Classic Chesterton's fence principle.

Remind me of some quotes:

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

Recently, I came back home after 2.5 years of studying and working abroad. Home (family, friends, scene, etc.) didn't change much, but I definitely felt something off that it was hard to describe. I grew out of it, I suppose.

Reddit is already blocking some Proton VPN IPs...

If you're pursuing a MSc, your effort should be spent on the study itself, not on tinkering (e.g. I saw some recommended a Framework laptop). So my wholehearted recommendation is a Thinkpad + Fedora for maximum usability, stability, and durability. Thinkpad speakers are usually bad though. And Thinkpad is not particularly good for gaming, either.

This is actually not a good advice, from my experience. If we don't monitor, refactor, or improve the code, the software will rot, sooner or later. "Don't touch" doesn't mean we don't ever think about the code, but we make the conscious choice not to modify it.

This + org-mode are enough for me to switch to Emacs.

It was VPN issue for me. Some IPs in Proton VPN doesn't work. When I tried a different IP or turned the IP off, I could access again.

Well, but most of the time I don't care enough to go in.

Better learn COBOL now.

This is the real problem.

Ehm... Elliot uses Gnome.

https://youtu.be/ishgn7-NLlU?si=ox06KyNHHk35XlDL

The different servers, having to remember other people's instances along with their username.

This is just like email, I see no problem here.

I think the problem is about the mindset and the onboarding experience. We've used too much proprietary products and prefer something easy and not too much diverge from the norms. Recently, I tried to advertise Mastodon and Lemmy to my non-techie friends, which are using X and Reddit. Some did try but gave up. They said they didn't understand the concept, and didn't want to bother with choosing an instance in the first place, because they didn't understand the federation concept. It's just hard to explain the benefits of the fediverse to non-techie people.

The type of people that the fediverse attracts are FOSS users.

I have the same observation as your view. Current fediverse communities are heavily towards tech. Some of my friends joined but gradually left because they had a few to no interactions or no interesting people in their interested areas to follow.

The Internet is great. It connects people. I learned so many things even I lived in a small town in a third-world country.

But ads, scam, and 15-second videos are bad. The current Internet is nasty and not as beautiful as it was.

Two sides of a coin, I suppose.

I learned the lesson: keep the hope low (so I don't get disappointed), and never preorder.

Unpopular opinion: just type "Massive Win". What's wrong with it?

Gitlab used to be cute, small, and innovative (as in open). But now it's too bloated. Gitlab CI is not well designed and half-baked.

That's interesting to know. Maybe that's why add-ons don't work in Firefox iOS or iPad OS.

Second. Up-to-date packages and stable at the same time.

Same. I gave up the first time due to tedious details and weird control. I played it again with some control tweak (can't remember what I changed) and tried to embrace the slow details, and completely loved the story.

+1 for Kagi. $9/month is well worth every dime, considering that searching is one of my main workflows. Google search results nowadays are full of rubbish—ads and SEO-boost junk articles.

Default Brave blocks ads more aggressively than default Firefox. Of course you can achieve that with Firefox + uBlock Origin, but add-ons are not available on iOS and iPad OS.

That's just my experience. I still use Firefox + Firefox Focus BTW. To block more aggressively, I also use VPN + Adguard Home.