I remember once meeting someone (a woman) on IRC who was over 40 or even 50, I don’t remember the exact age. I remember just being surprised that someone that age would be on the same part of the Internet I was hanging out on. But I don’t think that person was there for any bad purposes.

Mid 2000s. Web forums based on UBB, WBB, vBulletin, phpBB, etc.

Went on to discover wikis at age 11, IRC at age 12, most of my social contacts in my teen years were with people I met online because they were generally a lot nicer than people I met IRL.

I would see nothing wrong with people born after me doing the same, although admittedly those years would have been a lot better if my school hadn’t been full of people I had nothing in common with and I hadn’t needed to use the Internet to socialize.

I think you may be looking for this: https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths

Most people I communicated with at the time were also minors, maybe a few young adults, and it happened almost entirely in public forums, not private conversations.

I first became active on web forums at the age of 10 and didn’t keep my age secret at the time. Not once (!) did I encounter anyone who appeared to be a child predator or anything like that. So forgive me if I don’t see a lot wrong with “kids talking to strangers online” although it certainly depends on the kid’s age and maturity level and also what kind of online space it is.

We shouldn’t do either nor do we need to. Billionaire-owned social media can continue to exist if people want it. The important thing is that there must be alternatives to it.

And the result of literally any new government regulation of “social media” (I still don’t like that term, but if everyone is using it, so am I) at all, including but not limited to age verification, is to make that harder.

because they made friends through social media and have no other communication channels with those friends?

That is the central problem with all of this.

Oh, you want the government to regulate “social media”, like requiring age verification and such things? Because you are noticing young people being “addicted” (what you mean is having a habit, or hobby, that you don’t like) to TikTok or Instagram or what?

OK, have fun without wikis, public git repos, public tech support forums that aren’t financially able to comply with any of these regulations. What do you mean that’s not what you meant! You said social media, social media is any website that allows the general public to publish information and read information published on it, so clearly that’s exactly what you meant!

This https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence needs to be widely remembered again, and quickly before it’s too late to undo the damage.

holy shit not Canada too >:(

The point of democratic elections is, in my mind, to somewhat tame the natural tendency of government to work against the interest of the people. We still need to remember that even a democratic government isn’t the same thing as the people themselves (who for the most part want to live a life where they can do what they like as long as they aren’t harming anyone else), and has its own interests that may be quite different from that of the people… it’s better than a dictatorship, no doubt!

We currently have a very good example of this: a lot of governments around the world are currently passing laws requiring age verification on social media. Did the people ever ask for this? Is it in the interest of the people to have that? Is it harmful to anyone if young people are using social media? No: it’s in the interest of governments to be able to identify people posting on the Internet, it’s in the interest of governments if there aren’t too many different social media sites operating so that they have an easier time monitoring what’s going on on them… it is, I guess, also in the interest of governments that young people aren’t having too much fun and don’t hear too many diverse voices so that school is the main source of information for them and they don’t get distracted too much? Nobody can tell me that any government that’s doing this is acting in the interest of the general population, especially not the ones affected!

Lula was championed for not being Bolsonaro

At least Bolsonaro didn’t break the Internet with an “online safety” law that includes age verification. So much for authoritarianism being a trait of conservatism…

The countries that were ruled as single-party states by communist parties in the 20th century, including those that survive until today, called themselves “socialist” and called the goal they were supposedly working towards “communism”.

Of course all of this ideology was always nonsense. The liberal revolutions of the centuries before that were all about taking power away from the (monarchical/aristocratic) government in order to establish a society in which the government was elected by, and served, the people, and there were no longer any formally defined classes and all inequalities that remained were about income and property, which were (at least ideally) possible to overcome through one’s own achievements… why did communists ever think that the next step after that might be to once again establish a powerful government that serves as the only (or only major) employer, that’s a movement precisely in the other direction, not the natural next step…

So as much as communists may mock the idea that “socialism is when the government does stuff, the more stuff it does the more socialist it is, and when the government does everything it’s communism”, I think that (while very simplified) is certainly a more accurate description of things than what communists claim their movement is about. Government and people are never going to have the same interests and it’s generally a good thing to take power away from the government and let the people handle things through free association; it’s a bad thing to do the opposite.

At some point in your life, you didn’t know who any famous people were.

Probably not a lot. I remember 2009 well enough that if the events of that year are any indication, the next US president will just get a Nobel Peace Price for the achievement of not being Donald Trump.

Yes, I mean that is basically what everyone was joking about during the pandemic… “Marty, whatever happens, do not EVER travel to 2020 or 2021”…

OSM is just a geographical database. It by itself doesn’t have any user-facing features at all. If there are such features somewhere, they are features of a specific frontend to that database.

I don’t think there’s a way to do what you want directly on openstreetmap.org but you can achieve your goal with https://overpass-turbo.eu/ for example.

What I do (assuming I am at home all day) is a cycle of this:

• before going to bed, put a fresh full glass of water beside my bed
• after waking up, first thing I do is drink from it
• most likely I will now need to pee, so do that, and after washing hands, immediately refill my glass
• drink from that glass of water throughout the day when I am even slightly thirsty
• usually when I have finished a glass of water, I need to pee again; if that happens, again refill my glass after doing so
• if I’ve finished a glass of water but do not need to pee, I usually refill it with another drink (e.g. fruit juice) instead
• keep that cycle of refilling after using the toilet going

If I’m spending my day at the office, the first thing I do after arriving is grab a glass of water, but otherwise, same cycle.

Of course, there are many countries in the world with not much history of engaging in conflict at all. Many of them are very small or located in places that have no strategic or economic value to anyone.

The first country I thought of is Liechtenstein.

You may be thinking of https://xkcd.com/1720/ but it’s not the exact same thing.

Why would you expect routing software to route somewhere that no path is mapped?

As for public transport routing, I explained this here https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/50719308/22594280 a while ago.