I kind of hate that you're right

I think it's important to provide children with a variety of potential careers ;)

Because everyone knows if a 14 year old reads Nora Roberts (or that one penguin children's book) society will fall apart.

This is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Most of the activity on any given instance or community comes from outside of the instance. If you start cutting off instances because they are sharing their own stuff with Meta, then you will also be negatively impacting your own communities since the amount of active users will go down.

Most users won't react to something like this by joining your instance or an instance that you approve of (or, at least, currently approve of). They'll either find another community on an instance they're federated with or they'll switch to another social media platform. The latter becomes more likely depending on how many instances end up on either "side" of the issue. Although most user accounts are relatively new, it's still a pain to switch over to something else once you've gotten used to something.

The scale of defederation you propose, especially this early in the fediverse, would be enough to turn off a lot of folks from federation. If admins are just going to defederate from each other at the first sign of disagreement, that weakens my faith in the fediverse.

I absolutely believe that instances should not federate with meta's stuff. The largest servers had enough issues when we were getting new users in the thousands. Meta will likely bring in users in the millions. However, it makes no difference to me if another instance federates with Meta.

It usually does, however, there are cases where a hole can have two openings. For example, there's a saying/idiom about digging a hole through the earth and ending up in china/australia/etc. It would be confusing to say that you "dug two holes" to China, you would only say that you "dug a hole" to China. "Tunnel" is definitely more precise here, though it would be odd to refer to the openings in a drinking straw as a "tunnel"

I've been watching "Match Me Abroad." Basically, it's people going to other countries in order to find love through a matchmaker service. It's not very good, but it's entertaining.

This is true, and I'm not against "alternative" sources for ebooks (having used them myself), but it's always better for the libraries and authors if there's foot traffic to the libraries, since that drives tax dollars which in turn makes its way back to the authors. It's less than pennies on the dollar, but it's important.

I'm conversational in Spanish, but I've recently been trying to put more effort into maintaining it/getting exposure to the language. I haven't seriously studied it in almost ten years, so honestly I'm surprised I've maintained any of it.

About a month ago, I started trying to learn Japanese. It's going better than expected, I've been trying to do 1-2 hours per day in stuff like LingQ and Language Reactor. I feel like I'm starting to understand some of it, though I still can't say much more than "えきは どこ です か？" (where is the train station). Still, this is a lot more enjoyable than formal education, so I'm fine if it's slow

In fairness, privacy issues have been a bit like a "frog in boiling water". Unless you pay a lot of attention to these things or are completely out of the loop, the average person won't see the issue.

At least my grandmother's vindicated now for not wanting to get on Facebook and share those sorts of things

I imagine that it could also get pretty data-heavy if someone subscribed to a large server on threads (assuming it doesn't become another metaverse).

Oho, that's so simple, too! I know there's tons of google alternatives out there, but this extension takes the cake! I am adding this right away :)

Brave, Qwant, etc. just weren't as effective for me. Marginalia gives interesting results, but since they specifically prioritize small sites, what you get won't always be approachable (For the example "The History of the Internet", you mostly get blog posts, niche wiki projects, and stackoverflow pages- though admittedly they are all relevant)

Because everyone knows if a 17 year old reads Nora Roberts (or that one penguin children's book) society will fall apart.

Apple products are good, but I don't like owning things that I can't repair. Though right-to-repair has come a long way, it's no secret that apple products are deliberately engineered to make them difficult to repair.

Thanks for making this!

Thank you, this is a lot of good information! What counts as "efficient learning" seems a lot more fluid than I thought. I guess everyone is going to assume that their favorite method is the best, perhaps that's why it seemed so polarized to me.

I Expect You to Die, the first game has a really good tutorial for someone completely new to the controls. Since it's stationary, they don't have to worry about movement/motion sickness as much

Oof, I'm already getting the "Got error: "Sign in to confirm that you're not a bot"" errors :(

I really like these kinds of things in principal, but so long as uBlock's still able to keep up with YT's nonsense, I still prefer accessing YT with that versus a separate site.

In a perfect world, something like a PeerTube instance or maybe an alternative like Odysee would take off

I don't mind the actual download being a PDF, to be clear. Just the front-end website

I don't think I'd be able to do it w/o a keyboard. I'm too used to working in an environment where I can type at 60 wpm. Speech-to-text is an option, but it has its own difficulties.

An alternate path for this is sign language. Tacoma, a sci-fi game, had an interesting idea where in the future, folks use finger-spelling (sign language alphabet, but not all of the signs) to interact with computers. I think there's already been some research into using finger-spelling in VR that looks promising, but the entire ASL lexicon may be too complex for something like the quest. A lot of ASL relies on position of hand in relation to head, chest, etc. Additionally, although I think you'd be able to get buy-in to memorize the 26 sign language letters, ASL is an entire language and it would be difficult to get everyone on-board with it. Finger-spelling may not be quick enough to get to 60wpm, but it is better than using the virtual keyboard.

I can't find a scan anywhere of anything 4a or higher, but if you are willing to pay for a physical copy there are a few sellers on AbeBooks selling "Reach Higher Student's Book 4A".

For free textbooks outside of that series:

BCcampus Open Publishing: They provide a ton of free courses and textbooks on a variety of topics. This isn't really piracy, but it's got a ton of good information.

I did find one site that seems to have all the PDFs for sale, but I can't tell if it's a scam or not. I would recommend looking at some of the free resources available on BCcampus before attempting this.