I would spend all the time I can contributing to open source projects.

Yep, that’s it. That’s the sketch.

Veep

It’s really easy if you move to a country where this language is spoken and study a lot.

It’s all very anecdotal but where I lived you could get from my apartment building to the playground without crossing any streets. All kids were just running around unsupervised starting at 6-7yo (for me it was closer to 5yo). The entire playground was just communist style metal constructions. I cut myself on rusty nails, was hit by a metal swing and twisted my ankle while jumping off the top of a slide. Today the entire playground was replaced by wooden, safe toys and I can’t imagine kids playing there unsupervised. Times have changed. It’s simple as that.

What I had:

What kids have today:

IMHO saying that “car culture -> less people walking -> more crime -> more fear -> less kids on the streets” is a bit of a stretch. I’m sure it can be true in some areas but is far from universal rule. European cities are very walkable yet no one lets small kids play outside alone. Many villages are way less walkable yet kids play outside alone without issues. This meme tries to imply that kids don’t play outside because of cars yet it’s only one of contributing factors and only in some places.

This has nothing to do with design or actual crimes. People are scared because the media is scarring them. The numbers of abductions are actually dropping but people are more and more scared because child predators were made into the bogeyman of the XXI century. It’s a well known fact that crime perception in US does not align with actual crime statistics. Cars have nothing to do with it.

To be fair, kids are not allowed to do most of those things because people are scared of pedos, not cars. 40 years ago we already had cars but I was allowed to disappear for whole days without anyone complaining. Now kids can’t go to the playground alone even if they don’t have to cross any roads.

I tried hosting the bridge and it was hard to set up and unreliable. Right now I have WhatsApp installed on Graphene OS in a work profile so it doesn’t get access to all my contacts, only the ones I had to specifically add in this profile. In theory you can restrict it even more using labels but managing this was a pain in the ass.

WhatApp will still know who are you talking to and you still have to run their app somewhere so in my opinion setting up the bridge just so I don’t have their app on my phone is simply not worth the hassle.