IIRC research shows similar brain activity between reading books and listening to audio books.

But splitting attention is another matter. I listen to podcasts a lot, and often I’ll finish an episode and realize I have no idea what happened because I was focused on work.

When it comes to audiobooks, I try not to split my attention because of that. Sometimes I’ll listen to the audio book while reading along. For me that seems to improve my speed and focus compared to either one on its own. I’ll crank up the audio speed to around 3x, which is too fast when just listening but fine when reading along. And the audio keeps me at a steadier pace than reading alone.

The cheapest options I’ve found over the years are mostly black Friday sales on lifetime plans. Be careful who you trust, of course. There are lots of scammy ones out there, but there are also some reputable companies that have been around a good long while still offering lifetime plans. Check reviews before buying.

Over the years I’ve picked up cheap(ish) lifetime memberships with pCloud, Koofr, and Filen. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of them.

I use Borg to create encrypted backups on an external HD, and then I periodically sync that to cloud providers. I prefer E2EE services but it’s not a strict requirement for backups since Borg encrypts them anyway.

On Windows I recommend Kopia instead of Borg, at least until Borg gets an official stable windows build (planned for 2.0, currently in beta)

I exclude most things I could re-download like games and movies so 1TB covers my needs pretty well.

For those downvoting: please explain why, and don’t just downvote as a knee-jerk reaction to the bonkers-sounding headline. The purpose of science is not to reinforce conventional wisdom.

If this is true, we need to understand why.

If it is not, we need to understand why.

I’m not familiar with Pediatric Exercise Science as a journal, but from a quick lookup it seems legit enough, so I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand just because it doesn’t jibe with my biases.

I’ve only had time to skim the paper itself. Nothing jumps out at me as outrageous or delegitimizing, though I am left with questions about the self-reporting, and the conclusions from the paper seem to be far less conclusive that the article headline suggests (as usual…).

I also wonder how “screen time” from the 2008 and 2015 data sets would realistically compare to “screen time” today. The digital landscape has changed a lot in the past 18 years. I am older than the Internet, and my experience with computers as a teenager was very different from today’s teenagers’. The majority of my screen time at that age involved a lot of problem solving and creativity. I don’t think that’s the lion’s share of screen time today, but it’s certainly not absent either.

You can also just sync your files. Koreader, by default, stores metadata in the same folder as the epub file. If you sync the directory with something like Syncthing, then you don’t need a server.

Out of curiosity, when did your doctor tell you this? I ask because standard medical advice changes over time, and if its been a while you might want to ask again.

I’ve had low modestly low blood pressure at times. Never a big deal, but once they turned me away from donating blood because my pressure was a little lower than the standards allow. It was minor enough that my doctor basically said “be sure to stay hydrated and don’t worry about it”.

In theory, no.

In practice, yes.

It doesn’t need to be good to replace jobs, as long as there are no consequences for the people making those decisions.

I’ve lost count of how many “oops, it was AI’s fault, not my fault!” stories I’ve heard, even within highly regulated fields. Like, lawyers submitting documents with completely fake citations, and then…no real consequences. Seems to me like that should be cause for immediate disbarment, but no, apparently not.

Wrong about…what? The direct quote from GrapheneOS? It is a direct quote.

Blocked.

“It will initially be flagships similar to the current generation Motorola Signature, Motorola razr fold and Motorola razr ultra since those will be the 2027 devices meeting our requirements including the expected updates and hardware memory tagging but it can expand over time,”

This is great news in general, but it’s also a bit of a bummer that it will (at least initially) be limited to extremely expensive phones. The recently-announced Moto Signature has “a starting MSRP of €999”.

But MSRP is a joke so I really have no idea what the street price will be in practice.

Yes. Even the more reputable VPNs make ridiculous claims in their marketing.

Like, if you’re worried about hackers stealing your credit card, you don’t need a VPN. You need a chill pill.

You’ll think I’m crazy, and you’re not wrong, but: sneakernet.

Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I’m stuck with one conclusion: shit’s expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.

So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.

On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I’ve picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of most of them and it doesn’t look like they’re going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see “lifetime” sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.

I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it’s something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don’t bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it’s, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It’s a calculated risk.

I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.

I love Debian. I’ve bounced around distros a lot, for various reasons, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Debian.

The problem with reputations — both in terms of Linux distros and just in general — is that they tend to reflect conventional wisdom from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes that conventional wisdom was off-base from the start, and sometimes it’s just outdated.

Like, “Debian is hard” and “Ubuntu is great for beginners”. That was true enough 20 years ago. But today, not really.

My last distro-hop was to Bazzite because Debian didn’t have the latest GPU drivers that I needed (Debian 13 “Trixie” does now, btw). It was just bad timing that I upgraded to a brand-new GPU toward the end of Debian 12’s life cycle. If I’d waited another 6 months (or if I didn’t need good OpenCL/ROCm/Vulkan performance) I probably would’ve stuck with Debian.

I’m fine on Bazzite, but I feel like if I ever hop again, it’ll be back to Debian. Now that I am comfortable with DistroBox, I won’t worry so much about older application packages in Debian repos; if push comes to shove I’ll just run it in a Fedora box or something like that. Drivers are the only thing to worry about, and I’m not likely to upgrade my GPU again for 5+ years so I should be fine.

They could also just quit the yearly refresh cycle. Apple went several years between SE updates. Google could do the same. With changes this minor, why bother? It’s just a marketing gimmick to trick uninformed consumers.

Buy a 9a for cheaper. You can probably even get a regular Pixel 9 for cheaper.

Wow that gpt rewrite is awful. Not just bland as hell but it also changed the meaning. The first sentence is very different.

(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

Unrelated, but can you tell me how you set up your Mac OS 8 Platinum theme?

Do they even say what processor it has? All I see is “4-nanometer, 5G IoT SoC platform from MediaTek” which means nothing to me.

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?