Good question - does the browser plug in sync to the internet or is any part of it internet accessible? I’ve not used it. I just know a lot of people are put off by the idea of their passwords being “in the cloud” or otherwise accessible through the internet. Looking at the add-on for Firefox, it looks like it communicates with the local keepassxc instance, which should be fine for many people.

Thanks. I was not aware of this option.

krename is another excellent, but not as well known as it should be, KDE app.

krename can rename files and directories, and directories recursively, to almost anything. You can rename:

• using information from the files or about the files (image info, date / time info, etc)
• with templates (like #### for incrementing 0001, 0002, 0003, etc)
• by adding parts of the original file name (first three characters then the last 4 characters, for example)
• using find and replace (spaces to underscore, remove special characters, etc), including regular expressions
• by changing case

or with a mix of everything.

krename has a simple mode and an advanced mode for renaming, so you don’t have to jump into the deep end with the features.

You do have to be careful with some of the file info functions - it will happily try to rename a movie or a pdf with (non-existent) image EXIF info, for example. That would result in a file with a name you did not intend.

krusader is a dual-paned file manager for KDE. It runs on Linux (of course), MS Windows, and Mac OSX.

Folder sync is what makes krusader outstanding, even if you don’t care about dual-pane file management. Open the two folders you want to sync in the panes and go to Tools > Synchronize Folders. You can synchronize both ways, exclude files, delete lone files, etc. Very powerful.

Being a KDE app, krusader does not skimp on features, so there are lots of other things that krusader can do.

link: https://krusader.org/

Around 4 or 5 years ago, the Audacity project was acquired by a company that has several other open source music / audio related programs. The first few months did not go well because the company did several things with Audacity that the community didn’t like (like the telemetry that others have mentioned). It seemed like the company was trying to take an uber-popular open source project and convert it into something not in keeping with community expectations. Some forks of Audacity were started.

As others have said, the controversy seems to have died down. Gentoo at least, and probably many other Linux distros, have Audacity and not the forks in their repositories.

A little trick for people who are worried about putting business / work passwords in web-hosted managers such as Bitwarden: put just the username in Bitwarden, and put all the full information into KeepassXC.

Bitwarden will recognize the site and fill in the username - meaning you are at the correct site and are not being phished. Then, you can fill in the password from KeepassXC. This gives the benefits of browser-based managers while keeping more sensitive passwords (and recovery info) local-only.

Just to be clear, there is no official app for Android (and, I assume iPhone). If you are using SyncThing on desktop or laptop computers, there are downloads at the official syncthing.net site. On Linux, it should be available from your distribution.

In addition, carts of MS Windows computers (before everyone went 1-to-1) were not great in the classroom - students would save documents to the C drive and then the next day, on a different computer, they shockingly couldn’t find their documents. When my school had a legacy MS windows cart and a couple of Chromebook carts, the students would groan and grumble if their class ended up getting the MS Windows cart.

Also, because MS Windows had (and still has) much higher hardware requirements, the MS Win computers were much more expensive AND time consuming for the techs to maintain. Couldn’t really justify throwing out and replacing a $1000 computer (back in the day). A $200 Chromebook, no big deal. And, with 1-to-1, we can try to get the parents to pay to replace a broken Chromebook. I don’t think we could ask them to replace a much more expensive MS Windows computer.

Yeah, I think this happens somewhere in Germany every few years. MS then makes a concerted effort to woo some politicians back, and a few years later we have news that a city or state is moving back to MS. Yes, it is good that cities / states are trying Linux and challenging MS, but there is soo much more to any of this than technical superiority or licensing fees.

My understanding is that lower fertility follows higher female education for several reasons, including that women in school - and with access to birth control - prefer to wait until finishing school and starting a career before having children. Countries where women have fewer educational and fewer career opportunities, people often start having babies sooner, and more babies overall.

Another oft-mentioned factor is social safety nets such as social security (as much as that can count as a safety net). Areas with no or weak elder support outside of the family tend to have bigger families. Shockingly, this was also the case in the “developed” world back before they developed. Ask older adults in the USA how many brothers and sisters their grandparents had and it is probably a lot more than the next generation had, and the next, etc.

Do colonized people have lower life expectancy or do their children? Or both? Certainly, exploited people may also be living in (and unable to escape from) a society with poor elder care and insufficient safety nets such as social security or other retirement options. Which, of course, makes having lots of kids a totally rational decision. And also limits the ability of many women to participate in the economy outside of the home, which can also slow the development of the country / area’s economy.

Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.

Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.

Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn’t escape. And, of course, government jobs.

Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan’s Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.

I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn’t say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.

I understand the feeling, but I think this outcome is probably the best we could hope for, given the situation. If he had tried to impose fines or imprisonment, one of the higher courts would probably have intervened and the sentencing would never have happened.

Education is one area where GenAI is having a huge impact. Teachers work with text and language all day long. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ideally, for example, they should “differentiate” for EACH and EVERY student. Of course that almost never happens, but second best is to differentiate for specific groups - students with IEPs (special ed), English Learners, maybe advanced / gifted.

More tech aware teachers are now using ChatGPT and friends to help them do this. They are (usually) subject area experts, so they can quickly read through a generated or modified text and fix or remove errors - hallucinations are less (ime) of an issue in this situation. Now, instead of one reading that only a few students can actually understand, they have three at different levels, each with their own DOK questions.

People have started saying “AI won’t replace teachers. Teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don’t.”

Of course, it will be interesting to see what happens when VC funding dries up, and the AI companies can’t afford to lose money on every single interaction. Like with everything else in USA education, better off districts may be able to afford AI, and less-well-off (aka black / brown / poor) districts may not be able to.

I think “interactive clipart” is a great description. You are, I believe, totally correct that (at least for now) GenAI can’t do what professionals can do, but it can do better than many / most non-professionals. I can’t do art to save my life, and I don’t have the money to pay pros to make the mundane, boring everyday things that I need (like simple, uncluttered pictures for vocabulary cards). GenAI solves that problem for me.

Similarly, teachers used to try to rewrite complex texts for students at lower reading levels (such as English Learners). That took time and some expertise. Now, GenAI does it prolly many tens of thousands of times a day for teachers all over the USA.

I think, at least for the moment, that middle / lower level is where GenAI is currently most helpful - exactly the places that, in earlier times, were happy with clipart.

Am I correct in seeing this as the company is claiming that courts of law cannot require them to transfer control of an account from one user to a different user? This despite the fact that doing so has been fairly standard practice for years now?

Personally, I think the lawyers for The Site Previously Known As Twitter have a very weak argument. However, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so there’s also that.