I wish I had understood the freedom I really had back then, and used it better

Lots of reasons to dislike Google. That is not one of them.

That is not accurate, and doomerism only helps those who want us too demoralized to put up a fight. If you want to be part of the solution to climate change, I recommend doing some reading on what the range of projections and outcomes actually look like.

Is it fair? Probably, yeah. But I don’t think it’s an effective way of framing or addressing the problem.

The challenge is always getting enough people to do enough of an action that it makes an impact. It is certainly more effective, in terms of reducing emissions, to target policy interventions at leverage points - like forcing energy companies to adopt renewables by law and banning further fossil fuel extraction.

Personal action can be useful to live in alignment with your values and to provide examples to others for ways to get involved in the climate movement, but we can’t consume our way out of this.

Yes, and that should be changed, imo

Billionaire wants a totalitarian state, who’s surprised?

No, I just never feel good after using it

Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s the algorithms, but I do notice a difference in how I feel after spending time on the Lemmy or Mastodon vs Instagram or LinkedIn

I use Proton and really like it, but I don’t know how to go about using my own domain (though I am interested in it). How difficult is it for someone without webdev and self hosting experience to get set up?

Why am I not surprised? In the words of the Wu Tang Clan - “cash rules everything around me”

How so? I already use both, I’m just curious

In grad school, I was talking to an Econ professor and mentioned that I had been reading a paper from another economist. He said that he’d edited a book chapter the other guy had written and found it so incomprehensibly wrong that he didn’t know where to start lol

What do you typically use your computer for? That’s going to have a major impact. If it’s pretty basic stuff (web browsing, text editing, etc) you shouldn’t have any issue. If it’s something that’s more complicated or unusual, then sometimes it’s easy to do and sometimes not, depending on what you want to do. In general, a little bit of comfort searching the web and working in the command line helps a lot with troubleshooting Linux

Becoming more educated about politics and the world around me has not been good for my mental health either. Ignorance is bliss

Excel is definitely not useless! Learning a little Python (especially the pandas package) can go a long way in making data analysis easier though

Now you’re speaking my language!

Every time I’ve asked ChatGPT for help coding, I’ve wound up needing to rewrite it all for myself. LLMs make baffling design decisions (because they are just paraphrasing Stack Overflow, not making actual decisions).

I have found them helpful for turning error messages into more legible explanations of what went wrong, but AI-generated code has not been effective, in my experience

I’m not a power user, so I’m often frustrated by Excel trying to do things I don’t want it to and by its abundance of features that I’ll never use.

And at least at my workplace, a lot of work processes use poorly-designed Excel spreadsheets for critical tasks, because it’s such a simple way to manipulate data.

I also find that when I need to do more complicated data analysis, Excel starts to become limited, and I find Python to be a more powerful and flexible tool.