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Metaengineering and Laws of Innovation Things are invented. Things are discovered. And somehow there’s an arc of progress that’s formed. But are there what amount to “laws of innovation” that govern that arc of progress? There are some exponential and other laws that purport to at least measure overall quantitative aspects of progress (number of […]

I grew up in the 80s in Copenhagen and roamed the city on my own from an early age. My parents rarely had any idea where I went after school, as long as I was home by dinner. They certainly didn’t have direct relationships with the parents of my friends. We just figured things out ourselves. It was glorious. That’s not the type of childhood we were able to offer our kids in modern-day California. Having to drive everywhere is, of course, its own limitation, but that’s only half the problem. The other half is the expectation that parents are involved in almost every interaction. Play dates are commonly arranged via parents, even for fourth or fifth graders. The new hysteria over smartphones doesn’t help either, as it cuts many kids off from being able to make their own arrangements entirely (since the house phone has long since died too). That’s not how my wife grew up in the 80s in America either. The United States of that age was a lot like what I experienced in Denmark: kids roaming around on their own, parents blissfully unaware of where their offspring were much of the time, and absolutely no expectation that parents would arrange play dates or even sleepovers. I’m sure there are still places in America where life continues like that, but I don’t personally know of any parents who are able to offer that 80s lifestyle to their kids — not in New York, not in Chicago, not in California. Maybe this life still exists in Montana? Maybe it’s a socioeconomic thing? I don’t know. But what I do know is that Copenhagen is still living in the 80s! We’ve been here off and on over the last several years, and just today, I was struck by the fact that one of our kids had left school after it ended early, biked halfway across town with his friend, and was going to spend the day at his place. And we didn’t get an update on that until much later. Copenhagen is a compelling city in many ways, but if I were to credit why the US News and World Report just crowned Denmark the best country for raising children in 2025, I’d say it’s the independence — carefree independence. Danish kids roam their cities on their own, manage their social relationships independently, and do so in relative peace and safety. I’m a big fan of Jonathan Haidt’s work on What Happened In 2013, which he captured in The Coddling of the American Mind. That was a very balanced book, and it called out the lack of unsupervised free play and independence as key contributors to the rise in child fragility. But it also pinned smartphones and social media with a large share of the blame, despite the fact that the effect, especially on boys, is very much a source of ongoing debate. I’m not arguing that excessive smartphone usage — and certainly social-media brain rot — is good for kids, but I find this explanation is proving to be a bit too easy of a scapegoat for all the ills plaguing American youth. And it certainly seems like upper-middle-class American parents have decided that blaming the smartphone for everything is easier than interrogating the lack of unsupervised free play, rough-and-tumble interactions for boys, and early childhood independence. It also just doesn’t track in countries like Denmark, where the smartphone is just as prevalent, if not more so, than in America. My oldest had his own phone by third grade, and so did everyone else in his class — much earlier than Haidt recommends. And it was a key tool for them to coordinate the independence that The Coddling of the American Mind called for more of. Look, I’m happy to see phones parked during school hours. Several schools here in Copenhagen do that, and there’s a new proposal pending legislation in parliament to make that law across the land. Fine! But I think it’s delusional of American parents to think that banning the smartphone — further isolating their children from independently managing their social lives — is going to be the one quick fix that cures the anxious generation. What we need is more 80s-style freedom and independence for kids in America.

<![CDATA[I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 400 to 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS 2024-11-19 based on Debian Bookworm 12.9: The desktop of 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS 2024-11-19 on a Raspberry Pi 400. Since I had no files to preserve the process was surprisingly easy as I went with a full installation. And this time I finally used the Raspberry Pi Imager. When I first set up the Pi 400 my only other desktop computer was a Chromebox that couldn't run the Imager on Crostini Linux. This imposed a less convenient network installation which, combined with a subtle bug, made me waste a couple of hours over three installation attempts. Now I have a real Linux PC that runs the Imager just fine. Downloading Raspberry Pi OS, configuring it, and flashing the microSD card went smoothly. When I booted the Pi 400 from the card I was greeted by a ready to run system. On the newly upgraded system, building Medley Interlisp from source for X11 took an hour or so. The environment still runs well with the labwc Wayland cmpositor that now ships with Raspberry Pi OS. But, like the previous Raspberry Pi OS release, Medley doesn't run under TigerVNC because of a connection issue. #pi400 #linux a href="https://remark.as/p/journal.paoloamoroso.com/upgrading-to-raspberry-pi-os-2024-11-19"Discuss.../a Email | Reply @amoroso@fosstodon.org !--emailsub--]]>

