From what I understand Ireland has very little natural gas, very little coal and a not particularly large amount of peat. If they didn't shift towards importing all of that would be gone in the very near future.

It's a bit weird how it gets branded as a solely green move when there's clearly other motives for it.

If it wasn't for it no longer being supported by iOS I'd still be using a 2016 SE and the only things I'd seriously miss are an OLED screen (so good for using the phone in dark spaces) and wireless charging (basically for peace of mind if the charging port ever breaks)

As it stands the kind of people who want a smaller phone almost by definition need to be a bit savvier than the market in general to know such a thing still exists and along with that will have greater skepticism towards Android phones having any kind of post market support.

It'd basically have to come from Samsung to hit the all the price/quality/trust requirements. Feel like they've already got a lot of the pieces there with their corporate targeted XCover range just shrink them down a bit.

Did you investigate using a MiniDisc player at any point? I could see a minidisc player with some kind of shell and a DIY inline remote working with relatively little. Never actually used one enough to know how much they'd withstand a kid though!

Def get the impression they're driving people away who were enjoying bluesky previously, there's just so much of them on the feeds atm.

I was surprised too, I've brought far weirder and dodgy looking stuff through security

the X230 didn't last as long, the efficiencies of the M1 macbooks were too good to ignore. Gave it to my mother since because she wanted "an old laptop that just works"

I think POVs in forums are often much more about framing a thing to justify your beliefs than actually hitting at your own personal implicit values (it's plausible the poster believes leisure is a waste of time and lives by that belief but I doubt it) so I wanted to stick with the original POV approach to highlight the ways it seemed incorrect.

Parents cover the fees and give the kids an allowance for the rest; either the kids budget poorly or the allowance fails to really account for just how expensive the first few weeks are with all the books you're expected to buy?

This reads as though the goal of reading is to bolster your career opportunities as a developer? If it's not connected to your career then it shouldn't be viewed that way, it should be viewed as a kind of leisure and the challenges/rewards involved should be compared to the alternatives there (i.e. is the investment in time of being able to understand more complex novels returning a level of personal fulfilment that makes it potentially a more rewarding focus than some more immediately gratifying leisure activity)

It may still be of very low value but viewing the prospect specifically as being damaging to your career opportunities seems like an incorrect perspective to be starting from.

At the same time, as someone who was very addicted to the internet but only got a smartphone/broadband (previously having a 40 hour monthly limit) in my late teens I do look back at just how much I read then compared to ever since mournfully. I didn't grow up in a house that valued reading much so it was a lot of work to even get started regularly reading stuff with no knowledge base of what I might even like to start from. I'm still able to read a few semi-challenging novels a year but it's an insane amount of work to get into the zone now and I can't picture teenage me with a smartphone and constant internet access ever managing to build up any kind of habit at all.

As far as writing is concerned, I think how aggressively LLMs want to rephrase everything is a big issue and I'm not sure how it can be resolved. As autoprompts get more and more florid it's probably unsurprising people are going to get lazier and lazier at precisely phrasing anything. I tried using them building out my CV earlier this year and it was a great sounding board but the actual text it was giving me was atrocious.

This whole thing feels more like its about getting a snappy word out there than anything achievable.

It's a walking simulator though, if you're not into those kind of things in general then you're probably not gonna be into it.

Looks like the hot 100 is more confusing than I thought; I see I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys only peaked at 6 because it somehow only came out after its peak in popularity, whatever that means (maybe it was only a music video for a few weeks or something or not physically available or something?)

This sounds like someone who just feels like they need to provide tangible evidence for their reason being "I feel terrible"