ejs

social media laws are a treatment of a symptom, not the cause.

meta/tiktok/google capitalize by maximizing engagement, most lucratively outrage (risking ideological polarization) and addiction (many health harms associated). five years ago, this was very different, before the sudden takeover of short form media. now, surveys are indicating that average screen times of children are nearing 8 hours a day.

the need to address this dire situation is the greatest is has ever been historically.

yet, banning it outright (aside from the heinous privacy violations) does not entail any accountability whatsoever for these large corporations in creating highly addictive and harmful social media platforms that have consumed our youth

further, without changes to the structural incentive of maximizing profit, these companies will continue to maximize engagement, and thus addiction to what is a harmful way to spend 8 hours of a day.

i am hopeful that the lawsuit happening in northern CA against meta will result in some decision ruling these engagement maximizing tactics illegal.

i also hope that voters will choose candidates in the future that will pass legislation preventing these products from existing, leaving platforms that are actually productive to society, decentralized, and (most importantly) non-profit.

from a design perspective, consistency is key. light mode is on? then light mode means light mode, and apps should be in light mode.

do you want both your terminal to be dark theme and your gtk apps (including all of the gnome UI) to be light theme at the same time?

do you want settings within every single app in order to change from light mode to dark mode, as opposed to a global toggle that applies to every UI on your computer?

alternatively, is the terminal the only exception to this global toggle, and this design inconsistency by having the default contradict the default of the rest of your desktop environment is your preference?

i think you need to look into routing. Specifically, split tunneling.

https://tailscale.com/learn/what-is-split-tunneling-secure-critical-data-vpn

https://protonvpn.com/support/protonvpn-split-tunneling

https://mullvad.net/en/help/split-tunneling-with-the-mullvad-app

I’d recommend installing those python dependencies using apt, so that when you update your system packages, the python libraries get updated, too. Pip, on the other hand, is useful for development but is detatched from apt and you will definitely forget to pip update unlike apt update which you hopefully do frequently. Use the names of the packages the readme provides in the pip install … instruction. For example, for numpy, you can install this.

Then, since that python script has a shebang at the top, you can add it to a directory in your $PATH and mark it executable with chmod, and you can invoke the script in your shell from any directory with just the file name.