Do you have any idea how disappointed I am that you’re not posting from a slrpnk.net account?!?!

I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.

I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.

It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐

I’m never gonna financially emotionally recover from this!

Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.

I don’t know why Techdirt is so concerned about the so-called “COVID denialism.” They call it themselves when they suggest it might be mocking. Judge Walker was an Obama appointee and has been remarkably sane in his judicial career, including on COVID. He is clearly trolling the state’s attorney at several points throughout, letting their previous positions hoist them on their own petard. I particularly like the point he raises about how Florida handles parental rights:

THE COURT: Well, we’ve empowered parents to control what books our kids read in school. Why is it far-fetched to empower parents and think they know best for their individual children about who they are engaging with socially on social media platforms?

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, parents certainly have a role, but the key is these controls. And the controls have proven ineffective. So these platforms —

THE COURT: You are taking the control away. Because if I’ve got a 13-year-old child and I want him to — does my kid get to sign up if I want him to be able to sign up and have an account in a social media platform on Facebook?

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: You can register for an account and a kid can use your account, and you can monitor them. THE COURT: I don’t want to monitor them. Just like I want them to read the book about the two penguins raising an egg together. The two male penguins raising an egg together. I don’t want to sign up on my account. I want to have my own Facebook account. I want my kid — you’ve taken that choice away from me; right?

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: I just think it’s an irrelevant issue because their — I mean, the degree of control that parents have is irrelevant. What’s —

THE COURT: The point, Counsel — and I don’t think it’s particularly far-fetched — is the State of Florida picks and chooses when they want the parents to be making the decision. And when it suits their purposes, they do; and when it doesn’t, they don’t.

But I’ve got it. Fair enough.

It’s not that there’s no argument against letting children on social media. There are strong arguments, but the science is not mature maybe never will be, and the experiences parents permit their children to have can vary wildly. The point is that under the US system, you can’t make laws that limit free speech and private family behavior based on “this is probably not a great idea,” and if you can, then social conservatives will not always like where that leads.

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

I mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.

I don’t see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).

That’s the other galling side of this. It’s just so fucking dumb even as a way to “do” capitalism. Yes, theoretically one of the options in the face of tariffs is that an exporter can choose to eat the cost and both the importer and its country “win,” but that presupposes a market with few buyers and exporters with big enough profit margins that they can eat the cost. In reality of course, the exporter will instantly seek out other customers and if none can be found, they might eat some of the costs, but also pivoting their production to (previously) less profitable goods now makes much more sense because of the artificial barrier, and in the extreme case simply shutting down and liquidating assets is better than losing money on every sale. Then of course there are retaliatory tariffs, which work much better than the initial ones because they are targeted and leave the remainder of the global market available to country levying them.

Damning with faint praise, but you’re not wrong. No billionaire getting stuck-in like Musk is doing it to make the world a better place for anyone else, and no one except autocrats and accelerationist wackos should be pleased with how things have changed in the last 6 months.

I have no hope for USA anymore. It’s gone steadily from bad to worse, and it seems like Americans never learn, ans especially like the Democrats never learn. Because they’ve done absolutely NOTHING to strengthen checks and balances or to strengthen democracy in USA.

This is a fair criticism, and is looking like a much bigger mistake than it seemed initially, and I think it’s telling the one single thing Obama spent the political capital on to get properly enshrined into statue is the one bit of his legacy that Trump is having the hardest time undoing. Constitutionally, we have fucked ourselves by thinking we could run the largest economy in the world on the legal equivalent of a “plan of a plan,” worshipping said high-level outline like it was holy writ, and then making surprise-pikachu face when a bad actor who’s not concerned about long-term stability starts shoving dynamite into its many cracks (pardon the mixed metaphor).

I hope you’re wrong, but I am not confident enough that you are to argue the point.

Yup. Whoever is next, and hopefully that will be in January 2029 if not earlier, is not going to have anything like the same influence that previous presidents have had. They will be able to deescalate short-term issues and generally provide a lull in the storm, but Trump has exposed the fragility of US power, and his base proves that America is an unreliable partner, so getting anything significant done that might cross administrations is going to be so much harder. Even if the next president is not insane and is without any above-average level of evil (neither is guaranteed), then that only helps temporarily. Hell, even if there’s some sea change in the electorate that makes democratic allies more optimistic, recovering from Trump 2 is going to mean the US looks inward for a time and there will be, if not a power vacuum, a serious low-pressure system that draws in disturbances.

Now, I’m not sad about the decline of American hegemony per se, but this is very much a “not like this” moment, and a slower unwinding would be better for stability. Our best case scenario here is that our allies understand the conflict inherent in the American ethos and work with us where practicable but also pursue the “strategic independence” we’ve been hearing about. I hope it’s Europe that steps up and reasserts itself, because barring a very unlikely leveling of the international order, your other options are China bulldozing the world for the financial benefit of the party, or Putin throwing bodies (both at enemies and out of windows), cutting off fossil fuels, and threatening nuclear war every time he doesn’t get his way.

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.

I mean at this point, Trump’s preferred end state is basically China except stupid and unpredictable.

They see such an obvious opportunity for increasing their soft power that they’re saying things here that might actually slow down a move towards a world where taking Taiwan by force is acceptable.

I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.

I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.

You say “looming data apocalypse.”

I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”

I poked around a few other articles. A few are identical. Most are slight variations. Few are as different as these two. My guess would be that the original submission from the author or initial editor locks in a headline for the tab/title bar, but then the CMS lets them edit what appears in the main body of the webpage.

I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.

There are buckling spring Model M and M2 keyboards that will use PS/2 or the easily converted AT. Also look for Focus boards (Alps white) or various Cherry boards (usually Cherry black) with either of those connectors. Hell, I’ve been trying to offload a Tai Hao with Alps clones and an AT plug for a while now.

Quality of boards takes a nose dive once they start coming with “Win” keys, but you can find decent ones even with that. Gotta be more careful if you want anything other than a run of the mill rubber dome though.

If you want new, you could try to contact Unicomp at pckeyboard.com, they may still have some beige ones in the warehouse, and they already offer special orders for other stuff, so at a minimum they won’t think you’re crazy for asking.

Mouse is a little harder, as the technology is legitimately much better now. Still, both Microsoft and Logitech sold a few native PS/2 mice with three buttons and a scroll wheel; I guess it’s possible that some of the ones that come with their own USB to PS2 converters would work fine even when re-converted back, but I’m not sure. If you get a ball mouse, remember to clean the crud-rings out from time to time.

I had a “Diamond Mako,” aka a Psion Revo Plus. Neat device, but I just wasn’t “on the go” enough to really need it. It was slightly smaller than the 5, IIRC, and it definitely wasn’t as good for typing as even a Netbook (another good candidate for a “writerDeck” btw), but it was very slick, and the word processor in particular I remember being very good. IIRC it had NiCAD or NiMH AAA batteries hard-wired into it.