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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • That’s not the problem… The problem is Linux isn’t “normal”. Their work laptop comes with Windows or osx. Their home computer comes with the same.

    Now go tell the average person to install Linux… To them, you might as well be telling them to open up their computer and snip a jumper to make their computer faster. To them, you’re telling them to take their working computer and do something they don’t really understand and is beyond their ability to undo.

    It’s an aftermarket modification to them. If you want to make Linux approachable, it’s really damn simple. Hand them a computer running Linux, with a pretty desktop manager, and a GUI for everything you expect them to do with it. Better yet, add an app store so they can try out software and run updates without feeling intimidated

    My point is, if manufacturers start selling Linux machines again, a lot of people will get on board

    People aren’t opposed to learning, they’re just scared of breaking it, and they need to at least be able to use a web browser without going up a learning curve



  • Missiles are super inefficient. You have to overcome gravity while fighting air resistance at the same time, which requires unreasonable energy density

    If only there was some way to use air resistance to fight gravity, or better yet even some sort of metal road to push against to lower required acceleration to the minimum…

    Maybe if we made a super slow missile on rails? Never mind, this sounds crazy now that I say it out loud


  • Yep, it’s pretty amazing how much not destroying the environment helps it recover… although the closer we get to a collapse, the more that ability to bounce back diminishes

    Literally every aspect of our world is in a balance… Everything wears down over time, so the current state is basically a homeostasis between biological, geological, and astrological forces. The problem is that humans act on a far shorter time scale - 100 humans could cut down trees faster than a forest can regrow, 8 billion can change the atmospheric composition in a decade or two


  • There’s always the ones where AI are always omnicidal and all digital tech is taboo, or the ones that predate the information age where you have very manual but powerful tech… Like sure, FTL is definitely sci-fi, but without automation (even human guided automation like ripperdocs) you end up with very unequal societies where magic tech exists, but only for the rich or large organizations

    The first is a newer genre so I can’t think of anything well known, the second includes things like the time machine where the time machine is sci-fi, but technology regresses, and the last one could be things like dune. Or 1984, where we’ve surpassed the “futuristic” tech (and unfortunately was mostly used like a how-to guide in recent years)


  • I can. By making it technically possible, you can divert attention.

    One example would be for crazy edge situations. Like letting children with terminal illnesses fulfill their last wishes, or letting hormone ridden teens make their case to a judge, keeping them from more extreme actions.

    But more practically, I think this is a great idea… 99.9% of anyone asking for this either needs court ordered mental evaluation and/or a referral to CPS to do a deep dig into the situation. By making it technically possible, that means anyone seriously pursuing this has to explain themselves to a judge.

    Unfortunately our judicial system has a lot more to do with money than justice (so most people who would actually go through with this probably have the money to protect themselves from consequences), but this law would be a sensible part of a more perfect system… Granted this should almost never be granted by the court (terminally ill child is the only situation that makes sense to me), but there’s value in it

    My opinion would change greatly if this is a real path to child marriage rather than a mostly theoretical possibility






  • Everyone can’t learn everything. When you watch the news, do you fly down to Maui to interview victims and analyze the state of power lines yourself?

    You have to remember where you got something and learn to evaluate the bias of a source, but going on an active forum full of people with various levels of knowledge on the topic is the best way to get a complete picture in a reasonable time frame. They’ll call out inaccuracies in reporting, give background that might speak to problematic motivations or conflicts of interest, and argue bad takes.

    Is it perfect? No. It’s DD though, more and more usernames are quoted in the news - hell, even in this video forum posts are referenced frequently



  • I forget the name of the bias/fallacy, but it’s something like “I love and support X. If X is bad, then I support something bad, then I’m bad. Since I’m a good person, and I support X, then X must be good or I wouldn’t support them”

    It’s probably a quirk of how we make decisions - we don’t consciously make decisions. Instead, we might weigh out the options and that affects our choice, but in the moment we choose subconsciously. It might feel like we made a decision consciously, but sometimes at the last second we deviate from the course we chose (or upon choosing, realize that despite our thoughts we actually have already made up our mind otherwise)… Then we have to rationalize that choice, or start down a long and challenging road of constant introspection


  • They made a bunch of mistakes that were callous and might’ve smothered a couple guys starting out.

    But then the lack of empathy - “it was a bad product, no one should ever buy it, and so my fundamentally flawed testing is actually valid”, “yeah they asked for it back multiple times and we auctioned it, but it was for charity so it’s fine”, “we agreed to compensate them, but it’s been months and we did that real quick after we got called out, but we’re going to make it seem like we didn’t need a scandal to do the bare minimum”

    It’s all excuses, it’s all justification for why “this looks worse than it is, and actually we’re still the good guys”. It’s narcissist mental gymnastics, he still just doesn’t understand what he did wrong - besides being mostly excuses, every “apology” is totally off base on what they did wrong