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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

    It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

    Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

    A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.




  • tiramichu@lemm.eetoBooks@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    I can easily see both sides on this one.

    In one way I have little sympathy. It’s the same as parents complaining after they show their child a violent anime, that it was a ‘cartoon’ and so it must be for children - having made that snap judgement without investigating the contents in the slightest.

    On the other hand, as the article rightly suggests, there are established conventions in the publishing industry and this book defied them.

    They are conventions I personally kinda hate, because they are the reason every Crime paperback looks the same as each other, and every Sci-Fi book is instantly recognisable as that genre on the shelves. But the conventions do exist.

    In mass-market publishing terms, sparkly happy cartoon = children.

    The publisher and author totally knew what they were doing here and they did it anyway. It’s wilfully misleading.

    Whether established standards should be enough to absolve a parent of the responsibility to understand what they are giving to their child, though, you decide.





  • This is great, honestly.

    If you go back to antiquity, education was about philosophy. It was about learning how to observe, and think critically, and see the world for what it is.

    And then in modern times, education became about memorisation - learning facts and figures and how to do this and that. And that way of teaching and learning just doesn’t fit any longer with what our digital age has become.

    In my opinion, we are heavily overdue for a revamp of what education should be, and what skills are most important to society in this post-truth world. Critical thinking is an important foundation to real knowledge that we don’t teach enough.





  • It’s such a painful thing, and the scary truth is that it can happen to anyone.

    I’m sure we’ve all experienced instances of this, in some smaller and insignificant way.

    You take a packed lunch to work. Every day for five years you’ve taken a lunch to work, without fail. Its part of your routine, you don’t even have to think about it. Get your wallet, get your keys, lunch out the fridge and into your bag, out the door.

    Then one day you open your bag at lunch-time, and it’s not there. Why isn’t it there, you think? You remember putting it there like always, but then the memories of different days are all the same as each other, and it just blurs into one.

    And then you remember. Just as you picked up your wallet and keys, your phone rang. And it’s your Dad, who says he just had someone call to say he needs to transfer money to keep it safe, and you’re telling him no no no Dad it’s just a scam, don’t transfer anything! And you have to go or you’ll miss the bus, and did I get my lunch, yes yes I put it in my bag like always.

    But you didn’t put it in your bag. Its still sitting in the fridge at home.

    And obviously a lunch is not a baby. But the principle is the same. That frightening realisation that your own brain didn’t merely forget, but actually lied to you about what really happened that morning is the same.

    And it could have been a baby instead.

    Scary.



  • Google absolutely made a calculated decision when they decided to allow device manufacturers to fork AOSP and introduce closed-source modifications. If it wasn’t for that, I can’t imagine OEMs would have wanted to get on board, and so we wouldn’t have seen the huge adoption that happened, and Android might have become just another failed operating system.

    I do truly wish for a fully open-source “Linux on the phone” type experience, but what always kills that is apps, because companies just don’t make them unless the market share is there. Even Microsoft had to pull out after pumping so much money into Windows phone, and I think most of the reason was because they couldn’t incentivise developers to make apps enough.

    So I’m glad at least I can run Calyx, and have just a tiny bit more freedom while still keeping the apps I need, even if it’s nowhere near perfect.