KIXX.NEWS edition for:
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
New editions printed at 7:00 AM GMT on most Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. View past editions.
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[ recent ] The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State
TLDR: If you're a woman under 25 then get rid of Instagram. Anybody over 35 should get rid of Facebook: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement while people who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.
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[ internet ] You can heal the internet
David is warning us that our internet is being colonized and exploited by a cabel of tech titans. Five years later, and we know it's even worse. Smaller products, and smaller teams, run by people with different motivations may be the answer.
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[ craft ] This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii
Enforce some artificial constraints to force yourself into developing better websites: Unlike other outdated examples, clicking through to the NetBSD Wii port takes you to the latest stable NetBSD 10.1 release from Dec 2024. As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it. That workload is the blog you’re reading now.
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[ craft ] Control: Running your own website
There is an idea in my bubble that running your own website is A Very Good Idea. I subscribe to the idea that running your own website is A Very Good Idea and will continue to help that along in my career. But there is a heaping helping of It Depends involved here.