By then, I don’t think that the use of earth’s orbital period around the sun would make sense as a unit of measurement. It is important to track the seasons if you’re living in an agricultural society. But the orbital period of the earth is not consistent across time, nor the time it takes for the earth to rotate. It doesn’t make a good unit of measurement. And don’t get me started on leap years, leap seconds, negative leap seconds, timezones and daylight saving times…

I’d prefer to base the new unit of time based on “Plank time”. About 10^44 of these are about one second. Now if we switch to the duodecimal system we can define 12^41 × Plank time to be our standard unit. It’s about a third of an earth second. 144 of these (12^43) equal roughly 3/4 of a minute. 144 of these (12^45) is about 1.8 hours. 12 of these (12^46) could be the equivalent of a day, 12 of that could be an equivalent of a week, and you can find an equivalent for a year. The duodecimal is unnecessary, but it makes division a bit neater. Now peak a date well before the beginning of human history to avoid the need for negative years (BC / AD) and that’s it.

That way you get a single number that you can manipulate arithmetically. Not like yyyy/mm/dd format where each part is a different length.

This proves nothing. Of course there would be people who wish for any deal regardless of the conditions and it is not surprising that they will confront the government about it.

Israel cares a whole lot about its hostages. Evidence for that are the prices they were willing to pay in the past.

But sure, let’s go with your logic. Why can’t Israel just go carpet-bombing the crowded part in the south of the Gaza strip that all the refugees fled to? It would be a very effective way to eradicate them all. They are so crowded in such a small area that it’s possible to kill a couple hundred thousands in a single day. Wow, Israel has a lot to learn on how to ethnically cleanse a region.

This is simply not true.

There were talks about up to 15 hostages, of 239 in demand for 4 days of ceasefire. Hamas needs this ceasefire desperately to regroup and assess the damages. The chaos now serves Israel well and apparently it puts much more pressure on Hamas. The ground invasion proves very effective. Maybe as Hamas becomes more desperate the “price” for the hostages will drop. Alternatively, if Israel will allow them to regroup, the war will take significantly more time because it will be much harder to eradicate them. Maybe the Israelis know where the hostages are held and after a ceasefire the hostages will be transferred to a different hideout, or smuggled via the tunnels to Egypt and from there to who knows where.

Remind me how many Palestinians support Hamas and its ideology. You cannot make this comparison. Nothing Israel ever did comes near these levels of brutality.

Facebook kind of died and used the momentum it had to reinvent itself. Back in the day I used to see updates from my friends, and I used to interact with them. I stopped using Facebook at some point a few years ago and recently got back to it. I use Marketplace, and in my country people with the same hobby as me seem to interact over Facebook more than anything else. Younger people rarely upload except for a few very active outliers. Most of the content is these clickbaity short videos of 5-minute crafts or live-feeding frogs to slightly larger frogs because Facebook thinks I’m into it for some reason. They just made an addictive never-ending stream of content.

Requiring a headphone jack in 2023 rules out most “flagship” phones. If you’re looking for a mid-range then your odds are better. But if you want a phone with better camera array, then you’re leaving mid-range territory and chances are that you’d have to compromise on either the headphone jack or your camera quality. That’s about what I meant by “compromise” - the requirement for a headphone jack significantly limits your choices.

Well, you can have a DIY version that feels like the real thing, but with more features. All you need is a fairly modern phone of your choice, a strong glue and a brick. You may want to paint it in beige just for the heck of it afterwards.

They did decide for me by the point that a once obvious feature to include in a phone is discarded in all but a very slight number of niche phones where I’d have to compromise on a bunch of other features in return for something that used to be almost mandatory feature at once point.

While I do care about the headphone jack, I am mostly bitter about the manufacturers deciding for me that I don’t need it. I’d heavily trade off 10% reduction in thickness for a user-replaceable battery and a headphone jack, but it was decided for me that a thinner phone is a big improvement.

Back when I was a kid and got my first computer, I was mostly offline except for the occasional dial-up session. I didn’t have much to do on the internet anyway and it was quite expensive. I remember being amazed the first time I have set up to meet a friend over ICQ, rather than a phone call, of being able to communicate with other computers from mine. It didn’t matter whether these computers were at a neighbors’ house, a different city or entirely different country. I was looking forward to the internet giving us ways to connect like never before. No barriers, just directly communicating and bridging cultural differences and whatnot. Little did I knew that this was just one phase, as the internet gets more and more segregated. Rather than connecting with people, it gives you the ability to filter out whatever you don’t agree with, while staying connected with those who share your beliefs. It’s like we are no longer living the same reality and can’t even agree over fundamental things. I miss the old naive days of the internet when we feared viruses and the occasional pedophile in a chat room. Nowadays it’s the possibility of spreading misinformation that could overthrow a government. Either having it going uncontrolled and unregulated, or having a private company in control of such power.

Personally, I think that this should be the choice of an individual user rather than the platform.

It is a lot better than it used to be. Emulation tools got much better over the last couple of years, and there are many things that required applications in the past and now just work from the browser. You can edit documents, send emails, play games and videos, configure devices, edit images. All from the browser - over windows or Linux.

Making the shift to Linux is easier now than it has ever been. Linux caught up, Windows got bloated, emulation and platform agnostic web services gave a lot more options for counteracting Windows main advantage - which is software compatibility. And as Linux gains popularity that is changing for the better as well.

You did pay for a computer. But not just with your money, you pay by being forced into using the services of the company that subsidized the price of your product. Be it Android bloatware that you can’t get rid of, a free version that keeps reminding you about the premium features or simply ads.

Back in the day, the products you bought didn’t keep trying to sell you other products. However, we tend to take for granted the amount and quality and value of services that companies just give for free. Back when free mailbox used to be limited to 6MB, encyclopedias and map services used to cost a lot of money. The sheer amount of things we can do today online without giving a payment method is astonishing. And it is not just because of the advancement in technology. Personally I prefer this model of giving a product for free and using it to promote the paid product as long as it “polite”. Those who would like to get a premium experience will pay.

You could use Linux to avoid paying for software while avoiding the bloatware. Linux had massively improved over the recent years in being noob-friendly. However, you still pay for it with your time as still there are things that are not supported and you have to come up with workarounds. Personally I use Linux, but it took me a while to get comfortable with it. Unlike Windows, I can configure it nearly any way I like. But I can’t recommend this to everyone.

I don’t think that Lemmy will ever be as popular as Reddit used to be. The recent events deflated the platform, and Lemmy will grow in popularity on their expanse. At this point Reddit is in decline while Lemmy is not mature enough as a community. Times are changing, and users who left Reddit either in protest of the recent changes, due to a decline in content quality or because of both of these things will find a different platform. It might be the end of the glory days of link aggregators in the style of Reddit, of AMAs, announcements and celebrities lurking and commenting. It was so nice to stumble across comments by Rick Astley or Peter Mayhew (The original Chewbacca), or your favorite YouTuber. I don’t expect Lemmy to be able to replicate that.