Great idea, gg! And great remark:

newsprint sketchbooks are ridiculously expensive.

+1 only because I can’t do more.

I am both proud and ashamed of it.

Don’t be, you should have a look at my (non woodworking) cheaply handmade notebook. Unlike your sketchbook, my notebook is ugly as hell (made out of recycled plastic, and cardboard) but no matter how ugly (and cumbersome) it is it’s still the best notebook I ever used… in the last 40+ years. I’m loving it ;)

I would rater teach younger kids but, no matter their age, it would be history and/or literature, philosophy, maybe even Greek and Latin for the most motivated among them.

More or less, it would be what was once called ‘humanities’. Some people and some interests across the entire political spectrum, including our own are trying real hard to eradicate this kind of education and that is not for the kids good. I would love to contribute my humble part in resisting that eradication.

Europe is not one country, nor is it one democracy. It is 27countries that are all different. You would be better asking for specific countries ;)

Ancient Greece was not that much of “a democracy” either. I mean, there was no “Greek nation”, there were cities and group of cities, and there were many non-democratic cities. Facing Athens, there was Sparta, their lifelong nemesis, which was not really a democratic city. The Athenian democracy itself lasted approx 200 years (a bit less, and with pauses) and its “golden age” (around that Pericles dude who gave it its first real democratic constitution among a few other impressive things) was very short lived: less than 35 years. And even then it was still a lot more… selective to determine who was deemed worthy of being a citizen (there were a lot less of them, only men and only from a certain group of population). Like I said, democracy was not “Greek” it was a “city” thing, as there was no such things as our relatively recent idea of a “nation” (or then, the city was the nation). There were alliances between cities though (but not always… spontaneous, nor reliable: Be it against of from Athens there were many betrayals) and there were almost many wars including against foreign powers.

Those countless wars is what, imho, put the Athenian democracy to the ground and this makes me wonder: could there be any modern democratic nation uneducated enough (and dumb enough to elect one of the most uneducated POTUS ever) to ignore that past experience and think it would be a great idea to start countless wars nowadays, and also to betray alliances?

Just wondering, obviously.

Seen from France, I would say the most obvious difference I can see between the US version of a democratic republic and my own is in how quite a few of our own representatives still at least try to pretend they work for us, and not in their own interest or in their friend’s and sponsor’s interests. That is changing, sadly.

It also looks like many US citizens consider the word ‘solidarity’ an insult, whereas it is (or was as, sadly, things are changing quite fast here too) a founding principle of the French Republic: it’s the ‘Fraternité’ part in our ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’.

On the plus side for the USA: up until quite recently, you used to have a real incomparable freedom of expression (which we dearly lack around here, all in the nae of political correctness), but its seems you decided to let go of it, for the same absurd reasons, as we did a few years ago.

You also used to be able to sustain and accept very different values and ideas, within the same space. That too is going away very quickly all in the name of intolerant ideologies (from the right as well as from the left side of your political spectrum)

And now, let the downvote festival begin. I suppose.

As a privacy consciousness individual,

Potentinally there will be some sort of system or software that can monitor my activities

• Don’t save anything personal on that machine.
• And don’t do anything you would not agree to do publicly, on that machine.

Other than that, as already suggested, run some debloat script but I still would not trust Windows. Even less if it was configured with an official spyware from my employer/university/whomever.

no. Full disk encryption is enough to protect my privacy from anyone stealing my computer/disks, it’s what matters to me.

If some secret agency want to access said data, they would just need to ask me, with a smile and a nice warrant. At least here in France, not complying is severely punished.

You’re right, sorry I was not more careful expressing it. And thx a lot for pointing it out.

Commencé à lire: Tristan & Iseult.

Y a un charme très particulier à ces historiettes. J’aurais aimé les avoir lu beaucoup plus jeune, je pense que ça m’aurait impacté bien plus profondément qu’aujourd’hui. Dans le sens que ça m’aurait probablement aidé à me libérer de bien des blocages (et de mes prétentions) quand j’essaye d’écrire des histoires.

TLDR: give a pair of sneakers to an oyster, it won’t make it Usain Bolt.

Disclaimer: I’m not a US christian.

