My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)
The online editor is extremely useful for quick projects with other people where real-time editing works better than git, and where people don't want to download tools.
If you're from a well off family, you can be oblivious to everything and still have what you need to live so in my experience things were a lot easier. For me once I became self-aware, it turned into a tradeoff of outgrowing sensory issues (i.e. fire drills being pure hell) and weird speech issues and learning social skills, with worse executive functioning and anxiety and energy and still not being socially proficient enough to not be some level of offputting, and now the social skills matter much more so it's a bigger obstacle even though I'm a lot better at them.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
I can relate to this in that I barely have any energy in the mornings to do anything no matter how early I set my alarm, then end up skipping everything except the bare minimum to function, or maybe less depending on if I happen to have more energy that day.
There's no doubt that internet-connected devices are distracting and can cause all sorts of health issues (and as a college student, my frequently browsing various communities on my laptop is something that is constantly getting in the way of my productivity when I do homework). But people are acting like making kids and teens listen to somebody talk for 7 hours per day in a classroom is the solution, and as someone with an aggressively hands-on learning style, I couldn't disagree more.
During high school, I would frequently tune out during lectures (and this was with phone bans in classrooms) and overall learned next to nothing from them. I got my knowledge from studying notes I copied from the whiteboard, studying the lecture PPTs, reading the textbook, using Khan Academy, completing homework, and utilizing the internet when needed. And I graduated with straight A's taking the most rigorous classes my school offered. Currently I'm in college now, and at some point I decided lectures were wasting my time and stopped attending them so I could sleep in or do homework instead, and it hasn't hurt my academic performance at all (and probably improved it).
Along with the importance of lectures being vastly overstated, a lot of the content from them isn't even particularly useful in real life. Basically all of my tech skills came from family connections, Reddit, HN, YouTube, random blogs and documentation, and having the time to work on projects (and one of my biggest concerns about the push to keep kids off of social media is depriving them of this sort of information and community). Lectures and homework take time away from learning these sort of skills and make people instead learn things much more inefficiently and that are often of questionable value (i.e. studying old poems, learning scattered facts about history but not analyzing why they happened and leaving many of the most important bits out, having the same things be taught multiple times in K-12 then having to take the class yet another time in college).
With this in mind, I wish people would focus more on making the school system more efficient, engaging, and applicable and not a waste of time instead of acting like banning phones is going to fix everyone's problems.
I know people personally who recently graduated high school and went down the 4chan rabbithole because they wanted to be "edgy", then they got comfortable with the extremely racist attitudes they were promoting
I'm not sure how paid Gmail handles data, but at least Fastmail is not from a giant ad company that wants to basically DRM the internet with WEI and generally has an incentive to collect as much data as possible and show ads everywhere. Privacy (against corporations) is one of Fastmail's main marketing points, and considering how it's a smaller paid-only service where being discovered lying about its claims could basically destroy its business, I would trust it more than paid Gmail which will continue to exist despite Google's unethical behavior. It's not end-to-end encrypted though, so it's not perfect privacy-wise, and worse than ProtonMail/Tutanota in that regard.
However, after looking some things up, I just saw that Mailbox.org has a feature called "Encrypted Mailbox" that automatically encrypts incoming emails before storing them (which I somehow didn't see when I was using it since I thought it was similar to FastMail but based in a different country), similar to how ProtonMail/Tutanota work, and I'm not seeing anything similar for FastMail. However, Mailbox.org also supports third party clients and features that FastMail has like email forwarding, unlike ProtonMail/Tutanota, so Mailbox.org actually looks like a better option than any of the others (assuming you trust that they're not secretly storing your emails as they arrive somewhere unencrypted, although they might if forced to by the government).
For the free versions, they are pretty similar, except ProtonMail supports PGP which works with people who don't use ProtonMail, whereas Tutanota uses its own encryption which only works with Tutanota users. Neither of them support third party clients (although ProtonMail has an IMAP bridge for desktop for their paid version), so I would say ProtonMail is better for that reason. Both of them are much better than Gmail though privacy-wise.
However, one thing to be careful of is that unlike Gmail, neither of them support email forwarding, which might become a problem if you want to switch email providers again. A workaround for that is to buy your own domain and use the paid version of whichever service you choose so you can change services without changing your email address. For that feature, Tutanota costs significantly less than ProtonMail does.
