If there ever is anything remotely competitive to Netflix, I’m gone like a shot.

Their “suggestive sell” interface is such garbage. We, the paying customers, should be able to default to a genre search without having to jump hoops every time. We, the paying customers, should be able to hit “not interested” and actually not see suggestions to watch the “not interested” title again. We, the paying customers, should be able to view the available catalog as we choose, not as their manipulative algorithms choose. The only reason we’re still with Netflix is because the ad-free version is still affordable, but their content selection system is heavy advertising in and of itself.

Honestly, folks, if you want to watch a couple of movies a week I bet your local public library has a better interface allowing you to choose from new releases and a deep catalog, all for free - you just have to drive by once a week to pick up / drop off your selections.

When “parenting” consisted of making sure the rugrats were off the streets by the time the streetlights came on in the evening, it was a little lower maintenance than today.

Now, they have multiple global access terminals in the home, open 24-7-365, that can connect them to anyone/anything anywhere anytime. The physical threats of broken bones, abduction, etc. are less than in Beaver Cleaver’s neighborhood, but these days you don’t have to worry about the one drug dealer that got chased from the neighborhood last year, these days they can have anything delivered “in discrete packaging” if not to your home then to a convenient parcel pickup box not far from the school bus stop.

They can get into video-chats with law enforcement agents trolling for child-sex, they can access porn you didn’t know existed, and they can do it all from “safe mode” of their phone browser after “lights out.” Smuggling a porno mag to look at under the covers by flashlight has gone far far more more interactive and easily hidden.

My approach is to confront the challenges in the open. When the OnlyFans.com charge shows up on the bank card, sit down and talk about how paying for sexy things isn’t good for either party. Don’t take away the bank card, don’t take away the internet access, try to teach why the whole thing is a bad idea. I suppose if it gets to be a habitual problem then denying access is the next step, but with respect to internet problems, I don’t think we’ve had that issue yet (after 45 child-years…) Other habitual problems requiring access denial? Sure. All depends on your particular circumstances, but attempting to deny internet access seems like a seriously losing battle in today’s landscape.

My kids are savants about media control systems. You don’t need to explain anything, they’ve got it figured out before they touch the first button.

Yeah, I passed that suggestion into the “don’t show me content from the New York Times anymore” selection box.

Just say yes, only use it to watch “Fireplace for your Home.” I think you can change the “Kids” icon to whatever character you want it to show.

Subscription for the OS period, even if security updates were free, is pretty much the opposite of what I wanted a Jolla phone for back when I put a deposit on one. Are they actually delivering devices this time? Last time they got built but somehow were unable to be shipped to the people who paid for them.

They certainly had a rough spot about 10 years back, never delivered a device I put a deposit on, only refunded half my deposit.

I started using Linux more or less full-time in 2014. I find it to be just as “stable” as Windows or OS-X, which is to say: it’s stable until you do something that makes it not stable.

If you’re staying in the mainstream, using a “stable release” from a big distro (Ubuntu, Debian, there are others…) and waiting at least 6 months after the release of that stable release before using it, I have found Ubuntu to be just as stable as Windows or OS-X. You might want to use an unstable app, that can be a problem in any OS, but granted: there aren’t as many “stable” apps to choose from in Linux as Windows.

OS-X and their apps have burned me hard, repeatedly, for things that Windows and Linux had under control 10 years earlier.

The major difference in my WIndows vs Linux experiences has been: when you want something to work and it just doesn’t, in Windows you have to shrug your shoulders and explain to your customers: It just doesn’t work, there’s nothing we can do. In Linux, you have the option to do the heavy lifting and make it work. It will frequently not be worth the effort, but if you’re really determined you can fix just about anything in Linux.

Yeah, I got my son a draw-on monitor explicitly for use with Krita. It’s a normal PC too, but it makes Krita much easier to use well.

I’m a mostly procedural thinker, even though I program in OOP all day long. OpenSCAD works a lot like the rest of my code: write it, try it, look at the results, curse, revise it, try it, look at the results, curse differently… you get there eventually. I do highly suggest not coding a masterpiece in OpenSCAD without visualizing the components first.

I compare today’s GIMP to the Photoshop I used in the 1990s, and they’re not very different at all.

Maybe I’m doing too much engineering - I found Open SCAD to be way easier than Blender for making stuff, and that’s saying something because Open SCAD is quite a pain.

I (distantly) knew an indie software developer who was putting up a pretty good Photoshop alternative in 1996: ONE GUY alone in his bedroom was making a decent living selling a Photoshop alternative that he wrote himself. And he wasn’t exactly a super-wunderkind coder, just a guy who knew the photo manipulation space well enough to get enough customers to float selling his software for a few years - in direct competition with Photoshop.

Adobe isn’t selling magic dust ground from precious gemstones by thousands of artisans. They had a decent product that they marketed the hell out of and eventually got overly greedy.

GIMP, Krita, and many others are right up there if you haven’t been sucked into the Adobe addiction vortex.

Think of someone you know with an IQ of 100 and then take a moment to realize: half the world is dumber than THAT.

Meanwhile, a lot of the less technically, physically, intellectually capable people I know seem to place value on “sucking up” to “their betters” in hopes that some of that success will rub off on them. “Their betters” are well aware of this game and often keep the hangers on around just because they’re occasionally useful and don’t cost them much, if anything.

I mean, if people will pay us for gases extracted from the atmosphere, I’m all for that. And iron ore doesn’t seem to be nearly as concerning as things like copper, cobalt, lithium (though I bet the “lithosphere” has much more available lithium in it than we currently know.)

It’s good to have production capacity ready to go, underutilizing input streams. Things like steel can do this very well, things like state of the art microchips? not as much.

It’s the natural resources in the ground that we should be using as slowly as possible, if we could buy the bulk ores and just have our own mines ready to start producing if the ore shipments ever stop, that’s the ideal circumstance - but going at it like that is a little transparent.

To be fair, I was afraid T1 was going to be much more like T2, but I think the powers that be were in shock with what fell in their laps and couldn’t organize quickly enough to be “as effective” as they are this time with 8 years of prep time.

They had 4 years to engineer another Brexit, and they made it stick again - my neighbor still is living in some kind of reality distortion fog even as of last weekend.

In my experience, the further up the foodchain you move (from worker bee to manager, director, VP, CEO, Board, Investors) the more they take for granted, the more they “go with their gut.”

I have always thought that it makes the most sense to import your non-renewable resources regardless of whether you have them domestically or not. Then, if the SHTF, you’ve got what you imported, the exporters don’t have it anymore, AND you have your domestic sources to develop.

Schrodenger’s Douchebag: a guy who says something highly offensive to see how everyone reacts, then decides if he’s going to say “Oh I was just joking.” or not.

All the crap they’re doing with downsizing of federal agencies, they just wave a hand without knowing what they are doing and when the protests get loud enough they take it back.