Christ was poor, he stood for the poorest, not the richest, he had some brain working, he was oppressed for his ideas, and he died for them… while at the same time forgiving his murderers.

No matter the amount of AI trickery (and wasted energy), Trump looks as much as Christ as he looks like a decent human being (hint: not at all). Imho, he would have a lot more chance to try to pass as Taylor Swift…

I’m lightning fast the moment I realize someone is only looking to either

• be toxic, or worse
• waste my time, troll me.

For the rest I don’t block individuals, nor instances (I can have issue with people, but I don’t want to condemn the entire population of their instance).

Les retombées sont essentiellement politiques ou de l’ordre de la menace (par MS, j’entends). Nonobstant la résistance au changement, bien entendu.

De fait.

Quant aux conséquences positives, elles sont, je suppose, essentiellement économiques (enfin, j’ose l’espérer).

Je me fais peu d’illusions à ce niveau: tant que une masse d’entreprises (et de consommateurs) considéreront l’argent public comme une ‘ressource gratuite’, il y aura pillage plus ou moins en règle de ladite ressource. Exemple tout con : y a aucune raison matérielle pour que les montures de lunettes soient vendues si chères en France… mais comme elles sont remboursées. Si le client devait payer de sa poche, je ne doute pas que les prix baisseraient soudainement.

but I’m just not interested in such low-effort crap. Me, I’m here for the original spirit of the community, but I guess many are not? Fine.

With you on that.

Obviously breaks RULE #1, and to a lesser extent, RULES #2 and #3.

People can do mistakes. They can unintentionally post stuff that breaks the rules and don’t even realize it. A bit like they can upvote something just because the enjoy it, not even realizing the content goes against the rules. To be honest, I don’t understand why you think that post you mentioned breaks rule2?

And YET people here upvote that low-effort crap? Okay, got it. Fine. Big part of why I’m going to need a long vacation from this project.

As an old dude myself (maybe older than you are? Nearing my 60s) I would be tempted to remind you that you can’t control people’s behavior and probably should not be willing to or you risk losing your sanity. Some people can be dumber than an old wet rag, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

I quite regularly mention my rather painful first encounter with the Fediverse. It was on Lemmy, but that could apply anywhere on the Fediverse. To put it mildly, I was disappointed and quite frustrated with the shit ton of low effort posts and even shittier politics, when not outright pure hatred, I was served by default. Had I not quickly discovered and learned to use the filtering and blocking tools I would have ran away from the Fediverse, to never come back… like I ran away from Twitter, which is saying a lot in regards to what my default first experience was around here.

(To anyone wondering, no, this is not me being judgmental on anyone. This just me stating that I have clear expectations regarding what I’m willing to spend my time reading and, a lot more importantly to me, what I’m not willing to waste my time with, aka no shitty politics, no low efforts posts.)

When I first found this community I hesitated to join as I really have little interest in memes but quickly realized this had nothing to do with memes, nothing, and that each new post was even quite stimulating and surprising. I joined and did not regret it even though not every single post was a hit with me.

Now do I sound bitchy and uncool upon all that? Absolutely, fluffing-yes. But damn it, I thought I’d tried.

I like most of what you posted. I also don’t like some of the pictures posted by some other contributors and I agree with you: they are not in the spirit of the community. But like I was saying, they can honestly be mistaken and hopefully they can learn.

Why don’t I post myself? I’m not much of a comics person. I’m a huge fan of ‘Asterix’ (which is French so it won’t play well with an English speaking community), ‘Calvin & Hobbes’, ‘Peanuts’ (to some extend) and of ‘Corto Maltese’ but most of what I read are text-based books. Many of the comics I used to enjoy as a child would undoubtedly have been able to contribute some content around here, but since I have kept none of them…

So, thx a lot for what you did. Including this last message, that could hopefully trigger a healthy discussion. I’m not giving up on the idea of reading more of your contributions sometimes in the future.

Ca m’étonne toujours qu’un choix pourtant apparemment pas si compliqué que çà à mettre en oeuvre, avec une portée symbolique/politique réelle, et des conséquences pratiques bien réelles aussi, ,'ai pas déjà été fait au sein de l’UE depuis… depuis au moins avril 2025. Je suppose qu’il y a des considérations techniques qui m’échappent.