It’s been a little over 100 days since elementary OS 8 was released, and we’re proud to announce another round of updates, including a fresh new download. We’ve been hard at work this winter addressing issues that you reported and we’ve added a couple new creature comforts along the way. This bug fix release also includes the latest Ubuntu LTS Hardware Enablement Kernel, so it’s worth checking out if you downloaded OS 8.0 and it disagreed with your hardware. AppCenter We now properly use dark mode brand colors and dark mode screenshots thanks to Italo. Plus, when developers provide screenshots for multiple desktop environments, we now prefer the ones intended for our desktop environment, Pantheon. We support the new <Developer> Appstream tag, thanks to Juan. And we now support the contribute URL type. AppCenter now shows dark mode screenshots when available Italo also fixed some issues with release notes overflowing out of their container, and we slightly redesigned the release notes window in the Updates page. He also addressed a few other issues in the Updates page that could occur while things were being updated or refreshed and made sure AppCenter recovers gracefully when its cache is emptied. Release notes dialogs have been slightly redesigned Search is also much faster thanks to Leonhard. And for developers, Ryo fixed loading your local metadata for testing with the --load-local terminal option. Files & Terminal Jeremy fixed another half-dozen reported issues in Files, including an issue that prevented entering file paths in search mode, an issue that prevented scrolling after deleting files, and an issue where files would disappear when dropped on an unmounted drive. The New file submenu now respects the hierarchy of folders in Templates. We now also respect the admin:// uri protocol for opening a path as an administrator, and Files is now styled correctly when run as administrator. He also fixed an issue where Terminal tabs took multiple clicks to focus, and an issue where keyboard shortcuts stopped working for tabs that had been dragged into their own new window. Plus, file paths and names are also now properly quoted when drag-and-dropped from Files into Terminal. System Settings System Settings now allows configuring its notifications in System Settings → Notications. So you can turn off bubbles if you don’t want to receive notifications about updates, for example. We’ll also no longer automatically download updates when on metered connections and send a notification instead, thanks to Leonhard. Plus we no longer check for updates in Demo Mode. Updates now show their download size and you can see progress towards our monthly sponsorship goal In System, Vishal made sure we show how large an update will be before downloading it and that we skip held-back packages—such as phased or staged updates—when preparing the updates bundle so that it will more reliably succeed. Alain added a progress bar while downloading. And Ryo made sure the last refresh time is more accurate when no updates are available. Alain also added a new progress bar that represents how close we are to meeting our monthly sponsorship goal. In Applications, you can now disallow notifications access. This is especially useful for apps which use the notifications portal, but don’t properly report their notification usage and can’t be controlled in the Notifications settings page. Reign in apps that don’t appear in Notifications settings In Network there are two new settings: whether a network should be automatically connected to when available and whether to reduce background data usage when connected to that network. Disable autoconnect or mark a network as metered We also updated the pointer icons in Mouse & Touchpad settings and the checkmarks in Locale settings will now respect your chosen accent color. Plus settings pages with sidebars now remember the width you adjusted them to, thanks to Alain. Installation & Onboarding David fixed a crash with certain partitioning schemes in the Installer’s custom install view. And the Encryption step was redesigned to fit on a single page, solving an issue with confusing navigation. Plus, onboarding will now always stay centered on the screen, even when resized. Panel & Quick Settings Ilya fixed an issue with the panel height when using the Classic session and HiDPI displays. The app context menu in the Applications menu now shows a “Keep in Dock” checkbox, just like in the Dock thanks to Stella. In the Power menu, we now show the device model if available, and avoid erroneously showing an empty battery icon thanks to Alain. In the Sound menu, Dmitry fixed loading album art from certain apps like Google Chrome, and we fixed an issue where player icons could become too large. See who else is logged in and quickly switch accounts from Quick Settings In Quick settings, Leonhard fixed an issue with performing updates while shutting down. And Alain added a new page where you can see which other people are logged in and quickly switch between accounts. Dock Leo added a bit more spacing between launchers and their running indicators, and fixed an issue where larger icons could be clipped at the peak of their bounce animation. Apps who don’t notify on startup will no longer bounce in the dock indefinitely, thanks to Leonhard. We fixed an issue where the dock would still receive click events while hidden in the Classic session. Plus the dock now has an opaque style when “Panel Translucency” is turned off in System Settings → Desktop → Dock & Panel. Window Manager We have another huge release of our window manager thanks to Leonhard and Leo. This release fixes five potential crashes, over a dozen reported issues, fixes related to both the Classic and Secure sessions, issues related to HiDPI, and more, plus performance improvements. It’s worth reading the full release notes on GitHub if you have been waiting for the fix for a specific issue. And More OS 8.0.1 includes the latest long-term support Hardware Enablement stack from Ubuntu, including Linux 6.11. This brings improved performance for AMD processors, support for Intel “Lunar Lake” processors, and filesystem performance improvements in some cases. Plus support for certain webcams, USB network devices, joysticks, and more. Leo fixed an issue where connecting Bluetooth devices could cause the Lock Screen to freeze. You can now close the captive network assistant with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Q, thanks to Stanisław. And Alain fixed copying screenshots to the clipboard. We fixed an issue where wired network connections could fail to connect due to a change in Ubuntu. We’re pursuing this issue upstream and working on a way to ship the fix as an update, but for now fixing this issue requires either manual intervention through Terminal or a reinstall. We also now pre-install an AppArmor profile that fixes a number of Flatpak-related issues like not being to install certain runtime updates or apps not launching in the guest session or Demo mode. Special thanks to Uncle Tallest for investigating this issue and helping folks in our Discord who ran into it. And of course this release comes with a ton of translation updates! Special thanks to our hard-working internationalization community and especially Ryo who fixed a number of issues with things that couldn’t be localized properly in the previous release. Get elementary OS 8.0.1 elementary OS 8.0.1 is available as a pay-what-you-can purchase at elementary.io today. Localized direct downloads and a torrent magnet link are provided. OS 8 FAQ Download elementary OS 8.0.1 Sponsors have been able to download OS 8.0.1 release candidates since last week, so if getting things before anyone else is important to you, consider sponsoring us on GitHub