Christian

I believe veganism is ethical but have failed repeatedly in attempts to give up comfort foods. A lot of tastes nauseate me, so I don’t intend to give it another try until I can afford the costs (in time, finances, emotional health) of trial-and-error to find more meals that work for me.

intrinsic critical thinkers whose nature overcame their upbringing

I’m going to push back on this because I don’t think it’s true and also because I think it’s harmful.

There are not people who are naturally inclined not to think critically. Just as much as upbringing can shape someone’s worldview, environment can shape willingness and capacity for introspection. People don’t think critically when they’re naturally predisposed to do that, they think critically when they’re either adequately distanced from the disincentives for reflection they’ve known forever or when the incentives for reflection create enough desperation to overwhelm.

I say harmful because is there anyone who sincerely doesn’t picture themselves as an intrinsic critical thinker? Everyone is already there, so the “intrinsic critical thinker” worldview means assuming some people you meet will be worse at it. “I’m naturally better at critical thinking than this person” is a mindset that provides a shortcut to dismissing this person’s viewpoints without actually evaluating them.

I never went further right than voting democrat, but I used 4chan occasionally for a good decade and I’m convinced that support of Trump’s campaign on there was well-understood to be a running joke until people unaware it was a joke started joining to participate. I’ll admit I wasn’t using it much anymore at all by that time, but when I saw comments about Trump support start popping up the first couple months my thought was “this is hilarious”. The idea of actual Trump supporters existing was not something I was capable of imagining at that time.

Anthropic is right! AIs trained without direct consent from the owners of the training material should be blacklisted!

We demand that our governments criminalize all AIs developed without full permission for use of training material, in support of Anthropic!

Ace and Demi have sex, it’s just not a primary motivator.

I am totally ignorant here, is there a difference between a low sex drive and asexuality? My expectation was that sex is not a primary motivator for someone with a low sex drive while someone who is asexual is not sex-motivated at all (like having sex is entirely treated as caring for someone else’s needs).

I’m hoping this reads as sincere, I always worry about whether my phrasing will come across as rude whenever I’m this spectacularly out-of-touch.

I am 100% certain, I’ve done this many times over the past few years.

I always had to look up how to use the dd command until a few years back I saw somewhere that you can literally just use cp and the results won’t be worse in any way.

cp image.iso /dev/sdX

I mostly agree with this. The reason I stick with arch has nothing to do with finding it technically superior or more convenient to use than other distros. There is almost no way I would be using arch if their wiki wasn’t leaps and bounds more helpful than other distros’ documentation. Some other distros can meet my needs just as well or better, but arch’s documentation allows for a more straightforward learning process through tinkering.

I do think repository differences can potentially matter a lot. I have a lot of respect for hyperbola being ultra-hardline in removing proprietary packages and any hint of uncertainty in licensing, but the fact that that kills off texlive makes it untenable for me to use. Keeping manual installs up-to-date is a hassle, so I can definitely understand someone limiting themselves to distros supporting a certain set of packages.

I just mean that I can understand where it comes from when someone is already close to their breaking point, and I think most people are about there. They’re not consciously deciding to bury their heads, because making a decision requires too much inspection to actually ignore it. Often when I was beaten down it’s like my mind selectively blocked out information as a means of protecting me, but I remained in denial about that until I started really getting out of the hole. I’m not sure I’d equate them to Trump supporters in a broader scope, but I do think the lack of inquiry here is not too different from Trump supporters.

I also think that with more animosity towards regular citizens, the more the conversation shifts from the powerful to the powerless. The impact of one citizen changing their mind is wholely insignificant compared to what a politician changing course would do.

I see that there’s no apprehension of “Prevention is better than cure”. You cannot wave away problems because they’re only going to return worse than before.

I’m not smart enough to piece together what you’re saying here. Prevention or cure for what? What does prevention look like? Why should we be apprehensive, it sounds like a reasonable statement?

There’s also demeaning people who see the atrocities for what they are and want to create awareness so they can minimize it. But are shamed for it.

I do feel this point and I’ll admit I’ve had many infuriating interactions. Now I try to just ignore until I cool down, because once I do it’s like this asshole isn’t worth that much thought. I have a limited amount of time to be angry, that’s better spent on the people who actually could make a meaningful difference by taking a stand.

To be clear, -Qm displays installed packages not currently in the repositories. This will include AUR packages, but I avoid the AUR (except for davmail years ago) every once in a while I’ll run it just to check and sometimes it finds packages.

When you install things from the main repos the dependencies get installed too, and if those dependencies are no longer needed they’ll be removed from the repositories. (I also have a bad habit of forgetting --asdeps when installing optional dependencies.) Sometimes they’ll conflict with a new dependency and pacman will ask to remove and replace them, but other times the functionality has become a part of an existing package, so with no conflict to prompt removal they’ll just sit unused on your install. If you haven’t tried -Qm in a long while you’ll probably find a few harmless currently-unused packages that were installed through the normal repos. (-Qdt will cover the other cases where dependencies remain in the repos but are now only needed for packages you don’t have installed.)

