Off course, that’s fair. This was a while ago, but I believe my point was more generally about whether to rename an existing popular application. I think it’s commendable that you make that effort to protect the kids you work with.

Plenty of words have multiple meanings, but I rarely think of them when I’m using a word to mean a specific thing. I know the meanings of gimp, but I never think of them when using GIMP; perhaps because it’s capitalized and I always assumed it stood for something (and it does).

But anyway, and more importantly than that, what you describe is a problem that you might run into with any word.

A small subset of the world population can view it as an insult, but for the vast majority it means nothing. Sort of like the word “negro” in Spanish, which some English people take offense to when they hear it. I even searched “gimp” in 3 different search engines, and the first 2 to 5 results were always the GIMP. Most people have no other concept for the word.

Let me put it this way: you say you’d favor Kira, but how do you know that there aren’t some kids in Egypt, or Russia, or someone else in the world, that take offense to the word “Kira”?

The podcasts and other media consumption will probably be what most benefit you in the long term, and something like Anki and Duolingo I think are good complements for that.

Any alternatives to Duolingo that I think would be worth replacing it, would have to be something that is more focused on the specific language that you are learning, i.e. Nicos Weg for German (and I don’t personally know any for Italian, sorry). Most other general language learning websites/apps would probably be running into the same issues and limitations as Duo, and which one to use depends most on personal preference; however, there is one I’ve heard of called Italki (there may be more) which basically acts as a language exchange app, where you connect talk to people who natively speak the language you are learning, and they can give you input. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard good things.

Other than that, you have certified online/in person courses, but obviously those are not as convenient as Duo, and they cost money (probably significantly more than even a Duo subscription).

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, but one thing which I personally enjoy is looking up and trying to read children’s books; and I mean like “90% picture & 10% text” books which are made for parents to read to their very young kids. And as you get more comfortable, try finding and reading increasingly harder books/stories online.

This is frustrating, but it has always been an issue; and usually the more you advance in a language tree the more it happens, because fewer people have found the problem and reported it. It’s a human problem that comes with not considering every possibility when creating an exercise. I’d imagine that using AI (in addition to humans) would actually help reduce cases like this, since they could be detected before users run into them.

That’s a bit over the top, in my opinion. I’ve tried plenty of courses, and Duolingo is pretty good to get a hang of the basics of a language.

I’d say, in my experience, the hardest part of learning a language is getting started, and I feel Duolingo is perfect just for that. To get deeper knowledge and become more comfortable, one should probably switch once they start feeling more comfortable with the alphabet (if there is a specific one), and with the basic vocabulary and grammar.

EDIT: Forgot to add but another advantage of Duolingo, is that it’s also great to get a taste and basic feel for different languages; and that can be especially useful for someone who is looking to learn a new language but can’t quite decide on one.

Any tolerance for those ideologies

Again, you are misrepresenting what is being said. There is no tolerance being given to those ideologies, neither by me nor by the other user. You are arguing in bad faith and misrepresenting what is being said; the very thing you accused the other person of. There is really no point in continuing to talk if you’re going to do that, so I’ll just leave a link to another comment I wrote that expands on this, and I’ll be going.

I think you have misunderstood what the other user was saying, and/or are not thinking through what you are saying.

You said “All areas should be nazi-free areas”, but unless you are advocating for putting them up against a wall, that is not possible to do. That is what the other user meant by “‘Tow it outside the environment’ is not an option”. By the way, I think that expression is a reference to this; it’s not very relevant to this topic, but might help illustrate the point they were making.

Another alternative, like the other user mentioned, would be “lifelong reeducation camps”; but not only does that have questionable morality behind it, it’s also not a view that merges very will with the idea of abolishing the police and especially prison systems, which so many on the left, especially the more libertarian left (which btw a lot of Beehaw seems to lean towards, including me, and I think the other user as well), subscribe to.

Like the saying goes: “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity/ignorance”, or something like that; there are real life examples of former Nazis/white supremacists changing their views just from interacting with other people outside that group. When you think of a Nazi, you’re probably thinking about the smart and actually evil ones that tend to be at the top, but a large part (I think the vast majority) are just the product of fear and ignorance (think average German during WW2); and when you try to erase/separate those people from society, one way or another, you’re often just feeding into that ignorance and fear.

