When I have to use discord, I use it in the browser. I don’t trust the app not to get up to no good.

I’ve recently started to have to use Teams at work and wow it’s awful. In subtle and overt ways.

Thinking about the pedocon theory post again : https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-talk-about-pedocon-theory/

Google is complicit

My favorite encore might be one time I saw Sincere Engineer. Someone in the audience shouted "play corn dog sonnet!. That’s one of their “hits” as far as small bands go.

But the band had already played it earlier in the set, and said so. The audience person shouted back “I was late! I missed it!”

The singer went, “well, I guess we could play it again if everyone wants to hear it again”

The crowd cheered , so they played it again.

Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.

Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.

I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.

Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.

But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.

given democracy doesn’t work when people vote based on vibes or propaganda feels.

Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of people are primarily vibes driven. Everyone is, in some cases or other. For example, a lot of otherwise reasonable people will flip their shit if you suggest eating less meat for environmental or animal welfare reasons. You just get excuses and variations of “but i like it” and “but i’m a good person”.

I would not be surprised if my old coworker-friends started a separate group chat without me after the nth, “Maybe you should come to one of these protests” and “Please at least read the wikipedia summary on this historical topic before you start going off about it” message from me.

They’re fine people but they’re also kind of very… apolitical.

Just one dish and one fork, typically. Sometimes the rice cooker.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

I pretty much wash as needed.

Need a fork? Take out of sink, wash it.

Need a bowl? Take out of sink, wash it.

Need more room in sink? Take stuff out of sink and wash until there’s room

Works pretty well. Never really have a big stack up in the sink. Throws me off when guests come over and just grab stuff out of the cabinets and drawers like normal people, though.

There’s a kind of person where emotions create reality. They feel a thing, and will use any facts at hand to justify it. Later if they feel something else, different facts will be used.

These people are trash, honestly. That’s a garbage way to live. It’s dishonest and hurtful. It’s immature. It’s a lot of conservatives.

It’s striking how little many people know about history and politics, but more concerning is how little they care. My old coworkers just don’t seem to care much. And they won’t even feel shame because their only priority seems to be protecting their ego.

Reminds me of Brent from The Good Place, honestly. “No. No. I’m a good person. I’m a good person!!”

Interesting idea. I know at least one of them is dating a Google employee who, from what I can tell, is rather “apolitical”. I don’t know about the others, though.

Some months ago I was giving a coworker shit for not doing much of anything. No protests. No volunteering. No donations. Just works his mid six figure job, plays video games, and dates his works-at-google girlfriend. He admitted maybe he could do more. I said I could nag him the next time a big protest happened. He said sure.

Well, I messaged him with a quote from that conversation. He was like “oh it’s Saturday?” And then no further responses until I followed up a day later. He’s not going to do anything.

The other guys from that group also don’t do anything.

Something about rich white straight (-passing) men comfortably just keeping their heads down and not even doing a half assed minimum bothers me.

But I guess there’s nothing to be done. I’ll be doing my best.

I think it’s because evil is stupid. Like, it’s a net negative policy. And often predicated on falsehoods (eg: belief that race works like old DND)

Other people have good answers already. Chiefly to ask questions and talk through your reasoning.

But also I’ve noticed the difficulty of interview questions varies wildly. Some places would give dynamic programming problems I’m terrible at. Others would give trivial "find the largest number in this array of integers, in python. Don’t worry about efficiency. " problems.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.