Thurstylark

It’s not about actually caring about making minors safer on their platform, or caring about giving tools to guardians to help keep minors safer on their platform.

It is about having something to point to the next time Meta is called in front of a congressional subcommittee to discuss proposed regulations. Look, we did positive things to our platform in the name of protecting minors, and we did it voluntarily, despite what losses we saw in that demographic! We definitely can (and so totally do) put the control of those protections in the hands of parents, where it belongs! We don’t need to be regulated, because we’re doing it ourselves already!

I think it would be naive to think that they don’t know this already. Not to say that I think you’re making that argument, but that I think the losses are calculated against the benefit of the appearance of care that this move affords them. Sure, these new restrictions and tooling means that some parents will be more willing to allow their teens to engage with the platform, but there’s no way that will outweigh the active user reduction in the targeted age range.

The real benefit is looking like they’re doing stuff in a positive direction in the context of minors. I’m definitely expecting them to point at this move (and its voluntary nature) as an argument against future regulation proposals. Especially the part where they’re ostensibly putting that control in parents’ hands.

1. Set even more alarms. Annoy yourself into being awake. Identify when you want to be awake, and start your first alarms at that time. Increase frequency as you approach the time you need to be awake. Make your wake up time harder to ignore.

2. Involve multiple senses. Sound alone isn’t doing it? Add sight, touch, taste, or smell to your alarm regimen. There are several products that can do these kinds of things. For example, I have Home Assistant turn on my room lights to full when my phone alarm goes off, and I could easily add a diffuser, or a vibrator under my mattress. Bonus points if it takes multiple steps to reset your alarm. Which leads me to…

3. Increase alarm reset difficulty. The more you have to conciously engage your brain to reset your room to sleep mode, the harder it will be for your brain to automate the snooze button. Put your phone across the room, use an app that continues to scream until you scan a QR code in another room or solve math problems, make a deal with your partner that they get to spray you with cold water unless you correctly answer these riddles three, anything. Make it difficult for your brain to remain in sleep mode when your alarm goes off.

4. Enlist the humans in your life to help. Ask, cajole, or haggle with your parent, partner, sibling, roommate, friend, or whoever else you’ve got available to help you wake up. Be it pleasurable reward or punishing annoyance, whatever they can do that is hard to ignore and can get you going will be better than one phone screaming into the void.

5. #4 part 2: Involve medical professionals. Sleep is a process that involves your body, and when your body isn’t working as you expect, you take it to the Body Shop. If nothing is working, talk to your doctor about your struggles with waking up when you want. They can help you narrow down the root cause and supply treatment if necessary. This treatment can range from sleep hygene coaching, to OTC medication recommendations, to prescription medication addition or adjustments, or even doing a whole-ass inpatient sleep study to figure out what’s going on. If nothing else is working, present your problem to a licensed Professional Human Animal Mechanic.

6. Don’t give up. This is a problem that can be addressed. It may take adjustments to your life that are unusual or unpleasant, but remember that, just like exercise, you are trading one unsustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: employment problems due to chronic tardiness), for another sustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: going to bed earlier, or changing your sleep environment)

It’s 65% more bullet per bullet!

I see we have a volunteer

Oh, poor baby can’t make money with an illegal business model. How awful.

That depends on which audio system you’re running.

Since this can vary depending on your distro, the easiest place to look for that info is going to be your distro’s documentation. That documentation may also include instructions for how to accomplish exactly what you want.

On top of this, your account gets penalized if you refuse to take an offered ride.

The complexity is the point. The less people willing or able to jump through all the necessary hoops to receive their healthcare through the system, the less money they have to pay out. Adding more complexity in the form of yet another opaque approval system adds many more hoops to get through, which is actually the entire purpose of that system. Deloitte knew this going in.

Yes, I have sympathy for the individuals who have to build this system, however I have absolutely zero sympathy for the company that put it into practice.

Yes, the medicare system is needlessly complex, however Deloitte decided to replace manpower with cheaper automation which had the side effect of saving them work by increasing rejections.

The world also happens to be complex. Enough so that both things can be true.

As a former rideshare driver: Fuckin’ based.

-… . .- - / – . / - — / … -

I already don’t own an xbox and am happy about it. Checkmate, MS.

The thought in question is that a specific group of people should stop existing. I’m sure that won’t backfire either.

The differing opinion being that a group of people shouldn’t exist?

Yeah, totally. That sounds like a healthy society to me!

Go fuck yourself.

It’s challenging, because he’s challenging to listen to, even though his message is important

…ya know… whatever that is…

Uh, yeah, actually. Those are exactly the things that the people who create and stoke climate denialism are afraid of. It’s in the intrest of the fossil fuel industry to make these exact things unpopular.

'Member when apple didn’t launch the iPhone with native app support and used the argument that HTML5 could do everything you could ever want, and they were wrong, but actually right as well?

Yeah, I 'member…

My city recently renamed a street after Nelson Hackett, who was a local slave, but more notably, was the first and only escaped slave to have made it to Canada, and then be extradited back to the US. The road was previously named after Archibald Yell, the governor of Arkansas at the time, who wrote the extradition order. Canadian laws at the time forced the government to respect the extradition, but they found this situation so distasteful that they immediately changed the law to basically make Canada a safe haven for escaped slaves.

Lots of locals didn’t know who Archibald Yell was, but now they do, and the road is now named after the slave whose case laid the groundwork for the Underground Railroad because of the governor’s actions.

Not just a correction to the person who should really be celebrated, but also an S-tier snub, if you ask me.

Allow me to translate:

We are inviting you to work for free because our content moderation team isn’t focussed on actually moderating harmful content… Well, only if you define “harmful” as “harmful to advertisers’ brands.” And by “moderation” I mean adding notes to things a la twitter, or X or whatever… Doesn’t matter, we just think that Elon was onto something when he outsourced the responsibility of fact-checking to unaffiliated users who can be duped into free labor as long as we dress it up as “making the community better” (like we actually have a platform that actually fosters anything close to a “community” lol). Hopefully you’ll steer unearned traffic towards incorrect information so we can make the case to those users that YT is OK with that kind of content without having to say the quiet part out loud, and make the case to advertisers that it’s worthwhile to stop caring what kind of content their ads get placed near. Your contributions will be ignored by the general public, especially those who are seeking out inaccurate content, but you’ll get the feeling of superiority that comes with hitching a ride on the coattails of someone shittier, yet vastly more popular than you could ever hope to be. Together, we can make Youtube even more money.

I use vcsh and myrepos.

vcsh allows you to run multiple git repos that share ~ as their root, and mr simplifies/automates the management of those multiple repos. You can check out my setup here.