Obviously -Qm will also show removed packages that aren’t dependencies, a few years back my preferred pdf viewer was removed from the repositories.

-Qm will also find manually installed packages that aren’t in the AUR if you ever do that.

Gonna disagree with some of the crowd here and say I think those people typically aren’t bloodthirsty/supportive of war. They’ve never believed many examples of inhumanity have been direct consequences of democratic leadership, and some (I have the Gaza genocide in mind here) they’ve never believed existed at all. They’ll see an “expert” voice an opinion that they’re already inclined to believe at present. The “expert” authoritatively cites evidence that they’re not familiar with, so seems legit enough. They’re not going to trust you to have knowledge the “expert” doesn’t, but they’re not interested in holding the discussion with you because they don’t carry the mythical knowledge that would win them the argument. They concede the point ahead of time to avoid conceding after a debate that didn’t convince them. It’s not forgetting, it’s pretending that they agree with your assessment.

A huge factor is how detached we are from atrocities that don’t touch us. I really believe that if one of these people had a friend or family that were affected by this, they would think a lot more deeply on culpability. I lived in Dearborn during the last election and I didn’t get the sense that muslims there were more likely to abstain from voting (or vote third-party) than non-muslims. I know this is partially a function of who I was talking with (mostly academia), but I’m convinced that a big factor was that all of us knew someone in our personal lives that had been emotionally injured by losing family.

There’s a good argument that ignoring atrocities is a moral failure, but I think most of us can relate. There are so many evils in the world today that if I actually spent time to think on even a fraction of them I think I’d be in a mental institution. That recent exposé on the dogs that were trained to rape prisoners, I can acknowledge it’s almost certainly real and that saying otherwise would be an injustice to the victims, but in my heart I don’t actually believe it happened because I don’t feel capable of managing the emotions that would come with accepting it. If you’re already overwhelmed by other aspects of the hellscape you live in, at some point reacting to horrifying headlines by throwing up your hands and booting up a video game becomes a survival strategy.

I could swear Icecat went unmaintained like a decade ago, but after looking it up just now it seems like I hallucinated that.

What does it even mean for one person to be 50% more intelligent than another person?

how much are you paid?

I don’t remember exactly, but I remember feeling insulted by the stipend because I spent more on parking in downtown Detroit and had no means of transportation into the city other than driving myself. I had such a hard time finding cheap parking spots within reasonable walking distance of the court.

A friend once texted me that she really liked my writing and said “It sounds like you”, with “sounds” italicized. It was like she was just focusing on my writing and hadn’t even thought through that using “like you” as unambiguously complimentary is a bigger compliment towards me than towards my writing.

I was really passionate about math for years, and I spent most of my free time on it. When I got to grad school and I had to do it to survive my passion dried up. I think it became harder to have fun when I knew I wouldn’t be free to put a project down if I wanted to, and when math stopped being fun I stopped being good at it.

I passed all my coursework and exams but I burned out before finishing my dissertation and dropped out seven years into my phd program. It’s six years later and I still barely touch it. I passed qualifying exams in algebraic topology and today if you asked me to compute a homology group I’d be clueless.

I’m not going to discount that monetizing your passions works for some people, but the experience of finding out you’re not one of those people is soul-crushing.

Removed by mod

I think I had this comic saved like twenty years ago and I also don’t remember where I found it.

Before I lost my sense of smell I was absurdly sensitive to ranch. If my ex opened a ranch dip in the apartment I would be dry-heaving very quickly. When I was a kid I would sometimes move seats eating lunch at school because other kids had ranch doritos. Not having to deal with that anymore was a rare positive to come out of my awful experience with covid.

I can enjoy coldcuts and cheeses, but they’ll make me sick if they’re not extremely fresh. In some cases they already smell and taste like they’ve gone rancid fresh off the slicer.

Pancreatitic sepsis fucked my tastebuds, my hospital stay was extended a full week because I couldn’t keep down foods other than sweets. They actually restarted me on the feeding tube because of that. When I went off the NPO and got to eat again for the first time I asked for a spicy sandwich from Chick-Fil-A, I’m pretty sure it was just an ordinary spicy sandwich but in that moment it tasted like the spiciest thing I had ever eaten in my entire life. I don’t like the taste of water anymore, which is miserable.

Ever since I had pancreatitic sepsis I hate the taste of water, it’s so frustrating. I mostly drink a few specific zero-sugar sodas now, I wish the prebiotic sodas weren’t so expensive because they would be the best solution.