Yeah, it was prevention - to my knowledge there wasn't a comparable internet-blocking feature in Android at the time. I have a dumb phone from way back that I switched to, and I shut off my smartphone. For desktop, it was primarily site blocking extensions like Block Site, and willpower to develop a habit. I'd still use the internet for things like banking and - since I was re-studying CLRS - SO and reference collections, but I trained myself to a hard cutoff of not using it besides the purposes I switch it back on for. The rest is on paper: my books are physically with me or loaded on an e-reader.

I should clarify that I had taken last year off to recover from burnout, and I was freelancing. I think that helped a lot with being able to detach for that long.

This is wild. Another problem with fudging what used to be a trail is what that means for fingerprinting people online. Especially given recent attempts to take down the Internet Archive. I'm not saying forum histories are/were iron-clad "paper"/e-trails, but they can and do get used for cross-platform profiling.

Anecdotal, but I can see this. Last year, I took a 2-3 months off of what I now call recreational internet use (e.g. keeping up with the news, forums, etc.), because my mental health and cognitive abilities have deteriorated a lot. The result wasn't just improved mood but also regaining cognitive skills that I thought I had lost forever. Brain fog also lessened. A year later now, and the improvements are stable and still there, even though I do use the internet recreationally again. It's still not where I used to be before, but it's a work-in-progress anyway.

It's not far-fetched, infinite growth and all.

Since Kobo e-readers have public library integration where I live and I no longer have an Amazon account, the Kindle I bought is just sitting there. If it pans out into a subscription model and Amazon also cans other forms of side-loading, honestly Kobo + physical books would be my only go-tos: why pay extra to borrow from Amazon when my taxes already go to a library system from which I can also borrow books? I've transferred the books I had on the Kindle. Maybe it can be reused with a pi should it come to.

Thanks, I'll take a look!

Why would it be bad idea to use both? According to Tor+VPN, provided you connect to VPN first, it should be fine.

I used to use Tor to surf surface + deep webs, but not the dark web — basically a substitute for the common browsers but without the incessant tracking and attempts at personalization.

I do agree that a VPN + Tor, disabling JS, and avoiding identifying forms are up there in terms of safety measures. I'd add that using Tor on Android is also iffy, but I'm still looking into it.

While happiness might need reason, life doesn't. I find that, in a way, we live in a probabilistic universe with enough attractors that allowed things to form. Among them were humans, now also building some things with/against the odds, and subsequent self-image/sense of importance.

You can still suspend thinking about the inevitability of death and inherent lack of meaning to feel or create something. It does require one to choose and get comfortable making choices that are beyond right and wrong (not in a moral sense), however.

I don't know if there is one answer for why people can still feel happy despite it all, and I suspect there will be different reasons. One reason could be that they've just accepted the futility, focusing on what makes them happy. Or maybe they've accepted that pursuing universality/objectivism when it comes to subjective things is impossible. Or maybe even that no matter which option one takes to view life, one cannot escape delusions.

WPS Office is proprietary, Chinese spyware

Thanks for this, I didn't know that's WPS has come to. I'll update my answer.

I understand the context in which you're responding. It's a learning curve to adjust to a new writing environment that would be more apparent to students now, considering the last time they have learned about the editors they're switching from was years ago. Since OP is compiling a list of alternatives rather than one recommended product for graduate students studying OT and psychology, there's no harm in having LaTeX (+ editor) as one of those options. Considering the improved language support, templates, and the different editors out there for LaTeX, the barrier isn't as steep as coding from scratch IMO. People learn, it's not a big deal.

Sure, LyX has (had?) its quirks and isn't bug-free, but so did Excel with parsing gene names into dates for years, leading to scientists renaming genes as a bypass until MS provided a solution in 2023.

I see mention of LaTeX, imho forget about it. It’s great but if your students already are complaining about clicking a few buttons and menus in LO Writer, I doubt they will enjoy configuring LaTeX at all as it’s really complex to setup and it’s also very, very technical. (It is also very much English focused by default, which means there will be a few more tweaks required to make it support other languages and where that turns out to be real fun is that said tweaks may vary depending the libraries you’re relying on since you install various ones and, of course, the doc will not always be reflecting that exactly.)

All good suggestions, but this part is iffy. I've had course instructors provide boilerplate for students so that they don't need to worry about formatting. There are also WYSIWYG LaTeX editors like LyX. Finally, language support for LaTeX has expanded considerably over the years.

I wrote my MSc. thesis using Texmaker, and I've dabbled a bit with TeXstudio. I'm partial to Texmaker simply because of how easy it was to integrate bibliography and dictionaries, spin up code snippets/templates, customize build flows, debug errors, and embed different image types.

You can experiment with a few editors if you like. Ultimately, it's the one that you feel most comfortable that will work best because the code is the same.

Happy writing!

WPS Office is the closest to the MS suite, and I believe now it's available on both Windows and Mac.

If you're interested in technical academic writing that supports math and robust formatting in particular, LaTeX is still the top of the line. It has a bit of a learning curve, but better for documents that require more control on formatting involving equations, images/figures, advanced paragraph forms, etc.

Edit: @Donkeywitch@lemmy.world, newer versions of WPS Office have AI + cloud integration and are exploitable. In light of this thread, I wouldn't recommend. Thanks, @Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com.