Over the past several days I’ve seen you draw out many good faith disagreements about racism or nazism into what seem like intentionally blurry “just asking questions” type derailments whereby you try to shift the topic of the discussion to other, emotional or tangential details and or try to misrepresent the issue at hand to make the racism or nazism seem not that bad.

This does not appear to me at all what is happening, at least in this thread, and I would even go as far as to call it gaslighting.

The other user literally said if 10 people are at a table and 1 is a Nazi, then all 10 are Nazis. They have also labelled any opposing view as “sympathizing towards Nazis” in another comment. That is pretty damn fucking far from good faith. And yet, somehow, because this other user pointed out the problem with this type of thinking, you are now accusing them of not being good faith? Are you serious? People are refusing to have any kind of nuanced view of the situation, accusing everyone in that situation of being a Nazi and people who disagree of being sympathizers, but somehow the other person is the one not acting in good faith, or using emotional arguments?

I really don’t want to be rude, but your comment reads like textbook projection. They also never said anything to defend Nazis or the far right, not once (*), so that makes you the one who is misrepresenting what they are saying and doing. I encourage you to keep everything you said in mind, but re-read the thread through a more objective lens.

I really didn’t want to get involved in this conversation, but some of these comments really frustrated me, and yours was just the straw that broke the camel’s back; I had to let some of the frustration out. If you just want to ignore me, that’s fine.

(*) At least as far as this discussion is concerned; I do not have an all seeing eye.

I can easily go without using my phone for extended periods of time, and always have been. I’ve never really been “phone addicted”, and never used my phone during class - despite having one for the entirety of my school years.

That still never stopped me from not paying any attention in class. Drawing on a book/desk, talking to the person next to me, looking out the window, or just spending time with my imagination were things I did too often, and I never needed a phone for any of it.

I seriously doubt banning phones would make much of a difference, other than pissing plenty of kids off. You’re essentially being forced to go to a place, every day, where you will be stripped of your personal belongings and are not allowed to be in contact with the outside world.

I’m talking about first and third party websites tracking you. I don’t use Chrome or Opera, but I’d rather only have to trust a browser of my choice, than having to place my trust in thousands of different websites.

The point is, if you care about tracking and privacy, you shouldn’t be using Vivaldi in the first place.

According to this Vivaldi protects you from tracking about the same as Chrome and Opera, and both of those provide less tracking protection than even Edge.

When this topic comes up people usually bring up search engines that still use either Google or Bing’s index, so if you want to look at something completely independent of those:

• Qwant

• Brave Search

• Mojeek

Sort of, it depends on implementation. There are some techniques (which I don’t really know) that will allow a 32 bit OS to address more than 4GB, but natively it can’t for the same reason that the process will still be limited to 4GB.

Perhaps you already know this but: 32 bits can only represent 2^32 numbers (4.294.967.296), which is how many bytes 4GB is equivalent to, and so anything after that cannot be reached. This also means 64 bits can address up to something like 17 billion GB, or about 16 EB.

You don’t need the friends, that is just one example. You have to think of the general concept and logic; Lemmy, as well as kbin, have communities. If one place manages to secure all or most major communities, they can pull the same thing. And Threads is meant to be a Twitter replacement, so you do have the bit about connections, as well as influencers. It’s like Mastodon, but completely centralized.

So the same logic applies: if Threads joins the Fediverse and most people go to Threads, then most users who are not on Threads will still end up having a lot of discussions on Threads and following a lot of people there. Then some day, once Threads gets big enough, it will stop federating and Fediverse users will be forced to move if they want to keep those connections. Meanwhile, Mastodon dies. Lemmy and kbin might survive because they fill a different niche; however, if instances start federating with Threads and making it possible to follow people on there, then the same exodus will happen.

We can learn from history, or we can let it repeat itself. Federating with Threads would mean a huge failure to learn from history. And then maybe ten years later you’ll be the one trying to warn someone else as they tell you how that time it’s totally different.

Copy pasted from my other comment:

There’s been lots of discussions about this already, but the short version is that this is a play book tactic used by big companies to take over a sector.

I didn’t experience this at the time, so the details might be off, but one example, as I understand it, is what Google did with Google Messages a decade ago or so. They federated using some other service that existed before Activity Pub I think, and most casual users just flocked to it with no idea about any federation. Once it got big, they just stopped federating, and anyone who was not on Google Messages but had friends who were (which most did since GM was so popular) had to change to GM.

