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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Except that most of that is still in effect.

    Especially poor people still spend 12+ hours a day working, and even for middle class people it’s quite common that both parents work 10+h a day.

    Average work hours per year have gone up by ~10% since 1980.

    And when it comes to the jobs: While we like to pat ourselves on our back about how creative our work has become, we are essentially still doing factory work, just on a desk with a computer instead of in the factory with a welding torch.

    Most of the work that most of the people do is still the same mundane, formulaic toiling away.

    Modern education is focussed on teaching kids to learn stuff they don’t care for at exactly the time it’s asked for. Same as at work. If I have to learn a new framework for a project, I have to learn it right now, no matter if I feel like it or not. My boss is not going to wait around until I naturally feel like learning what’s needed for the job.

    That’s why it’s ok that we forget all but the basics the instant we graduate from school.


  • This is a nice idea, in theory, but once it touches reality, it falls apart, mainly for two reasons.

    • Not everyone is high-IQ neurotypical with high intrinsic motivation.

    As an extreme example, put someone with ADHD into a Montessori/Walddorf/Unschooling setup (three well-known systems that do pretty much exactly what you are demanding) and that kid will fail hard. That’s the reports you read of 10yo unschooled kids who never cared for learning to read and who are now having an incredibly hard time learning anything at all, because material for that age group expects the kids to be able to read.

    • The most important thing to learn at school is not the subjects/material

    Apart from the very basics (reading/writing/basic math), 95% of the content taught at school can be (and is) safely forgotten once you leave school. There are more than enough reports on the fact that adults fail most school tests if they have to repeat them a few years after leaving school.

    And that’s ok, because what school really teaches you is how to efficiently learn material you don’t care about no matter if you have motivation for it right now or not.

    That’s necessary to prepare the kids for higher education and work.

    When I have to work on a new project with e.g. a new framework or some new stuff I don’t yet know, then my boss won’t wait around until I naturally accidentally find the interest to spend time learning the material. No, the project has a deadline in two weeks and until then I need to learn what’s necessary and do what needs to be done, no matter if I feel like it or not.

    And that lession, which is much more important than the subjects you learn in school, is not taught at all by free-form student-driven learning systems like Montessori, Walddorf or Unschooling.




  • This is sadly it. If it gets niche enough, there’s no way around Reddit.

    I completely replaced Reddit with Lemmy for political topics, for wasting time, for doom scrolling and so on. But when I need information about a niche topic (e.g. how to overclock the 15yo netbook I recently got), there’s just no way around Reddit.

    That’s the difference between 50k monthly active users and 360mio weekly active users. There are dozens of subreddits that have more active users than all of Lemmy combined…

    Sadly, the big exodus is still pending.

    Or luckily, considering how badly Lemmy instances scale. If a few million users were to migrate over to Lemmy, probably the whole system would just collapse.


  • Mostly Lemmy here. I use it for my doomscrolling and distraction, and for that it’s imho much better than Reddit, since the content is much less fake (I hate all that AITA creative writing and similar crap) and the politics are better.

    I do sometimes use Reddit for when I actually have questions about some deeper topic. Lemmy sadly doesn’t have the manpower and the decades of content to help me when I need to know how to overclock a specific 15 yo netbook or when I need help with some issue in a game or something. For that, there’s sadly hardly a way around Reddit. Some things can be (badly) covered by Stack Exchange, some things I can maybe find on DuckDuckGo between heaps of AI slop, or I could let ChatGPT lie to me by hallucinating a wrong answer. But in many cases there is sadly no way around Reddit.




  • Two things can be true at the same time:

    • GNOME devs can pour hundreds of hours of free labour specifically into accessibility
    • GNOME accessibility still sucks

    And GNOME is not alone with that problem, it’s prevalent in the large majority of apps and platforms, because accessibility is really hard especially if you don’t have a tester with the specifically accessibility need on staff.

    OOP says they have a legally blind and a semi-blind person on staff, but that’s by far not the only accessibility issue. Accessibility is much more than just screen reader support.

    A big one is learning difficulties, and for that, having an UI that can be used the way the user wants/expects/knows how to is very important. And here, the very concept of an opinionated DE contradicts accessibility.