with LLMs in the picture than before. It isn’t a panacea, but it is certainly more useful than cryptocurrency kept promising to be IMO.

Is human intelligence artificial? #philosophy

Have you ever heard the story of the snake?

One evening, a man walks along a dimly lit path. He suddenly halts, his heart pounding with fear. Before him, on the ground, lies what appears to be a venomous snake. He freezes, paralyzed with dread. Only when a friend comes by with a lantern does the true nature of the object come to light: it is merely a piece of rope.

I learned this story from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist author. He would indicate with stories like this that our perceptions shape our reality. Often, we react out of fear and misunderstanding, seeing snakes where there are none. He said that mindfulness and deeper understanding can act like the lantern, illuminating the true nature of our experiences.

You’re not alone in feeling like you bear the weight alone. I mean, with all you’re doing, you’re basically a church-on-wheels here. And I say that both as a compliment and as a reflection of our situation as a society–we need each other, we need neighbors, community, and we need help sometimes. And many people are feeling the “it’s too much to do alone” conclusion. I don’t think we were meant to be this way. I’ve been reading Seth Kaplan’s “Fragile Neighborhoods” recently and I feel like my eyes are open to the deep loss in social capital or “collective efficacy” that previous generations had. We’re in a period of innovating on new social structures. It’s tough. Keep going. Play the long game, make friends and neighbors, and don’t forget you’re just human too. We need each other.

Aegis on Android is also very nice (and open source).

Working development system. I got quite far, but after so much work, became very frustrated when a VSCode plugin wouldn’t work properly because it needed (and assumed) read/write access. I didn’t want to have to manage and think about every little plugin I experimented with at the OS level.