trees dont ruin ANY human infrastructure. But the usual urban infrastructure isnt well thought out enough to exist around trees. But smarter urbanism is possible and in fact does exist.

obviously. you probably misread me.

encrypting matrix chats just protects one step of the process, your data may be leaking in various other ways.

the matrix room may be public, but when you choose someone to talk to via dm, at that point encryption matters. Of course, you shouldnt really trust that random person from the matrix room, but it being an encrypted chat reduces the risk somewhat.

i do backups of my home folder with Vorta, tha uses borg in the backend. I never tried restic, but borg is the first incremental backup utility i tried that doesnt increase the backup size when i move or rename a file. I was using backintime before to backup 500gb on a 750gb drive and if I moved 300gb to a different folder, it would try to copy those 300gb again onto the backup drive and fail for lack of storage, while borg handles it beautifully.

as an offsite solution, i use syncthing to mirror my files to a pc at my fathers house that is turned on just once in a while to save power and disc longevity.

VIvaldi is cool, but its not open source. If you worry about the trustworthiness of you browser, picking an open source one would be best IMO. Among the chromium-based, there are chromium itself, brave, …

not everything in a language is helpful.

what do you mean by “explicitly non gendered”?

yes, i wasnt advocating you should know any specific grammar. and that distinction is a good point. I meant that learning a prescriptive grammar decently is an important tool for reasoning. im not saying that descriptive grammars are bad, just defending that prescriptive grammars arent as useless as people seem to judge them.

yes, its very arbitrary, but these are sets of rules that you can use to structure your thoughts. language helps us reason. it doesnt matter that it is arbitrary. definitions in mathematics are very arbitrary, but they are a foundation we can lean on to reason about abstract ideas. Being arbitrary is not a testament of uselessness. Different languages, lead to different foundations for structuring ideas. But dominating at least one of those foundations can be very important cognitively.

i think that being used to properly structure sentences is important for reasoning well.

i agree that the effects of books and writing were probably beneficial to the brain, although they might have atrophied the memory and something else. But im not sure about tv, radio, internet and AI.

but are they wrong though?

in these groups theres often someone that just cannot install a new app because their phones storage is full and they can’t afford a better phone (or just don’t want to spend money on it). i wouldn’t insist with these people and just accept using whatsapp

be mindful of what info you want out of instagram before opening it. open it, get what you were looking for and get out. dont let it suck you in. turn off notifications. maybe install it in the work profile (if you use android) and leave the profile disabled when youre not using it.

i try to only open it once a week, like i do with my personal email. otherwise i get sucked into it when i procrastinate. but i admit i mostly rely on some friends finding out about local events.

you underestimate too much. trump is just a face, there are plenty of people working with him and planning all kinds of shit. any kid plans some trickeries while playing board games. what makes you think a political group is incapable of forethought?

“for people”

This doesn’t mean a lot for people who don’t know about people, or dont want to look it up.

why?

i struggle to see how this problem transfers to fake news regulation

transparency is precisely what can make regulations not be censorship, or I should hope so.

When a judge decides to convict someone of murder, we all know they might be wrong. The judge is not entitled to decide what objective reality is, he just decides how the judiciary system sees and treats the situation, as someone has to do it.

The same thing should be applied to fake news, which is sharing (dis)information with the false appearance of some verified news piece to influence people into making certain decisions.

Of course, there’s a big potential for censorship in how we treat fake news. So this treatment should follow clear objective criteria and be absolutely transparent.