Windows becoming a Linux distribution.

not what I want, I want Windows (as in, the existing Windows codebase) to become FOSS, if that happened, we would no longer need to care about anyone switching to Linux, in fact I might then install a FOSS Windows myself

I remember already playing it through Wine in like 2009 or so, so all that is new is that it’s now a decompiled version.

Alcohol damages the body, phones definitely don’t do that.

I remember being a child and early teenager before anyone I knew had mobile Internet. Many of us engaged in highly disruptive behavior, including behavior harmful to others, when bored.

Researchers believe that the students, especially younger ones, may have turned to more disruptive behavior when they no longer had access to their phones.

Yeah, no shit? Phones tend to serve as a distraction that kills boredom; disruptive behavior is frequently (maybe usually) the result of boredom.

“One conjecture is that this resembles, to some degree, withdrawal symptoms,” he said. “Students are unhappy and disruptive the moment their phones are taken away.”

They’re understandably bored and then, understandably, try to kill their boredom in other, more disruptive ways. I for one very much prefer students being on their phones (or other devices) to beating each other up, damaging property, or insulting each other in psychologically damaging ways out of boredom! No idea what about this is supposed to resemble withdrawal symptoms.

I haven’t seriously used it myself, but maybe Qt Quick is somewhat like you’re looking for?

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qmlapplications.html

The main question I have is this: is it going to be replaced by something better (such as federated services)?

Or will this just mean the Internet as a whole will lose lots of users? That, I think, wouldn’t be desirable. Whatever one may think of Meta, they’ve definitely done a lot to popularize the Internet as a mainstream technology, which by itself is a good thing, though if they use Meta platforms, it ought to be only the first step.

I’ve never bought VPN access, so am not sure; but don’t you need to have a bank account or even credit card to pay for VPNs anyway? How many very young people are even capable of paying for VPN access?

Does it really seem to you like the forces of freedom are winning? Not to me. :(

The second one is the one they’re (at least mainly) concerned about…

A fairly well known German news site that specializes in digital policy certainly published an article https://netzpolitik.org/2026/phishing-signal-unkenntnis-allerorten/ that expressed the opinion that switching to Wire because of this is complete nonsense and pretty much everyone in the decision-making process has no idea what they’re doing.

Do you really think that you will get better answers on non-topical questions from these chatbots than from generic LLMs that are free to use anyway?

because when I wrote the above comment, around 80% or 90% of my lemmy homepage was just your posts, which felt kinda spammy

bro are you just mass-crossposting things from reddit or what? Those camel case titles aren’t really common here, you know.

For technical work, AI can definitely be helpful, but as a tool, not replacement. I work in software development and have used AI to tell me why test runs were running out of memory, after a few suggestions that didn’t work, it did give me the right answer (it was a wrong and unnecessary annotation). Also things like “what is the syntax for configuring a proxy with this-or-that command”.

The thing about technical work is that no matter if the solution is made by humans or AI, you still have to, and can, verify if it actually works. If you ask AI factual questions you genuinely don’t know the answer to and have no way of verifying, it’s your own fault if they are wrong.

Yeah, not really a new or surprising realization at all.

That is good news…

So, uh, I assume the Dutch government will heavily push back against any ideas to ban social media for young people in the EU? After all, a public forgejo instance is also “social media”, and surely they will find it too costly to implement an age check there? Riiiight?

Right now I can access it. They seem to have a status page https://fhf-lemmyworld.instatus.com/ that says that earlier today there were some problems for approximately an hour? I don’t have more information than that.

If we’re going to wildly speculate, hey, isn’t this what we have AI for nowadays?

I asked ChatGPT: “give me ideas what the abbreviation WLBR might stand for if that is the name of a piece of image editing software”. Here’s the result:

🧠 Professional / technical-sounding

• Wide Layer Blending & Rendering
• Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher
• Weighted Light Balance Renderer
• Wavelet-Based Light & Blur Reconstruction
• White-Level Balance & Retouch

🎨 Creative / artistic branding

• We Love Better Retouching
• Wild Light & Bold Retouch
• Wavelength Brush
• Wonder Lens: Blur & Refine
• Whitelight Brush

⚡ Modern / software-product style

• WizLayer Build & Render
• WarpLab: Blend & Refine
• Web-Level Bitmap Renderer
• Workflow Lens & Brush Renderer
• WLB Renderer (treat WLBR as a stylized acronym)

🧩 Slightly abstract (like many real apps)

• Wavelength-Based Rasterizer
• Layered Bitmask Refinement
• Light Balance Reconstruction Engine
• Wideband Luminosity Brush & Retouch

🧠 If you want it to feel like real software naming

Most image tools (like Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) don’t strictly spell out acronyms anymore—they use:

• suggestive tech words (Layer, Light, Render, Brush)
• or abstract brand terms

So something like:

WLBR = “WaveLight Brush & Render”

feels believable without being overly literal.

(end of ChatGPT response)

Out of these, I think “Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher” works best. But interesting that ChatGPT thinks “GIMP” doesn’t “strictly spell out” an acronym anymore, or that “Photoshop” ever did?!

Is WLBR supposed to be an abbreviation for something? I realize it is a reference to the mascot Wilber, but apart from that?

I think it was after Diamond/Pearl that they were forced to remove the game corner so they could be deemed suitable for children…

The thing is that I remember playing the game corner, especially the one in gen 3. It taught me that casinos are very boring and frustrating places which I’ll inevitably get tired of after a few minutes. I’ve never used a real-life casino in part because, if it’s anything like it was portrayed in Pokémon, why would that be a fun activity?

OSM is just a geographical database. It by itself doesn’t have any user-facing features at all. If there are such features somewhere, they are features of a specific frontend to that database.

I don’t think there’s a way to do what you want directly on openstreetmap.org but you can achieve your goal with https://overpass-turbo.eu/ for example.