Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. I think speed and accuracy of reading is also pretty low (I read like 80 wpm and 80% accuracy somewhere, but i couldn’t immediately find a good source for that).

If you’re on a text forum like this you’re probably well above the average person, and your experiences are not universal.

That said, I don’t have any data on hand about readability so you could be right. I’m sure people have studied it.

I think it’s partly because many people are only semi literate, and breaking the text up helps people read it. A larger block of text is "intimidating’

Yes, I am very aggressive about turning off notifications. The use case I had in mind is texts from friends, and I don’t want to turn those off. Like someone texts me something that requires thought or online connectivity, but I’m on the subway or at a concert. I want to snooze the message so it’ll remind me in a couple hours.

Sometimes for really important stuff I’ll set a timer myself, but that’s more steps than if the OS just had a “remind me later” built in.

I found a setting that alleged to enable snoozing, but it doesn’t seem to work. This is an older android phone though.

It would be helpful if my phone had a built in snooze function. Sometimes I get a text and I want to snooze it for an hour. Just dismiss the notification and remind me later.

mostly I avoid a lot of the big drains (social media, other than lemmy) and tell people I’ll get back to them within 24 hours.

I tell people I have a 24 hour response window. Barring exceptional circumstances, I’ll get back to a message within 24 hours. Often faster, but that’s not guaranteed.

Outside of like NYC you have a car. It’s a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go “no because I feel so”. Or, “one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles”.

I would prefer basic, subtle, black. I don’t want rainbows and lights. I’m very function over form.

I’d also rather play a game on medium settings where it runs flawlessly and doesn’t make the fans go hard, than at high settings with worse performance.

Yeah I think a lot about the guy I knew that took a job at palantir. When asked about working on questionable stuff, he just shrugged. He was always nice to people he knew personally, so far as I can tell, but bigger picture stuff didn’t seem to matter to him

Dislike:

• poor search engine results
• relatively small

I want it to get to a level where you find the good stuff reddit used to have. Like niche hobbies, detailed analysis, etc.

I’m doing my part, I guess

will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?

Seems unlikely.

As to your broader point about the tools themselves not being bad, the root problem remains capitalism, or “a few people have unaccountable power over many”

I feel like the current AI stuff has been net negative. It prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, but then didn’t produce quality results.

I think I remember some doge goon asking online about using an LLM to parse JSON. Many people don’t understand things.

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

I don’t think I know anyone who’s cheated. But I also hang out with a lot of polyamorous people, where cheating is possible but I feel like is less common.

Huh. I don’t think I know anyone who cheats so I guess I got lucky. Your post is plausible

games? I found a civilization port for the phone and it sucked up a lot of time. Turn based so you can do it for a few minutes at a time: https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv

learn a language? duolingo and other apps are out there

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

Funny, because when I go to the suburbs or other sparsely populated areas, walking around without anybody else feels dystopian. Feels like a post-apocalyptic setting, where everyone else got taken by aliens or plague or something.