I currently use VSCode. I did use Emacs for quite a while, and it in itself is a fantastic editor (if you can call it that :^), don't get me wrong. But I had a few reasons for switching.

• Emacs is a very rigorous editor to configure, and whilst it comes with many features out of the box, a lot of those are either broken, or highly unfinished / unpolished, so it is effectively required to manually configure your environment. This also includes that the codebase for GNU Emacs itself is, and is still built upon, a fossil, and it can show it's age in a few ways. VSCode is typically ready for development out of the box, if not, easy to get set up using plugins, and customization usually just takes tweaking a few things in the settings.json at most.
• Improved language support is a must in many cases. Emacs language or LSP is usually good, but in some cases it can be quite unoptimized (for example, the Dart LSP client on Emacs does not run well whatsoever in my experience). On VSCode, the language plugins are quite often official, and can come with some extremely helpful features.
  • On this, Jupyter Notebook is absolutely perfect on VSCode. Yes, Org Mode works great, but for Python data science, Jupyter is typically the standard in my usecase, I can't always use Org. EIN works, but it's not nearly as smooth and efficient to use as the VSCode support is.

Honestly, I don't blame them. It took Unity 10 days after announcing this awful change to backtrack to a normal revenue cut. That 10 days was filled with justified outrage from a ton of developers to the point of Re-Logic donating $100k to Godot and FNA in protest.

Some websites seem to hardly circumvent reader view, but to the point where it can be inconvenient. Reader Mode only works with the NY Times if I rapidly click on the "Toggle reader view" button whilst it's loading, otherwise it'll cut off. But it still does work brilliantly most of the time and gets the job done.

I live in a small tourist town (Ashland, OR), so I'm kinda in a mix where everything is compact and in one place, and services are common and very handy, whilst also having a lot of that beauty that living rural comes with, my only real issue here being the expense of everything.

As for living RURAL rural, my father recently moved to a house in a very much "country roads" kind of setting. It is very beautiful there, with the lush mountains basically being in your view 24/7, whilst also having local farms nearby all the time, he lives very close to the Del Rio Vineyards. However, I probably wouldn't want to live in such an area, as my main problem that really bothers me is that everything is extremely far away, basically car accessible only, so even a downtown drive is 3 miles away. So far, I personally prefer city living.

Not all conservatives or right-leaning people are racist homophobic douchebags, though. I know quite a few that have a right-leaning non-discriminatory worldview, mainly economic.

Admittedly, as much as I'm preferring the fediverse, it is definitely an echo chamber, Lemmy included.

Here is an article by one of the cited sources covering a lot more cities. Was quite surprised to see Minneapolis at #36 and Portland at #45, as those areas are quite well known for having good cycling infrastructure in the US.

I tried out Mastodon once, never really got into it. Fast forward to Twitter's acquisition, shit hit the fan, you know the story, but I wasn't really convinced until some of the decisions lately. Tried out Mastodon again, and whilst it was nice, it wasn't really for me. I figured I'd try looking for another instance, and I ended up landing myself on Kbin as it has Lemmy support for topical discussions, as well as microblogging capabilities for who I keep track of on Mastodon. I don't post that actively, but it's been great so far!

Studying for a 1600? Nah, I'm grinding Tetris for a center 4-wide, this is REAL studying.

In my curiosity, I bought a Nook Simple Touch off eBay for 15 dollars a few months ago. Despite obviously being inferior to a brand new Kindle, it worked really well for reading EPUBs off Overdrive and OpenLibrary, and it definitely made night reading a hell of a lot more comfortable, lasted quite long on battery.

I think the fact that more information is becoming readily available on federated platforms due to more people moving over to Mastodon and Lemmy for example is definitely making the platform grow as well. With Twitt- sorry, "X" locking down threads to an account, the information on there, as well as other sites I guarantee, will become less accessible over time. The fediverse hardly has that issue of it's information becoming less available, and if anything, the structure of hosted instances makes that near impossible for the time being to be phased out. If Threads, for example, went through with adding fediverse support, it probably would not be as widespread as others like Mastodon as such, because the sites that power ActivityPub were designed with users in mind instead of profit.