megrania

I get that ... It's just my impression that the "can't teach an old dog new tricks" mentality is pretty prevalent in general and people might read an article and use it to confirm that mentality, see a phrase like "critical learning period is closed" and say "see, why even try". Not you personally, just to be clear.

So I didn't want to leave that uncommented because I think despite that we should foster a culture of learning at any age.

It might be scientifically accurate but I think the notion of an age cap is misguided. Just because it's harder doesn't mean it's impossible, and the idea of an "age cap" just makes it seem like you shouldn't even try (might just be my interpretation).

Also it's just super helpful to learn something even though you're not perfect.

I've started learning English at 10, put in a lot of work over the years, and it got to near-native in my late 20ies (certified by my language-nerd native-english-speaker wife). At 20 I had trouble booking hostel rooms over the phone.

In my 40ies now and I feel like most of the skills that make "me" today, including playing instruments, programming languages, all kinds of crafts, I learned way past ten and many of them past 20. Started learning Spanish at around 35, nowhere near native but decently conversational. About to start the next course in Catalan soon.

So, this is the one thing where I think people just should ignore the science (which is usually not my stance at all) and get cracking, you can teach an old dog new tricks, and it's always helpful and fun.

Hmm spannend. Bin im letzten Jahr wenig gefahren, weil ich zum einen keinen Pendelweg mehr habe (arbeite von zuhause) und zum anderen Radeln in der Großstadt immer stressiger fand, und für Sportradeln keine Zeit mehr fand.

Die letzten Wochen allerdings habe ich wieder mit kurzen Strecken angefangen, die allerdings 400+ Höhenmeter haben (für mich der einzige Weg, schnell und ohne Abgase aus der Stadt zu kommen). Muss sagen, sich den Berg raufzupushen, und dann die Abfahrt zu genießen, hat auf jeden Fall 'nen positiven Effekt auf die Psyche, und auch die Stadtstrecken kommen mir auf einmal weniger stressig vor.

I have to admit, when it comes to new developments in the Linux world, I tend to live under a rock ... never switched to Wayland, not because I have any ideological reservations, but because my favorite WM (a minimalist WM developed by a friend of mine) is available only for Xorg.

I had heard about NixOS before, but until I stumbled upon this thread, I didn't have a good understanding about what an atomic distro is. Now that I have a bit of an understanding, I guess I can only repeat what others said before, it seems to be solving a problem that I don't have. I've been using rolling release distros for a very long time (at first Gentoo, like, 15 or more years ago, but Arch (btw) for over a decade now, with occasional, typically short stints in Debian-based distros), and the amount of problems caused by updates has been negligible for the last decade (Gentoo overlays 15 years ago could be a pain, for sure).

It does sometimes bother me that my OS config seems to so ... static these days, but then again I have so many things going on in life on that I don't feel a huge need to prioritize changing an OS that feels blazingly fast to use, stable, minimalist, and basically checks all the boxes. It just became my high-productivity comfort zone.

Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) ... can't say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn't wanna work. Making music wasn't really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible ...

My first ever smartphone (in 2015) was a BQ Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Edition that came with Ubuntu Phone pre-installed ... a lightweight, 4.5" smartphone ... there wasn't much of an app ecosystem at the time but I didn't miss it because up to that date I used a dumb phone, and the smartphone allowed me to do eMail and use a browser, which was enough for me.

At some point I accidentially dropped it on a hard floor and it broke, and I was quite unhappy that the company didn't continue that line :(

I guess it depends a lot on what you think of as "an alternative". I'm really happy using FOSS because I generally try to find a different angle on things, and it allows me to do that.

Luckily I'm not dependent on using common office software, the few spreadsheet tasks that I need can be done with online tools, either open or proprietary. For documents I usually use markdown and pandoc. For music making, I use my own software or Ardour for mastering, etc. For modeling and 3D printing I started using OpenSCAD.

There's also many things that proprietary software just can't do. Like, my day-to-day workflow is based on a minimalist approach to computing, with the most common operations being very easy to perform (browser, editor, terminal) ... MacOS is always hailed for their great UI but honestly, it seems slow and clunky to me even though I used it daily for a long time ...

Second this, I've tried TinkerCAD before and the whole Idea of CSG started to make sense, and then I found that OpenSCAD does something very similar, just with code ... I find it very satisfying ... I guess if you're making highly asymmetrical, organic shapes, you might have some puzzles to solve ... but I'm mostly making loudspeakers, so basically boxed with holes, and it's not a huge problem.

Hmm I think the issue is that Ardour is more focused on recording than electronic music production ... There's more intuitive DAWs out there but I suppose in terms of what it can do it doesn't have to stand back ... compared to ProTools I'd say it's still quite intuitive (not a high bar for sure).

hmm I might be biased because I'm a programmer by trade, and even make music with code, so describing things as code is pretty natural to me ... but I once I got the hang of it I found it easier than TinkerCAD in some sense, because there I would always get lost in the stack of objects ... and FreeCAD ... well, I couldn't even get a basic box designed ... 😅

Yes :)

Meh ... I wish there was a middle ground. Non-corporate, yet effective. Unfortunately, the Fediverse is only the first.

Discovery algorithms can be great, if applied with care. And I really think ActivityPub is not very effective at showing interesting stuff, while from a user perspective it's super intransparent. Personally I'd prefer a centralized user experience to the Fediverse fragmentation any day ... I guess I'm really only here because I'm fed up with corporate bullshit.