christian

joined 4 years ago
[–] christian@lemmy.ml 17 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

There's a lot of variability. We got Roto-Borola after our old cat Buddy passed. Buddy was the best pet I've ever had and I miss him with all my heart, but he was dumb as rocks, which produced some good stories.

Roto-Borola immediately showed he was a quick learner and it was immediately infuriating. He realized very quickly that if he chews on my electrical wires I'll tell him not to do that, so in a situation where he comes up to me for attention and I try to calmly explain that I'm working on something urgent for work right now and he should wait half an hour, straight to chewing on the wires so that he will have my attention. He almost never does this when he's not actively interested in redirecting my behavior. One time, he was probably a little less than a year old, I tried giving him twenty minutes of cage time to discourage the chewing and as soon as I let him out he sprinted back to chew on them again, like now it's not about making me play with him it's about punishing me for the injustice I have committed.

Currently have a makeshift setup where all the wires behind my desk are blocked off by large cardboard pieces with a tiny hole cut underneath so they can run along the floor. I've done an extremely poor engineering job on this - it works perfectly for its intended purpose of not having my wires eaten, but anytime I need to change a cable a one minute task now takes like fifteen unless I'm willing to cede ground in our battle over eating wires.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago

Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I'm assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I'd try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 month ago

I agree with the sentiment that it's very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I'm not sure I really agree with much else you've written here. In particular:

And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn't have a place on a private tracker, that's not a problem because they're not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won't stay for long if they neglect seeding.

I'm sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won't say I endorse that, but I'm cool with it, and even if I wasn't I still don't think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.

I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I'm invested. I don't care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it's morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

As a very stable genius, I completely agree with this.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I have one personal email (posteo, 1 euro per month) that I use for personal correspondences, and one shitty personal email I signed up for in high school that I use for anything where there's any chance it might make it to some corporate mailing list. I have the posteo address set up alongside work email to notify me when new mails come in, and the junk address I'll login through firefox like every few days (unless I'm expecting something specific) to skim and mark the most recent mail as read so I know where to start skimming next time.

For work, anything I actually need to deal with I'll mark as unread until I get around to it, because it's annoying seeing the icon show I have unread messages. Sometimes "getting around to it" does just mean putting it in a calendar or some other way of making sure I don't lose track.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I have a lot of trouble with this, I guess issues with egocentrism. For me, listening is trying to understand their perspective, and picturing how I would see things from where they are standing very often wraps around to finding an experience that I've had, or things that I understand, that are analogous. Those things help me get a better grip on what this person is saying. I haven't really found a way around this, when I really try to not inject my own anecdotes I end up not really contributing much substance and often not following as well, and I feel like a much worse listener because of that.

As I've grown older I've realized that I've always had some trouble with auditory processing in general, so interjecting is a way I can slow down the conversation before I get lost and make sure I'm still on track.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It really bugs me when people don't comment their code at all. I have no idea what this is supposed to do.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 month ago

I 100% believe the lemmy developers' firm belief in this policy is why the platform was able to take off eventually. In the early days we would frequently have people join and then stomp their feet about free speech and the slur filter and then fuck off to whatever variant of voat was en vogue (...that was wolfballs for a little while). It was a small community, discussions were heavily (but not exclusively) tech and communism, but I don't think it would have been an appealing landing spot if that kind of toxicity had been allowed to grow.

Absolutely no question there's more hostility in the conversations here after redditors came here, but more users will do that. The exodus has made it a lot easier for me to abandon some of the smaller subreddits I was still active on.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

It's kind of amazing that I haven't really thought about Woody Woodpecker since watching the cartoons as a kid and the animation doesn't look familiar at all other than yeah that's the right colors, but I could hear the laugh in my head immediately on seeing the name, without having to play the audio.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

About ten years ago I was really hesitant on claws because at that time the interface looked ugly and extremely dated, but I gave it a shot and found that once I got past that, it works perfectly for me, it did everything I needed it to do, and with one exception it still does. The interface has not had a facelift in the decade since, so it is ten years more dated than it was back then, but I've had so few other complaints that the ugliness is now endearing.

The one issue is that my work uses office365, and for a while I thought it just wasn't going to work with claws, but at some point I discovered a miraculous piece of FOSS called davmail (in the AUR for arch, if you use debian it's in the main repositories) which allows you to access microsoft email through any client.

 

I came up with a science fiction writing prompt/thought experiment that I'd like to share. I'm aware this is a little silly.

Background:

There exists an aether throughout the universe which I am going to suggestively name "soul". Soul can congeal, and congealed soul can take on a multitude of different states. Consciousness is congealed soul, and the states it takes on are emotions. Organisms have evolved to interact with soul, and over time the emotions they are able to evoke have become less rudimentary and increasingly varied.

The prompt/thought experiment:

A utilitarian mad scientist designs blueprints for a soul virus, which causes the aether permeating everything to congeal and then permanently crystallize in a joyful state. It will spread and eventually unify all consciousness into one. This leads to the question of whether universal bliss is worth the price of a total loss of individuality.

 

I was burned out on math for a very long while after failing out of my phd, just now starting to get back into it. This paper is not something a professional mathematician would take seriously, but I'm really happy with it still and wanted to share.

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