I’m going to start saying “that’s a one-brainer” to describe decisions that are simple but not quite obvious.

Ideally the ranking algorithm would be transparent (open-source) and customizable. I DO think it should be regulated, but I don’t think mandating chronological sorting is a reasonable solution.

There should also be a way to easily sort things. Bluesky has a custom feed system, and I think Mastodon does too. I’m not a huge user of either so I’m not sure which is better. But ideally I would NOT have a mix of news, politics, art, friends, family, etc. That’s probably why I prefer Lemmy’s community-centered format to most social media’s account-centered format.

Here on Lemmy, I don’t typically use “new”. My subscribed communities are low-traffic enough that I suppose I could without losing my mind, but “hot” or “active” become better as activity increases.

People who want a chronological feed are stuck in a 2010 mindset.

It worked back then, when the primary use case was just real-life friends and family. It does not scale to a “friends” list of 1000+ accounts, with news, politics, etc.

“Algorithms” are not the bogeyman. The problem is what they do, and the corrupt incentives behind them.

This is in no way an endorsement of the status quo.

Most of them were full of bots and scammers even before the AI craze. I can only imagine how bad they are now.

I’ll say that I had a good experience with Coffee Meets Bagel but that was years ago. Their gimmick at the time was that they only showed you up to 10 profiles per day so it didn’t incentivize doomscrolling like Tinder.

Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

Okay but also fuck you.

That’s the exact opposite of what your graph shows. Did you not see the huge spike after Trump’s second inauguration in the graph you posted?

More arrests under Trump, with a lower conviction rate.

IIRC research shows similar brain activity between reading books and listening to audio books.

But splitting attention is another matter. I listen to podcasts a lot, and often I’ll finish an episode and realize I have no idea what happened because I was focused on work.

When it comes to audiobooks, I try not to split my attention because of that. Sometimes I’ll listen to the audio book while reading along. For me that seems to improve my speed and focus compared to either one on its own. I’ll crank up the audio speed to around 3x, which is too fast when just listening but fine when reading along. And the audio keeps me at a steadier pace than reading alone.

The cheapest options I’ve found over the years are mostly black Friday sales on lifetime plans. Be careful who you trust, of course. There are lots of scammy ones out there, but there are also some reputable companies that have been around a good long while still offering lifetime plans. Check reviews before buying.

Over the years I’ve picked up cheap(ish) lifetime memberships with pCloud, Koofr, and Filen. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of them.

I use Borg to create encrypted backups on an external HD, and then I periodically sync that to cloud providers. I prefer E2EE services but it’s not a strict requirement for backups since Borg encrypts them anyway.

On Windows I recommend Kopia instead of Borg, at least until Borg gets an official stable windows build (planned for 2.0, currently in beta)

I exclude most things I could re-download like games and movies so 1TB covers my needs pretty well.

For those downvoting: please explain why, and don’t just downvote as a knee-jerk reaction to the bonkers-sounding headline. The purpose of science is not to reinforce conventional wisdom.

If this is true, we need to understand why.

If it is not, we need to understand why.

I’m not familiar with Pediatric Exercise Science as a journal, but from a quick lookup it seems legit enough, so I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand just because it doesn’t jibe with my biases.

I’ve only had time to skim the paper itself. Nothing jumps out at me as outrageous or delegitimizing, though I am left with questions about the self-reporting, and the conclusions from the paper seem to be far less conclusive that the article headline suggests (as usual…).

I also wonder how “screen time” from the 2008 and 2015 data sets would realistically compare to “screen time” today. The digital landscape has changed a lot in the past 18 years. I am older than the Internet, and my experience with computers as a teenager was very different from today’s teenagers’. The majority of my screen time at that age involved a lot of problem solving and creativity. I don’t think that’s the lion’s share of screen time today, but it’s certainly not absent either.