Hmm. I'm still using a 2014 iMac, as its 27" 5k screen still very good for coding (with added memory). Sometimes develops a bunch of thin vertical lines, which come and go maybe dependent on temperature, but hasn't changed for for ten years and i can live with those. Just wish they'd continue providing security updates for it.

Orban is not forever - whereas integrating a country to EU is a long slow process. Also Budapest is geographically a hub city (whose inhabitants didn't - mostly- vote for fidesz anyway). I find it hard to believe that hungarian people are so fundamentally different from their neighbours. So does it make sense to undo citizens' EU membership for this? Rather, we need some kind of suspension of rights of the current government based on specific behaviour, such as persistent obstruction, distortion of the national media, etc. (although such criteria could apply to others too which might get embarrassing). And in general, to remove all vetos (aka "consensus") from EU processes.

I don't buy this. I'm still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email's continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
Having said that, it's a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.

From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring 'Computer Skills' as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.

It's good they exposed this network of websites - now what is going to be done to prevent them using it as intended (casual users on phones promoting soundbites to friends are not going to be checking the list in such articles...)?
Having said that, the anglosphere experienced this already in 2016 with Brexit and Trump, and such networks also promoted anti-french coups in Africa, so to 'uncover' this now seems rather behind the wave. A specific issue among francophone elite was their concept that to make french great again they had to focus on resisting "anglo-saxons", so were naïvely tempted by russian narratives about a "multi-polar world". Russia wants to divide europeans, we need to cooperate better.

My boys have chromebooks, it’s almost mandatory for school now, and I get why teachers need the whole class to have a similar locally-networked tool. Problem is we as parents can't set anything, as we don't have 'developer' access, and the school controls their accounts. So at home, they do stupid stuff. The hardware is ok, I wish it was just linux. About what google gets - I doubt the current data is so valuable, they play a long game hoping to lock young people into their ecosystem, to profit from people with cash/energy in their 20s.

EU needs to abandon unanimity in decision making - it's not even the veto of one "country", but of one party in one country. Same for UN. Pure consensus is not working.

I discovered Lemmy via links from Mastodon, and so found i prefer these threaded communities. Nevertheless individual "status" posts have a purpose too, we need both topic-focused and people-focused structures, these should overlap and connect better.
As my Mastodon account follows my Lemmy account, my posts/replies get into that system, more might be discovered if I included hashtags here. However I can't do the reverse - follow a Mastodon account, or reply to or boost a post, from Lemmy. Communities might grow more if we could enable such interaction.

This principle works most but not all the time. I develop an interactive climate-system model that evolved with many small steps over 23 years. So it has many patchy fixes as climate policy structure changed, gases and sectors added etc. Then converted from java to scala module by module (out of ±50) , each step checking the plots looked as before. Result is it works, but parts are messy with legacy options and outdated code style. So sometimes it's necessary to radically rethink the structure, take big bold steps before it works again, that's hard. Scala strong type system, with hints from compiler (and "metals") help make such refactoring easier.

Well some small steps could include - taxes shifting from income to wealth, land and luxury use of resources, lowering barriers to voting for younger people (e.g. the requirement for stable residence disenfranchises people who move about), return to free education, a lower voting age and upper age-limit for politicians... Yet gerontocracy is a problem even in youth-skewed continents like Africa. So to be honest I don't know, maybe some people here on Lemmy have more revolutionary ideas...?

It's not passing such a milestone that's an issue, so much as how fast we pass it - i.e. a population decline is sustainable if gradual. My concern is that our models of economics and governance derive from previous centuries when population was rapidly growing, which helped provide social mobility and influence for younger generations. So we need to adjust economics and governance to compensate, to avoid stagnation and gerontocracy.

I'm here only a week or so, subscribed to about 100 communities that look interesting, but most have enough good posts yet very little discussion. Yet the top 'world news' and foss/fedi/prog topics get all the attention, it's not balanced. I hope the new 'scaled/best' ranking algorithm will help, if I understand correctly this is ready but not yet released? People should make more effort to find, upvote, comment on smaller communities (note- to find communities I recommend search-lemmy.com - you find more than from own instance).

Regarding Mastodon - as there are many more users there, it could be a gateway to Lemmy (that's how I got here). Now Mastodon 4.2 has better search, if you follow a lemmy community or account from mastodon, it may show up in such search. However Mastodon new search is opt-in for non-hashtag text, so I suppose Lemmy has to specify whether our posts / replies are searchable - anybody know how this works ?