For a few years I was a happy (paying) Kagi customer and like mentioned in other comments already, for me there was no going back: it works great, it’s bloat free with even a focus on small web, and a lot of cool features. Then, the new US President arrived with his team and their shitty politics. As a EU citizen I could not trust US services anymore and I was not willing to send them money either…

I went back to the French Qwant. It’s far from being perfect (they’re working on their own index but so far I think they still use Microsoft’s Bing), at least it protects my privacy from Microsoft’s (and it works fine).

Would I be US citizen, I would happily keep paying for Kagi. It’s really good. Much better than anything else, imho.

Thank you very much. I’m just sharing what I think.

And Netscape was created by?

So anyways… how do y’all detect “AI”, IRL?

I don’t meet AI IRL, I meet people.

And online?

• Too
• many
• useless
• Bullets

Too many titles

used to make

the lack of content look

more serious than it really is

Emoji, too 🎇💫🦧

;)

My opinion is that toxicity can be found in every little gesture in our daily life, no need for an highway. It’s also not somethign ‘external’ to us that appears because of poor decisions. It can and often thrives even in the most ‘humble’ or humane ‘infrastructures’, to use you image. Suffice to look how two people, say two neighbors, can literally hate on one another for petty reasons.

If you build platforms that don’t allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you’ll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.

People can have a fight on the street, or in a pub, in a shop, at work, or wherever, even at home, within a family circle, because “he looked at me!” or because “I don’t like the way he dress” kind of reasons. Do you really think tech is the issue?

But once again, you’re more than welcome to believe what you want to believe. Just don’t try to put words in my mouth that I did not say.

• Firefox (now using Waterfox), I started using when it was still Mosaic and no idea it would one day become Mozilla Firefox…
• LibreOffice.
• In a couple years, maybe three, I’ll be on Mint for 10 years and, yep, I do like it. And I certainly love many GNU apps that came with my distro: they’re lightweight, focused and so incredibly useful <3
• I used to love Mac OS (previous to Linux, since the early 80s I had been an Apple user) and many small third party apps. But I moved away from Apple and have no desire to go back.

I don’t buy this narrative that toxicity is inevitable.

You’re more than welcome to buy what you fancy, I don’t recall saying it was unavoidable. I even think I mentioned why we somehow manged to make it as… present as it is, and how we should try to get rid of most of it (hint: through education).

Can we get rid of all of it? Nope, unless one is to pretend we’re perfect? Don’t know about you but I’m certainly not perfect.

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

We don’t because:

1. it’s a wider issue than ‘the Internet’. Haven’t you noticed how even politics in general, which was supposed to be the epitome of our democratic societies, has morphed into an hate-filled shit show at best, when it’s not effing openly celebrating murders and assassinations of people we don’t like?
2. we’re part of the issue. It’s not a ‘them’ vs ‘us’. It’s us. And most of us, no matter what we believe in, are acting like morons, at best.

but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong.

Lemmy has not “gotten worse” in my opinion. It was worse to begin with and when I arrived a few years ago, the first thing I had to urgently learn is how to filter out what I call its ‘noise’: that constant (and self-celebrating) hatred for ‘the other camp’, the hatred for those who dare not think like ‘us’ (I certainly don’t put myself in that group). I then moved from Lemmy to Piefed, mostly because back then at least it offered me simpler/more efficient ways to filter out that noise.

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

Like mentioned in other comments, the only way is through changing (civil) society itself. Aka through education.

As long as our respective public educative systems (I’m from France, but I know it’s as shitty in the USA if not worse) are allowed to not do their job of actually educating and teaching kids some common values and principles (next to some actual knowledge and know-how), toxicity will thrive.

It thrives because it has been normalized and because those who benefit from it are being regarded as role models. But it’s even worse than that: just publicly discussing this issue and its causes would expose anyone to being… punished by an angry toxic crowd of people that don’t want to hear they’re being toxic (or that their ‘ideology’ they want so hard to believe in have morphed them into assholes). That is a huge loss for any freedom respecting society, and a huge win for those benefiting from that hate/toxicity.

edit: clarifications.