Other similar such things have happened before with other products and in other markets, and that’s what people fear will happen with threads.

There’s been lots of discussions about this already, but the short version is that this is a play book tactic used by big companies to take over a sector.

I didn’t experience this at the time so the details might be one, but one example, as I understand it, is what Google did with Google Messages a decade ago or so. They federated using some other service that existed before Activity Pub I think, and most casual users just flocked to it with no idea about any federation. Once it got big, they just stopped federating, and anyone who was not on Google Messages but had friends who were (which most did since GM was so popular) had to change to GM.

Other similar such things have happened before with other products and in other markets, and that’s what people fear will happen with threads.

Well, there isn’t much Pornhub can do to lawmakers. All they can do is block users in areas that elect those lawmakers, and hope those users take it out on those lawmakers. Possibly by electing different ones in the future who will change that law.

It’s sort of the same logic as striking or protesting; you can’t affect the people responsible directly, so you do something that inconveniences regular people who will then hopefully take it out on the people responsible in one way or another.

If you think that “privacy” is the wrong term: granted. But sensible deletion protocols are not too much to ask for.

Well, that is in a nutshell what I am arguing. I’m not inherently against the ability to delete things, as it can be quite useful as a quick means to say “I take this back”, or “this information I shared is wrong, so I’m removing it” (although in that case I would opt to use an edit). Even “I’m embarrassed about this, so I don’t want more people to look at it” is a good enough reason that I would respect, and for which I would delete the thing if it was in my possession. Essentially, I just don’t think it should be treated as a privacy issue, because that might give a lot of people the wrong idea.

That’s not what is demanded. No one demands that the audience (users) forget what I said (the comment), much less: immediately. No one is asking for mind-erasing power or the ability to remove screenshots from other people’s client devices.

Well, that why it is an analogy; the forgetting is equivalent to erasing from someone else’s storage. You have no real control over it. Other people can say they do, but you don’t know that. And that is what is being demanded - right now I can already “delete” my comments and Beehaw will indicate to other instances that it was deleted, but it can’t control whether they do it, and it has no way to know if they really deleted something or just hid it from public view.

Differentiating between a client and a provider becomes extra tricky when you remember everyone can start up their own instance and still be essentially just a client - and, I think this is also worth mentioning, people can create their own backends that also federate using ActivityPub, but which are not open-source, and you’ll have no idea what goes on in their servers. In the bar analogy, this would be people watching a stream of the mic at home; or another place, other than a bar with the same set-up, streaming and recording what goes on in that bar.

Also, if no one is demanding that things be deleted from client devices, then logically nothing should stop someone from sharing it with other people/clients. And if you believe otherwise, then as example: what if someone posts a comment, I reply, and then they edit it to put me in a bad light? Is it an invasion of privacy for me to show what it said previously?

This is not a privacy issue; you cannot demand privacy for something you shared willingly and publicly.

Respectfully, I find it more counterproductive, and even harmful, to encourage and spread the idea that people should have any expectation of privacy regarding things they have shared publicly.

After reading some more comments, I think I came up with a good analogy to explain this issue, and I wanted to share.

Think of websites like a bar that also has an open mic.

Now, when I go to a bar, I don’t want to have to give the bouncers and staff my full name as well as my address. I also wouldn’t want them to know that I just came, for example, from a store where I was looking for a vacuum, and then have them warn a vacuum seller about it. A vacuum seller who is then going to sit next to me, while I’m trying to have a drink, and show me a pamphlet regarding the “amazing vacuum” he has for sale.

Ideally, I can also look for a bar that will allow me to come in costumed and not show my face. Or I could ask the bar to delete footage of me at some point, and to not store my ID if I do have to show it to a bouncer at the entrance.

All of that is relatively feasible and within the realm of reason; and all of that are things that privacy advocates might advocate for.

However, what is not feasible, or within the realm of reason, or what privacy advocates tend to advocate for, is the ability for me to willingly go up on stage, say something on the mic which I immediately regret, and then ask everyone present to forget it ever happened and delete any footage they might have of it. No reasonable person would ask for something like that, because it is not a reasonable request.

That is how regular websites work. With federated websites, that becomes enhanced; it’s like if the bar you’re in has a camera pointed at the microphone, and transmits both video and audio directly into several other bars. So when you go up to that mic, you better make sure you’re okay with what you are saying being made public and available to anyone.