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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I think the breakdown in communication is due to a difference in how people’s brains have been trained to accept something as “true”. Some people embrace the scientific method, while others are dogmatic.

    To elaborate, I imagine you (aspire to) readily alter your personal beliefs to fit the data you’ve observed. But that is a foreign concept to some people. In order to utilize the scientific method, you need to be appropriately trained in it, and you need the intellect to apply it. But if you’re lacking in either department, you still need to be able to function day-to-day, to dress yourself, do your job, pay bills, and just stay alive. No one has time to think critically about every single challenge they’re presented, so our default behaviour is to create heuristics which can be reused multiple times without needing to think.

    The difference between science enjoyers and dogma stans is that the latter group slowly learned over their lifetime that heuristics helped them function in life more than relying on their ability to reason; and now not only do they depend on the exchange of heuristics between others in their group (their “ingroup” as-it-were) in order to function, but they assume everyone operates that way (it’s all they know). The scientific method is a just a vocab term they forgot in middle school, and the idea of re-evaluating your beliefs is frowned upon, because that means you must have bad heuristics!

    So back to your original question, I believe the confusion happens because you and they have different implied meanings when you each ask for a source of information: You ask because you want new evidence that might change your conclusions about a subject. But they ask because they seek to discredit your source of heuristics. In their experience, if someone told them X, but then later that person turned out to be wrong, then that’s enough reason to doubt X. That’s their heuristic for doubt, so that’s their goal, to make a map of your ingroup and try to foster doubt within it.

    That is the only reason in their mind that they would ever have to know your sources, the concept of empiricism is mostly foreign to them.



  • For the record, this clip from this movie is always posted out of context. Everyone posts it for its literal interpretation, but this rant happens early in the film, and the rest of the story shows how the network it aired on figured out how to capitalize on the ratings it generated. This results in a populist, sensationalist circle jerk that is very profitable for wealthy network owners. Much like how MAGA became what it is today.











  • Note: Gaming performance is purely based on money spent. There’s no fundamental reason windows would have better gaming performance, it’s just that there is more money being paid to engineers and vendors to support DirectX and related tooling.

    Then there’s the self-fulfilling aspect that, windows has the largest marketshare, so devs are going to spend the most money targeting it, so that they can get the most money in return, which means more people will use it, which leads to the high marketshare.

    The ONLY reason Linux use is seeing the few percent blip in gaming is because Valve has dumped truckloads of cash into making it viable.


  • The better comparison is that distros are the operating systems (like “windows”, “macos”, and “android”), while “linux” is the kernel under the hood that end users likely never interact with (like “NT”, “XNU”, and…“linux”).

    A distro represents an intended user experience. If you want a distro that has an intended user experience that is similar to windows, go with Mint or OpenSUSE. If your desired experience is like the SteamDeck, install bazzite (with an AMD GPU ideally). If that’s all you care to know, then that’s all you need to know; go use your new system how you would any other.

    But if you want to dig deeper, yeah, the fact that all the distros are based on linux (and more importantly, are posix compatible) means that a lot of the software is portable across distros. But that doesn’t mean your experience on all distros will be the same. Different distros organize their filesystems differently, they might ship with different versions of core utilities based on the stability testing they’ve done, and they likely offer varying means of installing and managing new packages.

    The tl;dr is, go use one distro, and then later try doing the same stuff in a different distro, and inevitably at some point you’ll go “oh, this didn’t work exactly how I expected because the other distro I’m used to handles this differently”. That’s the difference.