I think there are ways to impose child safety locks, as it were, on a phone’s access to the internet? Like a curfew or “max hours in a day” limit. I feel like that would make more sense than not giving a kid a phone.

And there are also tricks one can apply to circunvent some of that attention-grabby design, like putting the phone in grayscale mode.

Also, unlike cigarettes, smartphones serve many purposes, and 99.999% of people (in countries where they are ubiquitous) will need to own one at some point. I think it may be better to actively teach a child how to handle the information-overload, attention grabbing tricks, misinformation, and so on of the internet, rather than leaving them to just figure it out for themselves later on.

My concerns with denying children a smartphone altogether include:

• Phones are an essential safety device, and smartphones are better at this than dumb phones because of things like GPS and maps navigation (especially for kids who get lost easily), clear emergency alerts (e.g. “expect a tsubami in 3 minutes”, or “there is an active shooter currently around the grocery store at x and y street”), the ability to store easily accessible information for first responders in the phone (which can sometimes also be auto-shared when you make a 911 call), and the ability to easily and silently text 911 if they find themselves in a situation where calling is dangerous.

• Phones and social media are now an integral part of most kids’ social lives. If a kid doesn’t have a smartphone and can’t join in on real time group chats, with the ability to see the things their peers share in that chat, or if they don’t have video chat access, they’ll be cut off from a lot of other kids and their social life will suffer for it.

And access to social media is especially important for kids who need to find support they can’t find easily irl, like for queer or neurodivergent kids who benefit from talking to others like them on the internet - even if they’re lucky and their parents are supportive, it’s not the same as finding a peer support group. For similar reasons, access to digital library collections can be a big deal. Granted, some of this would be covered if they have access to the internet on a laptop or desktop, but at that point they’d have internet access anyway so they might as well have the phone too.

• Phones are more and more often required for basic utilitarian access, too. Sometimes taking the city bus requires a phone because you can’t pay cash anymore. Sometimes the laundry machine doesn’t take coins, only app or internet payment. Sometimes the menu at a restaurant is just a QR code that tells you to look at their website. It sucks but it’s only getting more this way.

I’m not advocating for giving smartphones to literal toddlers, but beyond a certain (fairly low) age I think at this point the risks of giving a kid a smartphone are outweighed by the risks of them not having one.

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Weird. You don’t have any potentially problematic extensions installed?

You could also try Firefox Nightly, though I suspect it may not be better for you if the regular one is broken.

I agree it’s murky. Though I’d like to note that when you shift hateful ideologues to dark corners of the internet, that also means making space in the main forums for people who would otherwise be forced out by the aforementioned ideologues - women, trans folks, BIPOC folks, anyone who would like to discuss xyz topic but not at the cost of the distress that results from sharing a space with hateful actors.

When the worst of the internet is given free reign to run rampant, it has a tendency to take over the space entirely with hate speech because everything and everyone else leaves instead of putting up with abuse, and those who do stay get stuck having the same, rock bottom level conversations (e.g. those in which the targets of the hate are asked to justify their existence or presence or right to have opinions repeatedly) over and over with people who aren’t really interested in intellectual discussions or solving actual problems or making art that isn’t about hatred.

But yeah, as with anything involving large groups of people, these things get complicated and can be unpredictable.

People keep saying it’s dead to them but the company’s own statements seem a lot more optimistic, imo. I think they’re just refocusing, and dumping a lot of the extraneous “let’s be an everything platform” features the userbase didn’t want anyway. Tumblr isn’t a giant cash so far as I know, but its userbase is sizable and stable, and recently grown since reddit and twitter took a tumble.

As a platform, there’s a lot to recommend it, I think. It’s one of those situations where the experience you get out of it depends on how you curate it. So like, you can go down fandom rabbitholes, or webcomic rabbitholes, or you can entirely ignore that and just subscribe to ocean science blogs, or to photography blogs, or so on. There can be drama in some parts, but that can also be entirely avoided in your feed if that’s your preference. I like it a lot better these days than I did like 5-10 years ago.

This article is about the “AI chips” Nvidia makes that undergird the major cloud services though, not the cloud services themselves. So I think it’s a hardware issue, more akin to a monopoly of GPU or CPU markets? Especially since Nvidia’s competitors in most spaces seem to be limited to AMD and sometimes Intel.

I can certainly imagine Nvidia having anticompetitive practices with their hardware and/or the software for their hardware, as they have done so many times with GPUs, though this particular article really doesn’t go into any detail.

