Fucking apatheid emerald mine inheritor ruining perfectly good words from the nerd culture…

Plot twist: we all share the same dad, have cut each other off, and are all shitheads.

I did not think Evangelion could get any weirder.

Weirdly relatable. What gives with dads’ sides of the family being entirely made up of shitheads?

I could not give two shits what the reasons are and with which frequency someone uses Linux vs Windows say. If you use it you use it: welcome and enjoy your stay.

The community won’t grow meaningfully with gatekeeping and elitist behaviour.

I’m going to assume this is a genuine question asked in good faith.

I’d say these are pretty wild mental gymnastics, but I think I kind of get where you are coming from because of the following point that I’ll concede: I don’t think that any society which tries to establish just rules and laws on the basis of scientific rationality should ever consider “thought crime” to be a thing, and we should push against that ever becoming something punishable.

This is however also me doing mental gymnastics to try to be charitable to your messages. Now for why I think people are very understandably bothered by this.

First of all, in the context of this post, this is not just about thoughts but also producing material that can be shared online. I don’t know whether you’ve followed the news as of late, but it should be pretty clear that for day-to-day life (i.e. without scientific rigour being applied to every aspect) it matters more what is perceived as true as opposed to what is true. From the point of view of the victim, whether the nudes are “real” or not does not matter nearly as much as the fact that knowing people who’ll view them will think that they are. This is, beyond shame, because of the fact that this may then be used against the victim for employment discrimination, harassment, or worse.

Now let’s move on from that and address just the “thought” bit. Trying to view that through a reductionist, materialistic point of view is pretty misguided in my opinion. Here, you’re dealing with people, feelings, and social relationships. I’d say that learning that someone, anyone, is fantasising about me (and I did not suspect it, and it’s unreciprocated), is, at the very least, likely to change the social dynamic because someone I considered a friend or coworker, and that I interacted with under the assumption that I was the same in their eyes. Furthermore, I’ll add that I am a somewhat strong looking man, and have thus far not felt physically or mentally threatened the (very) few times this has happened. Add power dynamics which are not in your favour in this equation and yeah, no wonder people freak out…

But all in all, I’d say that analysing human interactions on the basis of human beings being purely rational is naive at best honestly. There are varying degrees, of course, but I don’t believe anyone is purely rational.

Techbros trying desperately to solve the very real problem of them not getting any through removing that little obstacle in their way: consent.

You just reminded me there was a sculpture of an Alexander horned sphere in the maths lab where I did my studies. It was pretty shitty and obviously there were only a few branches. It confused the hell out of us as undergrads.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Best? Depending on what you do, probably not. That being said I have a friend with whom I code from time to time, and he uses the desktop mode for that. He uses nix packages to setup his development environments and seems happy with it.

This is more work than I’d personally like (I am lazy) but it does not sound so bad.

Funnily enough, I thought like you and was rocking Debian and various derivatives for years. Then one day, for some stupid reason (an out-of-date library for a side project in the Debian repo) and out of curiosity I tried arch.

Honestly have not looked back since for a bunch of reasons.

First, the package manager (pacman) is just awesome and extremely fast. I remember quickly ditching fedora in the past because, in part, of how goddamn slow dnf was.

Then, it’s actually much lower maintenance than I’d initially believed. I maybe had to repair something once after an update broke, and that was expected and documented so no problem there. Plus the rolling release model just makes it easier to update without having version jumps.

Talking of documentation, the wiki is really solid. It was a reference for me even before using arch anyways, so now it’s even better.

People also tend to value the customisability (it is indeed easier in a sense), the lack of bloat (like apps installed by default that you never use), and the AUR.

And, to be fair, a good share of people are probably also just memeing to death.

So I don’t know whether you’re missing something, it depends what you think Arch is like. If you believe it to be this monster of difficulty to install, where you essentially build your own system entirely etc etc… then yeah, you’re missing that it’s become much simpler than this. Otherwise if having more up-to-date software, easier ways to configure things and a rather minimal base install so you can choose exactly what you want on your system does not appeal to you, then likely arch is not going to be your thing.

Anna Karenina and Promise at Dawn

I saw the post that this was on, and yeah, that comment was uncalled for. So I get that it may have been confusing or even made you angry.

That being said, you can’t let some bitter person or some troll get to you on the internet like that, they’ll just spew their bullshit and move on. You won’t do yourself any good dwelling on it.

I’ll add to that that seeing as you’re studying for a maths PhD, chances are you are going to meet your fair share of insecure/competitive/self-important assholes who’ll like nothing more than to belittle you just so they can feel good about themselves/eliminate the competition. This won’t stop at academia either. So a good thing you can pick up during your PhD is to learn to not care when it’s not worth it, and to bite back properly when it is.

Source: been there, done that. I am now out of the academic cesspool but still (very) occasionally run into an insecure twat with a PhD who feels threatened by the fact I also have one and tries to start the dick measuring contest. You’ll make your life impossible if you give these people anymore attention than they deserve: none.

“There was not yet been an element for me to cherry-pick that would fit my distorted and heinous world view.”

They are so fucking predictable, it’s actually infuriating. We are losing to this FFS.

Now watch as the narrative becomes that he turned into a hateful and dangerous leftist by being indoctrinated at university, even though he comes from a good, god loving family.

Just want to say, with more than just an upvote, that I agree with you. My shit-eating grin at the news did fade when learning that his children were in the crowd. They did not ask to be born with that dickhead as a father, and now have to live with one of the most traumatic thing a child can go through.

I think one can be happy that there is one less fascist spewing hate in the world, but still feel sympathy for a couple of innocent children. There is no contradiction here.

They saw their father shot and killed in front of their eyes, and the video will probably forever be online. The only support they’ll get is from that dead piece of shit group of fascist friends. They will most definitely not be fine.

You know what, you’re right. Given the state of things we are far beyond just being reactive to that shit and have to proactively stop it. I’m sure there are already efforts in that direction, I’ll look into it.

Some good fucking news.

See you guys next year to push it back again.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you do, it’s a fantastic ride.