I mean, if more people here in NYC voted against Eric Adams in the mayoral race (who won the primary by less than 1% against a much better candidate), we would have a more functional city government- i.e., something that tangibly affects our day-to-day lives, in terms of housing costs, transportation access, education, health care, etc. To say nothing of the dozens of other elected offices covering our own districts, which in aggregate are at least as important as the mayor’s office.

So maybe at some point, we can collectively wake up to the fact that presidential elections aren’t the only thing happening in the country

The ‘general’ package has basically fixed that for me:
https://github.com/noctuid/general.el

Makes it pretty simple to swap out most common emacs shortcuts for much more ergonomic alternatives.

Emacs with evil-mode. Best of both worlds

You can ban them for yourself by monitoring your own internet use, deleting mobile apps (and/or disabling notifications) and reducing news consumption in general. All of which are pretty solid protocols for most people to follow 365 days / year, actually.

I’d check out Leechblock NG (for Firefox and Chrome) if you need a short vacation from Lemmy or any other websites.

Not being able to run Signal on my Android tablet feels really inconvenient. That would be no. 1 on my wish list

I’d say LLMs are pretty comparable to an operating system (i.e., something anyone can buy, use and develop without any outside interference) and not comparable at all to nuclear weapons.

Renoise is very fun to use, and sounds great too. My imaginary DAW would definitely come with a ‘tracker mode’ inspired by that

I have a paid copy of Ableton already, just enjoy the open-source model a lot more for (basically all) non-music software, for the openness and flexibility

I have to navigate my city’s public transit system every day, so mobile internet has been a game changer for me personally. Thanks to that I’m able to check live arrivals and see which station it makes more sense to walk to in my neighborhood, or figure out exactly when where to switch lines (also based on live arrival times), etc.

Having access to streaming music doesn’t hurt, either. IMO it really just comes down to not installing dopamine slot machines (e.g., basically any social media). Keep the thing simple and utilitarian

I’d say no, the benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks. But yeah, it’s important to have enough discipline to get outside and do plenty of stuff that doesn’t revolve around the internet

I like that it exists, but haven’t gotten any good results with it personally. I could see it being useful if your needs are simple though, e.g., just setting up mics with instruments, and getting a decently-mixed multitrack recording together.

That said, I fully acknowledge that building something with the capabilities and sophistication of Ableton, or Logic, etc, is a gigantic undertaking, requiring huge amounts of work from a well-organized team. But an ‘all-in-one’ DAW solution might not even the right approach to take here, tbh. Maybe the FOSS model would work better for building a bunch of small modules that can be brought together somehow

A FOSS digital audio workstation that’s on par with Ableton

The middle ground (IMO) is local news that’s actionable. For me that means reading up on community meetings in my district, events involving local representatives, proposed zoning or street design changes, small-scale infrastructure projects, funding for schools and libraries, etc.

Ultimately these are things that will affect your quality of life much more directly than anything involving national politics, or whatever irrelevant topic cable news anchors want you to get whipped into a frenzy about.

Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me

Exercise a lot (and get sunlight exposure) during the day.

Also, never watch movies, read, scroll on a phone, etc in bed. You want your brain to 100% associate being in the bed with sleeping, as soon as it happens

I’m usually out within 5-10 minutes now, since starting to follow those two things reliably

(edit: also, minimizing light exposure in the last couple of hours of your day is good)

edit 2: Forgot the most important thing of all, which is to keep a consistent sleep / wake time every day. Getting rid of all alcohol is great too, if you want actually-decent sleep

I use Fedora Silverblue personally (feels rock-solid and borderline impossible to mess up), but you might want to get more familiar with the basics before getting into immutable distros. I’d echo what everyone else is saying and do Linux Mint first

Also insanely unhealthy to consume stuff like this on a day-to-day basis

IMO Lemmy’s a new version of old-school web forums and link aggregators (which have been around since the beginning- kind of like Fark, Slashdot, etc). Using this site feels the same as using those sites.

Think social media’s a very specific thing that started off in the early-to-mid 00s- i.e., a site / app where you keep a profile that’s tied to your real-life identity and real-life social circles (myspace, friendster, linkedin, facebook). And that’s where the harm kicks in, since suddenly you have to worry about having some kind of curated digital persona, which has some kind of real-life impact. So if we can’t talk about the harms of social media in a specific way (i.e., the harm of constantly comparing your life to these idealized representations of other people’s lives), then ‘social media’ isn’t a meaningful term anymore.

I’m almost exactly the same age as you. If I’ve learned anything up to this point, it’s that people would start to have better and richer lives as soon as they cancel their cable TV subscriptions, delete all social media accounts*, and delete all news apps from their mobile devices. I really believe smartphones are a huge culprit in making people miserable, and it’s because we’ve let these things get totally out of hand instead of consciously making them as boring and utilitarian as possible.

The issue of being ‘informed’ or not can be covered by reading Wikipedia’s current events page for a few minutes each week. That should also free up plenty of time for people to focus more on what really matters day-to-day, which is their local community, friends, family and neighbors. Useful information is actionable, and actionable information can be found when you’re laser-focused on your local area and the ways you can help improve it.

• Lemmy / kbin isn’t social media, IMO. ; )

It’s interesting that I started hearing a lot about ‘critical race theory’ right around the time the phrase started appearing on Fox News. Almost makes you think we have a nation of gullible rubes who just regurgitate talking points they hear on TV