A lot of people in rural areas find themselves in situations like being 10 minutes from a walmart and an hour from any other option. So then anything besides walmart costs gas and time, on top of the product cost difference to begin with.

Nobody wants to drive extra after 8 hours of shitty minimum wage work and/or taking care of children.

Not like other grocery stores are any good for workers, either.

RedReader still works. If you’re gonna look at reddit, I recommend it. You can even turn off all the interaction buttons, so it’s like a “look, don’t touch” museum.

I uninstalled it though. Reddit is in too terrible a state to bother with any longer, except sometimes as a search result, imo.

Edit: I’m speaking of android though. Idk if redreader has an ios version or not.

I also wonder if they controlled for the fact younger people are online more often in the first place.

Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won’t even have to persue because most people can’t afford to fight it.

Even companies often can’t afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it’s bonkers) but couldn’t afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.

It’s kinda wild that Paint apparently made it all the way to 2023 without supporting layers.

Your link doesn’t seem to support your statement. Do you mean the part that advocates “turn on by default” tools to amplify factual information over disinformation? Because “turn on by default” implies an off switch.

It’s not possible for search engines to make zero decisions about what to prioritize in results, anyway. How would you prefer they sort the absurd quantity of results? Especially now SEO listicles try to drown everything else out?

If it’s otherwise Chrome or bust, I’d honestly suggest considering Edge. It’s not like internet explorer used to be. It’s also not anywhere near as good for privacy as vivaldi or firefox, but it might be better than chrome - I don’t really know. But some people really like it now.

If you’re some who’s tried firefox in the past already, I’ll note it’s change quite a bit over the years. I used to dislike it but I like it now (on desktop).

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You make a good point in general, but this particular case is about preventing non-scientologists from treating the ‘religious object’ devices how they will, not about the scientologists being at all restricted in their own handling of the objects (as would be comparable to illegal drugs or animal sacrifice used in religious rituals).

This case in particular is comparable to requesting that the government outlaw the modification or destruction of the Bible or Qoran, even by people who own their own copy of a religious text. It would require non-adherants to a religion to treat that religion’s objects as sacred and to do so in the specific manner prescribed by that religion. This is contrary to precedent and law established by cases against people who’ve burnt their own personal copies of the bible, or created derivative works making fun of the bible, and so on.

Do you have an alternative that isn’t google? Because google’s DNS privacy policy is much worse.

I don’t like cloudflare, but their DNS terms are relatively good, and they have my info anyway because as you say, they’re everywhere. I don’t think my not using their DNS will make any appreciable mark on their business, either.

As opposed to… ?

I genuinely couldn’t find a better option when I looked.

If you really want an app, Tusk is great, even just the free version. No ads. Nice colorful icons. Smooth interface, good scheduling options. Some functions are paywalled though, like calendar sync. I can’t remember if premium is a purchase or a subscription.

But really pen and paper is the best, imo. You can get little pocket notebooks. Much more satisfying and less restrictive than an app, if you don’t need it to also be giving you notifications.

Edit: Tody is great for household cleaning todos/scheduling. Also free and ad free, except for some paywalled functions.

If you download ADB AppControl to you computer, you can use that to disable bloatware over USB. Do this very carefully (consult guides, and make sure you know what something is before you disable it, and don’t use any program that claims to “clean up” bloatware automatically). But the great thing about this app in particular is it lets you just disable things instead of fully uninstalling them, so that this way if you fuck up it’s fully reversible; if your phone mysteriously starts having problems, just remember that you fucked with it and undo any recent changes to see if that fixes it.

Anyway, you might get a noticeable performance improvement out of disabling bloatware (there’s probably a lot of it), and you can remove various annoyances/“features” that have their “disable” option grayed out in the phone’s own settings menus.

You can also look into 3rd party launchers, like Nova launcher - some people prefer those.

Also, check the accessibility settings, in case there’s something helpful in there.

Also also, there’s probably a hidden “developer options” menu that may or may not be useful to you. You can look up how to activate it - it’ll probably be something like going to the about phone section and tapping on the model or serial number 10 times, or something similar to that. But I haven’t looked it up exactly for your phone model. With my phone, I use this mainly to manually change the audio codec when other menus don’t allow it, but not for much else. Do keep in mind most of the developer options are truly intended for developers and shouldn’t be tinkered with unless you know what you’re doing/have a reason.

Edit: I don’t know if the s23 specifically has this, but I’d check the lockscreen settings menu to see if you have the option to add quick buttons to it, if that’d be helpful to you vs the power key shortcuts.

That’d be pretty draconian for a teen though, depending on her age.