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Cake day: April 28th, 2023

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  • This article strikes at a very salient set of points about smartphones and social media. As someone that specifically tries to only use federated social media because it avoids some of these dark patterns, I certainly agree with. I also use my smartphone without any notifications turned on, ever.

    Unfortunately the author has a few paragraphs that miss the mark and strike me as coming from more of a centrist or right-wing “kids these days are too soft” which feels very off-base and disconnected from the issue. For example:

    This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.”

    The scare quotes around microagressions, a genuine issue faced my marginalized communities, is really uncomfortable and gives an unfortunate perspective on some of where this author is coming from.

    Putting that aside, I really do feel like most of what is said here is on point. Reducing social media use is imperative. Designing smartphone UX that doesn’t shove notifications at you would also be a good idea. Getting younger people involved in communities and forming friendships is incredibly important.





  • I acquired my 3DS before the first price drop and unfortunately I never really appreciated it while I had it. It was the first place I played Ocarina of Time, which was a really fantastic experience that I was probably too young to really appreciate at the time. I never got around to playing A Link Between Worlds unfortunately. Beyond that my other favourite was Mario Kart 7. There are a lot of games that I now wish I had picked up but didn’t get a chance to.

    The 3DS is also really interesting as it’s currently the last Nintendo handheld that can fit in a pocket. That era of portable consoles has largely passed out of favour (this is why I’ve started collecting PSP Go consoles). A lot of the best 3DS games have been somewhat overshadowed by the Switch now. I feel like its game library may be remembered similarly to the Game Boy Advance, more iterating on older franchises rather than having its own hugely impressive identity.




  • I will say unlike Reddit I find the best experience on here tends to be sorting posts by newest comments so that way discussion pushes things to the front of my page. There’s still too little content for sorting things by Top in various different communities to be worth the time. I suppose this turns it into more of an old-school forum homepage in a way.







  • Linux uses the File System Hierarchy which Windows does not use. How do I keep my system organized while keeping to the FSH.
    Altogether it’s actually not that different from Windows, it’s just shuffled around a bit. You’ll have your /home/yourusername/ folder, which is where you’ll put most of your files. If you have more than one hard drive in your machine you can mount it under /mnt/ and then store the files on it as you would normally. You don’t have to worry about where your programs are stored (your package manager will take care of that for you).

    re: the command line
    For the most part I agree, but I also think it’s a solved problem. A linux install with Gnome is on par with Mac OS when it comes to user friendliness, with no need to ever look at a terminal in order to do things. The UX here is nearly a solved issue. However I also feel that “growth” or “mainstream success” is no longer something I feel like I need linux to achieve. When I started using Linux in 2009 half of the programs I tried were pale copies of proprietary software. WINE barely worked. Game support was almost non-existant. WiFi drivers were genuinely almost always broken. Flash forward fifteen years and all of these issues are fixed. Using Linux on a day to day basis makes me happy, I no longer feel like I’m missing out on anything by using it. That is such an incredible leap to take. The key takeaway is that all of these problems were solved without Linux becoming “mainstream”. It and the community around it have just kept moving along and making it better over time. It’s been lovely to watch it grow like that. A fully-featured and powerful terminal is just one part of this fantastic, open computing environment that I love.

    As an additional note to this, I do think that Linux is poised to really take off among one particular demographic: PC gamers that build their own machines and can now finally see a good alternative to forking over $150 to Microsoft for their OS. The Steam Deck has definitely turned heads here. I don’t think the legions of people buying laptops to take notes during university lectures and browse Facebook (the “20 wpm typers” out there) will be very interested in Linux machines no matter what we do, so let’s focus the energy where it counts.