The slightly worrying part is though, that they apparently were in an ionized state before… 😬

Blizzard: WHAT THE HELL?

Wouldn’t that not just be British spelling meaning the same and coming with the same ambiguity?

Well, anyway, better stay away from high level electrostatic fields, just to be on the safe side! ;-)

That is great news! Workers unite!

Although I actually came here to tell what a strange word “unionized” is.
I am an engineer and at first I was like “They have WHAT???”
Took me some moments and actually reading the article to figure it out. :-)

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…

Basically all the Lego games (although 13y olds might already find them too child-like, depends…).
They all have split screen, so are suitable for couch (or desk) coop.
Also the slightly older ones are quite inexpensive when buying them during sales (a few €).

Special recommendation: Lego City Undercover.

Another fun couch-coop-capable game would be SuperTux, a Super-Mario-Cart like game.
This one is OSS and therefore completely free!

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…

Well, my KDE-based distro on my 10-year-old cheapo (350€) laptop feels snappier than Win11 on my brand new 1500€ work-laptop.
Admittedly, there are some company specific things like security scanner apps (and the mandatory MS-Office behemoth…) that are not present on the Linux-machine, but it is still a 20-core/64GByte high end machine behaving more sluggish than a 2-core/8GByte totally outdated potato…
So, I am not really surprised about OP’s snappiness observation.