If you want an email provider that is more focused on features like Gmail but doesn't sell your data, you can also look at FastMail (Australia) or Mailbox.org (Germany). FastMail (what I use) has a better UI, but it is based in a country with anti-encryption laws. While ProtonMail/Tutanota are trying to be government proof by end-to-end encrypting your emails at the expense of features, FastMail/Mailbox.org are more focused on productivity without making money off of your data. To me, FastMail/Mailbox.org have good enough privacy since I use Signal for most personal communications I want private, but if a government is after you for some reason, ProtonMail/Tutanota would definitely be a better option.
The Libredirect plugin also redirects to various instances you can select (although not automatically with error responses), both with Teddit/Libreddit and a bunch of other services like Nitter, Invidious, and Anonymous Overflow.
(It would actually be cool if this sort of error detecting was added to Libredirect so the user wouldn't have to keep clicking "switch instance" when it gets rate limited.)
I currently get about 5ish hours SoT on full brightness and a million browser tabs open, which is quite bad compared to what I've heard from other people (and honestly a bit disappointing since battery was supposed to be one of the greatest improvements for the M1). I've recently heard though that screen and keyboard brightness has an enormous impact on battery, so I need to remember to try lowering it and see if it improves. Standby has a slight drain, but I've found it to be the least of my problems since it's not much and I plug it in every night. If anyone has any tips to make my battery last longer, I am very interested to hear them.
I daily drive Asahi Linux on my M1 MBA for CS in college. Currently, it's usable enough for that, coding, and casual web browsing, but for other use cases it still has a ways to go.
Right now, the area that needs the most improvement is software support. x86 Linux is already not ideal in that it isn't supported for a lot of commercial software and games, but ARM Linux is even worse in that regard, since even a lot of open source software isn't supported, at least not on the AUR. Along with that, the M1 doesn't support 32-bit software, so AFAIK there is no good way to use WINE to run Windows software currently.
A lot of open source software like LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Firefox/LibreWolf/Brave (only release version for FF), Webcord, and Signal can simply be installed using an AUR helper like paru. However, a good chunk of open source software isn't supported for aarch64 on the AUR, like Logseq, Joplin, Element, Sonixd, Bitwarden, Tor browser, Mullvad browser, just to name a few, so you'll need to figure out how to compile and update them yourself (I personally haven't bothered since I can live without them for now, and I couldn't get the "-git" packages to work either). Widevine can be installed (to use Spotify in a web browser), but the process is very hacky. Jetbrains IDEs can be installed, but Toolbox is not supported and a lot of the AUR packages don't support aarch64, so you'll need to install a lot of them manually. It is also possible to emulate x86 machines with QEMU (I used it to run Kali Linux for a cybersecurity course), but the performance is extremely bad and I don't recommend it. I also have not been able to install Blender or Unity, so for software like that you'll probably need to boot into macOS. And don't even think about running games yet, except for maybe Minecraft, Minetest, and SuperTuxKart.
Fortunately, the Asahi devs are aware that the software support is terrible, and they are making a lot of progress toward fixing it. Asahi Lina posted a video recently demonstrating running a variety of Windows games using her custom kernel (which I am currently super excited for), and Martin says that the main distro is going to be changed from Arch Linux ARM to one that actually has good aarch64 package support (which is rumored to be Fedora). So it looks like this situation will improve in the not-too-distant future.
There's also currently a variety of other quirks from it being alpha WIP software, such as no speaker support (which is currently being worked on), no external displays, no microphone, no camera, no fingerprint, worse battery life/sleep, and random crashes/lockups (although this has been a problem on every Linux laptop I've used).
So based on this, whether I'd recommend it depends on how much you love Linux and FOSS and whether it is compatible with your workflow. I personally hate relying on proprietary software for everyday personal use, so I am willing to put up with the quirks to have a system that I have full control over (and considering how amazing the Asahi devs are, I am confident that it will eventually get to a more usable state). If you're in the same boat, I'd recommend giving it a shot. If you just want a computer that works well, on the other hand, or you use a lot of graphical creation-related software, you'll probably want to stick with macOS instead for now, or get an x86 laptop like a ThinkPad.
(If you use it, make sure to use the edge kernel since it has all of the latest interesting features like GPU support. The installer also comes with a preconfigured setup with KDE, although you can also install bare bones ALARM like I did and install everything through the command line.)
It is, although then the next problem is getting Monero in the US with their clutterfuck of cryptocurrency regulations, so you have to find an exchange that works with Monero and actually works in the US, then give them your identity and bank account information and hope they don't think you're suspicious and block you.
I use LibreWolf (hardened Firefox) with Mullvad VPN and in my experience have hardly had any issues with Cloudflare (occasionally I might get a single Cloudflare captcha but this doesn't happen often). Tor browser, on the other hand, gives me tons of captchas and is barely usable.