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Ideally, we as a society would eventually figure out and solve what drives so many people to suicide in the first place. However, it is heartening to know that this band-aid measure does seem to be effective (assuming that you trust the experts declaration that people are not simply finding another method).

Functionally, it is very similar to Flatpak. The main reason people do not like it (for reasons independent of sandboxed applications in general) is that Canonical controls the store and that it is not open-sourced, and that it is very difficult to remove it on Ubuntu setups (a major pain-point for people who need an unsandboxed Firefox setup).

This usually happens when you do non-standard things like try to change the desktop environment and then update to a new major version. If you pick a distro that is already close to what you need in the first place, this should not be as much of an issue.

Source: Personally got it into a state where it became a huge headache to update.


It is possible to get it into such state, but on a good distro like Debian simply changing the desktop environment and updating to a new major version is not going to be one of those troublesome "non-standard" things :)

This, exactly. I tend to run into a lot of problems, but that is mostly because I tend to tinker with it in non-standard ways (hard to be surprised about your computer no longer booting when you intentionally tried to change the encryption setup). However, if you install a distro closest to your use-case and and then stick with just general applications (i.e. the kind you can get from Flatpak), you should not run into issues.

Of course, some things will randomly break unexpectedly, but you get that with Windows and MacOS, too.


It depends on the density of the information and general complexity of the sentences and ideas. This exercise kept the ideas rather simple, but an old Dickens novel or a complex text-book would be much harder.


Another advantage of text over the long-term: it is accessible for discussion.

Let us say that you want to analyze, say, drinking culture in Ireland. You could write documentary on it, or do a fictional character study. However, those require actors, camera equipment, editing tools and time, and it generally extremely expensive and time consuming. A quick TikTok video may be a bit cheaper than a full-scale film, but still needs some of that equipment and cinematography skills.

Music is not much better. You need skills in singing, translating ideas of rhythmic lyrics, as well as supplies for instruments.

Writing, however, is simple. At minimum, all you need is paper and skill in articulating ideas. Almost anyone worthy to rationally ponder a topic already has the skills to put it to paper (assuming that they have gone through a proper First-World education and know reading and writing).

Text is also one of the easiest to share. A picture is worth a thousand words, but that poses problems in sending all that information. Plain text, however (or even most rich-text formats) can be transferred to anyone over almost any protocol, even rudimentary ones such as word-of-mouth. Ideas shared through text can be sent at an unrivaled pace.


This is why I think all video content should have auto generated transcripts for various reasons; subtitles, auto translations, but more importantly index- and searchability.

You can't expect anyone to view 20 million videos a day to find trends in current day video discourse. In theory machines could do it, but it costs a fortune. But 20 million text transcripts? That's doable on someone's local machine.


>subtitles, auto translations, but more importantly index- and searchability.

Google has this all for themselves, but they don't seem to give anyone else the ability to access the data easily so the last two points are a yes for them and a no for you.


Talk is even easier. You just need to press record. Or not even that, go and talk with people or scream at people.

Talking has always been superior to text, and most of the problems of industrialized society is that the majority of people have become psychotic brained by thinking that the written word is higher than the spoken word. The spoken word is of course superior, and has always been.


Another Emacs user here. I would argue that even Emacs is a bit of a struggle sometimes. More modern editors like Sublime Text, Kate, or even Notepad have an advantage of being intuitive. Typing on a letter always outputs that exact letter. The shift key does one thing and one thing only. Mouse integration allows for rather precise cursor placement in a way that utilizes a human's natural hand-eye coordination. The shortcuts that they do use are common across the OS (no need to remember if the copy you need is Ctrl+A - W, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Shift+C, or Ctrl+C).

Part of the issue is that operating systems have gotten more advanced and more standardized since Vi and Emacs were originally built. However, there is the case that UI designers have learned a lot over the decades. I like Emacs as well, especially when I am doing sysadmin work. However, I have to admit that it is not always intuitive. And even Emacs is more intuitive compared to the modal-nature of Vi.


> have an advantage of being intuitive

Emacs is incredibly intuitive - with a caveat. Once you internalize the model, things become incredibly intuitive. I love that EVERY single keypress, mouse movement and button press is nothing but the association to a piece of Lisp - documented, always available, fully modifiable, debuggable, profilable source. The intuition required is for Lisp only; once you grok that part, Emacs becomes an irreplaceable ally - nothing even comes close to what you can do in it with text.

And btw, Emacs is inherently a modal editor - just like Vim. Only because you're not using modality for "text editing", it doesn't mean it is not.


I am not sure where you found this, but I would agree that GitHub is very useful, for code backup and for sharing with the world.


Considering that OpenAI is having trouble getting its models to avoid recommending suicide (something it probably does not want for ANY user), I rather doubt this age prediction is going to be that helpful for curbing the tool's behavior.


At what cost, though? Most laws have some sort of benefit, but it always comes at a cost. Are we all willing to pay that cost?


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