Thanks, will try that!

And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(

Not only the U.S. grid is weak compared to China’s… Strategically China seems to be outpacing the U.S. on many fronts, being much more stringent and focused on long term goals than the chaotic U.S. at the moment. I really don’t like the idea of living in a world with China as the leading nation, but it increasingly seems like the most probable development in the mid to long run. And transition will likely not be smooth…

That surprisingly wasn’t that hard, actually.

One side of the family already settled on Threema for communication years ago, the other side I had to first show Signal to and help with installing it, but now they are even using it in other contexts.

And apparently I live in a bubble that is quite open to Signal, so most of the people I know at least use it in parallel to WhatsApp. And for the rest there is still RCS.

The actual hard part are (since I became a parent) all the WhatsApp groups that exist for most kinds of organized child activity, including distributing much of the crucial information regarding school.
Also at my wife’s work WhatsApp is standard for coordinating with the colleagues.

For that purposes we use an old customized WhatsApp-only smartphone, that is used by the family like some old-fashioned fixed phone-terminal, only for messaging…

It’s not just weird hobbies here, but basically all that are somehow organized.
Also a lot of relevant school information is only shared within parent groups on WhatsApp.
My complete WhatsApp-boycott lasted exactly until the first of my childs entered school… :-(

No, in a very private part of the Cloud, so don’t be afraid!

Hey, didn’t you read? It uses “Meta’s Private Processing technology”!!1!

Also:

original message: “Please don’t leave dirty socks on the sofa.” The AI then offers “funny” rewrites, such as: “Please don’t make the sofa a sock graveyard,” “Breaking news: Socks found chilling on the couch. Please move them,” and “Hey, sock ninja, the laundry basket is that way!”

Am I the only one that thinks the “funny” ones in the given example are much more offensive than the original one?

Nice, another reason to not use WhatsApp…

Well, an AI is incredibly patient and you can toy around with the language freely without perhaps feeling embarrassed. That alone lowers the entry bar (especially for slightly awkward persons like myself…) considerably.
On top of that AI is dirt cheap compared to a personal tutor or traveling around the world.
So it would open effective language learning to a much broader audience than before, which undoubtedly is a good thing!

Yeah, Duolingo has been resting a bit too much on its past accomplishments and still high popularity lately.
This feature is basically exactly what I would have expected them to offer me by now in return for the money I pay them each month.
Unfortunately Google is not an alternative for me, but I already have switched some of my learning to LLM chats elsewhere.
I am curious if Duolingo will be able to keep up again with the development in the long run…

Yeah, Spotify sucks for many reasons, the ones mentioned not being the least.

Some while ago I returned back to classic MP3 radio streams, grey-area streaming workarounds and occasionally sailing the high seas again.
And instead of throwing my money at Spotify (which then doesn’t give it to the artists I listen to), I make sure to support the bands directly.
Go to concerts, buy merch, support promising projects on e.g. Startnext.

Win-Win-Win-scenario:
I get my music, artists get more money, and the creedy corporate music structures around Spotify are not supported any more.

I also guess that no human being has been involved in suspending the account, just common-sense-lacking AIs doing automated tasks and classifying people as imposters of themselves. Might be the beginning of some really Kafka-level stuff for Neal trying to set that right again, depending on the mood of the complaint-processing AIs… :-)

This is at the same time hilarious and puzzling. I mean, Meta has urged users to use their real name for years and Neil does just that and gets apparently shut down now because he not only acts as himself but is named as himself on top of that!!1!