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And it was a huge step back from GTK2 at the time, taking ages to mature. Yes, the GNOME project is stagnating rather badly. Compare that with Qt, which is much better by comparison.

This is something I was actively resisting. It turns out that for me, I find GTK3 to be less aesthetically pleasing than GTK2. There are far fewer themes for GTK3, and they aren't as nice as the GTK2 ones either. Sad to see a step back in user interface design, in my opinion at least.

It won't be long before all the distributions catch up and start removing the GTK2 builds, which are likely to be deprecated.

I think the pendulum will swing towards that way eventually. It's cyclical. Once the novelty of social media wears away, as it has done already, and the harms start being worse than the benefits.

However not being on social media can have real-world consequences in the classroom, the child could be treated as an outcast and mocked or bullied for it.

There is a middle ground, which is to use a pseudonym and ensure anonymity. You can then selectively disclose this pseudonym to people you trust. It might be safer for the children that way and also make it more difficult for adult authority figures to interfere with their lives.

It's the same intuition that tells me something's wrong when I read things that end up being conspiracy theories or pseudoscience.

I trust it, because for me, it seems to have a track record of being correct in the end.

Well everyone has the right to their own opinions, and I might be completely wrong.

And I have every right to be a heretic, and not subscribe to things I think might be orthodoxies. That might be arising from bandwagon effects and social conformity. Which is what I suspect when it comes to climate change doomsaying.

And that's strictly my own opinion only, which can be simply disregarded by other people. But it still adds to the discussion. And such things can be proven wrong too, which might strengthen the case for catastrophic climate change actually happening?

Yes, I'm likely wrong there....

As a side note, one important change in the modern times is the ability to cross check information from a wide range of sources easily.

But I think it's the primary way the state finds out what we are doing, so it then can exercise it's violence, if it finds us doing something that it doesn't like.

The first thing police do nowadays is check social media accounts when there's a crime, whether it's a thought crime or not? So by reducing our reliance on online services, we can diminish the ability of the state to police our lives?

Or maybe I'm wrong here (tired, and need a rest, so I don't end up spamming HN)?

It might actually get better over hundreds of years, the current problems are decline over a couple of decades, which will likely result in a backlash eventually.

We abolished slavery, torture, blasphemy, heresy, witch hunting, etc. over the centuries. And made huge roads into tackling racism and the persecution of homosexuals, etc. So no reason to think it will get worse over the very long term, I think?

Unrelatedly one pressing issue we haven't yet fixed is the systematic cruelty and mistreatment of children by parents, which probably has religious origins in prior generations. And instead the government focuses on sexual abuse, which is a drop in the ocean by comparison.

We are also in the midst of a revolution - AI might shift power back to the individual - because it can be run locally, and the government has a much harder time monitoring that. And it can reduce our dependence on online services which are the primary means for state control over our lives?

A totalitarian police state in the making there. Yes, with ChatGPT (and its successors) they will be targeting politically subversive conversations that threaten state power, in 20+ years time.

It's happened before and we are already showing all the signs of early stage fascism[1], and there is no reason that it won't happen again.

1. Yes I am using the word fascism, instead of authoritarianism, because that is what I think it is, it is that severe, when you consider what is happening already (mass Internet surveillance, protesters being criminalized).

It's quite shocking when you think about it, that your "friends" here are in effect not allowing you to be yourself. And will potentially socially ostracize you (i.e. punish you) if you do something, that is harmless, but is not accepted by the group for some reason. Dystopian stuff indeed.

What about spoofing IP addresses (bittorrent DHT / IPFS / deliberately faked Tor IP leaks / etc.) or a combined technique, so that the police think illegal material was shared from that IP, and when they come to investigate they find large quantities of random data, which they think is encrypted?

Yes, quite possibly overgeneralization there. Thinking on it....

It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time.

As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media.

In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change.

I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already.

It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist. Those channels contributed to the moral panics behind "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse", which resulted in parents becoming overprotective towards their children, stunting their development. When these children grew up into adults, they carried this "safetyist" worldview with them, where freedom is traded for security. And we know from history where that path leads to in the end, if it's not stopped somehow.