haroldfinch
My own father was harsh, complicated, difficult to deal with.
I always thought I'd do the opposite.
What I learned later on was to ask my own children what their day was like, what excited them, how I could help them when they needed it most... and then you need to listen. Even if they're asking silly things, things they have yet to learn, that's how you find that connect.
And to some extent I try to balance the discipline by thinking, if I drop dead tomorrow, will I have prepared them as best as I could to become their own person? Will I have done it in a way that they'll remember me fondly?
So far my kids have always said I am a great dad, all the same I ask myself if I could do better every day.
I think the question you started with here is the most important one though, how can you do great/better.
I started using Le Chat a few weeks ago, also inspired by the Buy From EU initiative.
While I'm missing some creature comforts (memory, projects), the experience is good enough for me to switch. I've canceled my Chat GPT subscription because of it. Remember to export your data from OpenAI. It gives you a raw dump of all your conversations and customizations.
I may need to 'retune' my prompting because I was getting slightly better responses with o3 for coding. Also a warmer tone in conversation. But it wasn't enough to stop me from moving over.
You know what, good. Maybe it'll cause the people who keep using Chrome because they don't give two shits about their privacy to get off their asses and use something else.
Just like whole tribes are refusing to move from WhatsApp to Signal, because they say they care about privacy, but actually they don't.
I'd love to have some Tony's Chocolonely. Unfortunately, I have such a severe gluten intolerance that their cross contaminated factory produces Russian Roulette bars for me.
Even though most of their bars don't actually contain gluten based ingredients, the fact they use one big production facility that sprinkles gluten all over the place for shits and giggles ensures I will never be able to safely consume their products.
I'll stick to G'woon chocolate. They at least produce their non-glutened bars in a safe environment.
(And yes I've tried Tony's bars in the past, always resulting in issues because of it.)
Just to point something out here.
The thing you had to get off your chest was a depressing and negative bit of content, about how negative and depressive all the content on lemmy is.
If this was a meta-troll post, well done!