I know several people who have had cochlear implants since childhood who are all young adults now. None have regretted it, nor have their parents. I know this is a major issue in Deaf culture with a capital-D, but if the rest of the family has normal hearing this seems like a no-brainer these days. The surgery is well tolerated by almost everyone and the younger you do it the easier the transition period is.
I'm specifically using Voyager on iOS and MacOS (and in Windows via BlueStacks) because I do exactly this. I block several whole instances (lemmygrad and hexbear), the active politics communities, and also specific keywords (elon, musk, trump, gop, republican, etc.), so I'm even able to browse All without my eyeballs being seared.
I moved to Florida specifically so that I could live at the beach. Go to Hawaii.
Dec/Jan is the Florida high season, so everything is crowded and accommodations will be pricey. If your vacation truly is in Jan though, Hawaii will actually be quiet (end of December is super crowded tho).
If you do go to Florida, look at Naples up to Tampa on the gulf coast, or key west. The people are much nicer than Floridians on the east coast
I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.
I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.
Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.
I love how all of the characters are scowling and have their game faces on… and then there’s Kirby, who’s like “Hi there! I’m gonna eat you and extract your power!”
It would be ideal If the big activitypub platform stacks like mastodon, Lemmy, etc could agree on some standard like a federated OIDC or DID approach for all authx/authn functions. then fediverse users could get cross-platform and even cross-instance logins “for free”
None of the Work may be used in any form as part, or whole, of an
integration, plugin or app that integrates with Atlassian's
Confluence or Jira products.
That is a weird carve-out, so I'd guess the license revision (and technically the reason it's no longer open source) somehow has to do with Atlassian or their plugin marketplace?
Feel like the (totally impractical) fediverse end-game would be for each individual to have their own activitypub service, and federation happening on a person-by-person basis. So you retain some control over anything you publish, and your history is yours to keep.
As others have said, changing UPS batteries is required maintenance, and I agree 18-24 months is the typical service life for even high-end UPSs. However, you may want to look into LiFePO4 based UPSs, which can handle many more charge-discharge cycles and often have 5-year warranties. More expensive and potentially not as recyclable as lead acid batteries, but maybe appropriate for your use case.
Xeric Shrubland is definitely a LOTR character.