If you just want it to work, and you’re coming from Windows or Mac, use Ubuntu. It’s a nice intro, and the hardware support is excellent.

Many of the programs recommend therapy first. No one wants to drink themselves to death, even though it feels like that sometimes.

The guilt and shame is brutal, and shouldn’t be used to try to change someone into behaving better. It’s like spanking you kids, which is illegal now (at least whew I’m at).

Same, but the community was great. Being around people that understand is so beneficial.

I had 2 interventions in my life and neither worked. In fact, they made it much worse for me.

I suggest that you go to AlAnon and learn a bit about alcoholism before trying anything (btw, AlAnon is not AA, but is a program to help non-alcoholics understand what they’re dealing with.)

Your friend is lucky to have you. Don’t give up on them. It truly is hellish, and they’ll need your support.

Thanks for the recommendation! I love stuff like that.

Sure, if it isn’t copied a million times. You’re assuming it is left on the same disk.

What about your text messages and phone calls?

That’s fair. Adding to my point, with the wealth of information future people will have at their disposal, it could be possible to recreate this time era. That is, to simulate entire cities or countries. Who knows what tech they’ll have or what they’ll want to do with it. My point is that the info from this time period, between the advent of the internet and the widespread use of quantum-safe crypto, will be easily accessible to them, and contains such an accurate record of our daily activities. I’ve had the same email address since 2005 and have never deleted messages, so my email alone could probably be used to create a pretty accurate model of a large chunk of my life. Cross-reference that with the information the people I associate with left behind and they definitely could create such a model.

And, adding further, if you were inclined to create such a simulation, you’d likely want to simulate as many people as possible so that the simulation was as realistic as possible.

I agree with you about today’s models, but the models of the future are sure to be better than today’s.

What makes you say that? Who knows what they’ll want to do in the future. Even the most mundane historic records interest today’s archeologists.

What I meant was that info already exists. It was sent using older crypto.

I think about this often. I think that Millennials, and especially Gen Z, will be the best-documented lives in history. Almost everything you’ve ever done online is sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Once the encryption schemes are broken, posterity will have full access to all of it. They’ll probably study us for hundreds of years—possibly thousands (if we even make it that far as a species).

I’ve also wondered if all of that data collected about a person could be used to recreate them—a digital copy. It probably wouldn’t be perfect, but I bet it would be close enough to be useful.

I’m definitely not excited for people to have access to and study my college Facebook account :⁠-⁠P

Agreed. Sorry. I often hear this kind of stuff IRL from my relatives, so I might be prejudiced.

People bragging about their kids is irritating. However, I hope the girl ends up being a Linux guru :-)

Ah, yes, totally not written by one of her parents. I hate this kind of crap. She noticed that it wasn’t underlined, and they did the rest. Why is this news? No 4-yo. spells “tragedy”.

“Look how special my kid is, everyone!!”

I’m dumb, and had to reread what you wrote. I thought you meant tabs this whole time (doh). I haven’t even used an iPad before, so I didn’t know that feature existed. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen multiple windows of Firefox on Android (but you can have multiple apps open side-by-side).

I think it is unlikely Mozilla would support that feature, given the lack of resources and demand; iPad’s are niche.

That is actually somewhat useful. I don’t know if that use-case is worth it to me, personally, to have a potentially insecure device on my home network, but I suppose you could give it its own network and write decent firewall rules to protect your other gear.

That’s so weird, then, that it’d be so radically different than it is on Android. Why do you think that is?

We’re talking internet here, bub. Cable ads are definitely BS, though.

No, not everybody hates ads. Everybody hates today’s ads, because they’re literally as intrusive and annoying as the designers can make them. I didn’t have a problem with ads 15 years ago, but because I have to pay for my bandwidth, and because ads like to literally block what I’m reading with a giant, 100MB, unskippable video, I use an ad blocker.

Advertising shot itself in the foot, and it isn’t our fault for being pushed so far that we’re fed up with it.