A decade ago, I thought phone numbers would soon die out. Instead, the most popular messaging apps use them as identifiers and adoption of those in North America is poor.

It depends on how annoying a noise it will make if allowed to finish. I find it odd that the option to disable the beep on completion isn’t common. There’s rarely any urgency to remove what I just heated.

I’m content if my shoe cost is under $10/month. You’re just over a tenth that. It would be hard to get the number lower and still have reasonable comfort and protection from the shoes.

It had been the norm for phones, then Android came along and a much more PC-like level of capability became the norm for phones. SafetyNet didn’t show up until five years later and it didn’t get significant negative press.

It’s weird this didn’t get more pushback on mobile. Even the mainstream press was critical when Microsoft proposed it for PCs.

Sometimes people make things that are useful to Google or find bugs for them. It has no meaningful cost to them as long as non-Google Android isn’t appealing to mainstream users.

No single entity can ruin it. We’ve seen that happen over and over when someone’s political or economic goals conflict with user interests.

BlueSky actually talks about this quite a bit, viewing the company as a potential future adversary of the current developers’ goals. I’m not sure their design choices align with that in practice, but they articulate the argument well.

Another cool thing is the broader reach federation provides. Someone with a Wordpress site need only install a plugin and people can follow it with Mastodon and the like. Tag a community in a post and it shows up on Lemmy too. This is underused so far, but I hope to see it continue to grow.

Why do you care?

If it’s just about following the rules as a matter of principle, I suggest not doing that. Nobody is checking, and saying your exact age on public social media is oversharing anyway.

If it’s about content moderation being strict enough to satisfy some comfort level, I wouldn’t rely on that, but I also think 13 is old enough to start learning there are shitty people online and how to deal with them, preferably with some adult support.

People who binge drink frequently get used to it and don’t feel very drunk at 0.08. It doesn’t mean they’re not significantly impaired. Add that to a bit of propaganda from the bar industry, which has an incentive to normalize impaired driving and it starts to make sense.

It’s common, but not expected in the sense that most potential partners would be put off by your choice not to drink. If a date pressures you to drink when you don’t want to, that’s a red flag. Maybe propose something other than a bar if you don’t want to drink.

Why drink if you’re gonna drive?

A large number of people, perhaps even a majority think that it’s perfectly fine to drive after light drinking. The bar industry in the USA has tried to push a narrative that it’s mainly severely impaired drivers who cause crashes and the current DUI thresholds are too low. I used to think that until I went looking for research to back it up and found that there’s a pretty linear response in terms of driving worse as BAC increases. Driving is dangerous enough without any impairment.

The Thinkpad T60 has scissor switches. Source: have one, pulled a keycap to confirm it.

My favorite keyboard ‘feel’ 100% is an oldschool laptop style keyboard. Like the IBM T60

You may be looking for the IBM SK-8845 Ultranav USB keyboard. They’re long-discontinued, but I see several on Ebay.

Razer Blackwidow Stealth w/ rubber o-rings added to the base of each key, which I think is as non-clackety as a mechanical gets.

It isn’t. A web search says this uses Cherry MX Brown switches, which are pretty average in terms of noise. Here are some switches more focused on minimizing noise:

• Outemu Boba U4 - a quiet switch with a strong tactile bump (MX Browns have a weak tactile bump)
• Healios v2 - a linear switch (smooth, no bump) designed to be very quiet
• Cherry MX Silent Red - a quiet linear switch you might actually find in a factory keyboard rather than something custom or DIY

At least two of the three use rubber pads inside to minimize noise.

None, but my frontpage is subscribed communities only.

It was (and maybe still is) trendy to avoid gluten without any medical reason so it doesn’t surprise me you would encounter a lot of people lying about having an allergy or intolerance. Of course people with celiac disease can have a severe reaction to it, so it has to be taken seriously.

It usually wasn’t conversations that were at issue. People would engage in criminals acts, such as trading child sexual abuse media in large unencrypted group chats. Law enforcement would find links to those chats, join them, and observe criminal acts, leading to court orders to Telegram to disclose whatever identifying information it had about the offenders, such as phone numbers and IP addresses.

Telegram intentionally split storage of that kind of information across jurisdictions that do not cooperate so that it was effectively impossible to obtain orders for all of them. They bragged their marketing materials that they have never complied with a court order for user information. Taken as a whole, I see that as intentionally facilitating child abuse.

Signal’s approach is pretty much the inverse; rather than hoard data about users and shield people they know have done evil, Signal has ensured that it does not know the contents of any conversation, nor anything about users other than when they created the account and most recently accessed it.

Collaborating with Xitter is not the most distasteful thing Telegram has done. Its marketing model has been to consistently lie to people about being encrypted when that’s only true in very limited cases. It has also catered to criminals by attempting to make it difficult to comply with legal demands for information, while holding that information for its own purposes.

Signal, on the other hand is always encrypted and does its best to hold as little information about users as possible.

Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.

What is there to learn? Every popular messaging app has pretty much the same UI.

I don’t know you, your daughters, or their friends so I can’t make specific recommendations. What I can say is that it’s really common for teenagers who are sheltered from the dangers of the world to make more and bigger mistakes once they’re unsupervised than those who get a gradual introduction.

The two main dangers of social media for most people are:

1. Encountering assholes. For girls and women, there’s a high probability assholes will try to sexually exploit them. Since there are minimal consequences most of the time for sending “show me your tits”, they’re going to encounter that behavior eventually, and it may be easier to deal with for the first time when they have parental support.
2. Algorithmic rabbit holes. These can create the perception that problematic attitudes and behaviors are common and widely accepted when they are not. Having an open dialog with parents about anything from eating laundry detergent to Jordan Peterson can be a strong stabilizing influence.

I don’t think a closed Fediverse server is likely to serve as a first step in a gentle introduction because it has neither danger and presumably no strangers to talk to. The full Fediverse might work better, as it does offer interaction with strangers. Encounters with assholes will be less frequent than on corporate social media, and any rabbit holes will be much more self-directed.

That said, when one of them is likely within a year or two of leaving home or at least having full control of her digital life, if she wants to use some corporate social media, she’s probably better off doing that with some parental supervision and support than jumping in completely unprepared when you’re no longer in a position to prevent it.

Her friend group has a group text and she wants to keep up with everyone but doesn’t want to get the ding notifications constantly.

This seems like a good opportunity to learn how the notification settings on her phone work.

Trying to pet something I shouldn’t.

I’ve driven a couple cars with electronic door poppers and I’m having trouble understanding why anybody would want them. The novelty of accomplishing a routine task by pressing an electronic button instead of pulling a mechanical lever should have worth off in 1985.

Iv had to deal with plenty of people that just moving the windows task bar from the bottom to the top was enough to make them go full stupid and forget they have been using a PC for 20 years.

This is why I drink.