The freedom and control and depth and enjoyment in using Linux. I know, I know, shut up I’m answering the question.
There was a question here recently about partitioning, and that got me thinking about inodes and really wanting to understand how data storage works. I went on a deep dive and learnt so much. I feel like I have a real deep understanding of how my system works now.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things. Most people are just consumers of a thing. I do my own motorbike and car maintenance, and I know where my limits are in terms of skill and equipment. It’s so satisfying, it brings a sense of joy and accomplishment to my life.
I’m baffled that people just… don’t do this kind of thing. Don’t learn about metabolic pathways or companion planting or do careful research and just impulse buy… Like… Life must suck for them. It must be so dam boring to live life like that.
So yeah, I don’t think many people understand that.
I completely agree. And I’ve thought about this before. I can’t know what is going on in people’s heads but a lot of people just… don’t care. They have fun watching TV and playing popular video games. I think a large portion of people just don’t like learning things. Like it just annoys them. That’s what I’ve been led to believe. Which also makes it hard to get people into something I’m into. They’ll see I’m massively excited about something and the thing I’m into looks cool, so they’ll ask about it. Then whatever it is, be it some tech thing, a niche game, enthusiast grade flashlights, literally anything, turns out to require learning something, they just get turned off of it immediately. If someone wants to get into something I’m doing, I’ve started prefacing it with “this is not straight forward, are you okay with a bit of learning?” to avoid the disappointment and wasting their time. Usually the answer is no.
I’m not saying that about all video games, I was trying to say that people who don’t like learning tend to gravitate towards whatever video games are popular at the time and don’t necessarily form complex opinions about different types of games or their tastes. Anything below surface level enjoyment that would require learning would be too much. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with just loading up whatever new call of duty or fifa or something and just relaxing.
I guess I didn’t elaborate enough on that, I just said “popular video game” which didn’t get my meaning across. In short, I was saying those people also don’t put a lot of thought or effort into what entertainment they consume because whatever is easiest and most popular is good enough, because they don’t care to dive into learning about anything else.
I’m also not saying these games don’t have complicated and high skill ceilings. Most do.
I am in 100% agreement with you. I’m kind of in the same mindset in figuring out my homelab setup. Still learning docker and how volumes work 😢 haha
I’m in academia but I like to tinker with tech. So when my students or co-workers are surprised that I know so much about tech and how to navigate around most computer systems and troubleshoot (Mac/Windows/Linux) they are perplexed. They ask why I didn’t major in tech. I tell them that I majored in what I loved (history) and play with tech as a hobby to relax.
It’s why I selfhost my own Lemmy server. Gives me something to do with my hobby, keeps me focused on what’s new in tech, makes me learn to keep up with docker, Linux, editing CRON tabs etc.
Hey, I’m going through the same thing! I just got all my hardware in for my new server and I’m learning docker stuff right now. When do some difficult troubleshooting I’ll think of the random lemming I passed in the night that is doing something similar.
It takes time and effort though, and usually that time and effort is spent elsewhere, especially if you’re an adult with two jobs and two kids. When you don’t have to think to better your mastery of your surroundings, making good hardware/software choices becomes increasingly disparate
I absolutely agree with you. Just yesterday evening, a friend asked me for help with his laptop. He was going to throw it away because the Bluetooth broke and he couldn’t use his favorite mouse.
Start, Settings, Bluetooth, turn on. There, I just saved you six hundred bucks.
People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things.
I have so many areas of my life that I think in terms of a skill, one of which is Linux, which I’m using now. Another is coffee/espresso, cycling, writing, etc.
Basically all hobbies. But the point is that I can develop mastery at my own pace in so many different areas. Sometimes, it’s slow and methodical, like coffee: I’ll try something new maybe every weeks. And sometimes it’s breakneck speed, like Linux…just do a deep dive and come out knowing a bunch of new stuff.
Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.
… And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There’s a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.
I’ve seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead… wrote everything on a Mac’s Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher’s phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest “functional” person I’ve ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.
I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.
There are a lot of analogies but they all fail in some way. I think PBS Spacetime does the best in general, with good graphics to back up the words.
My layman’s explanation is probably all stuff you’ve heard before. Massive objects “warp” spacetime and things that get stuck in those “wells” eventually fall to the bottom due to drag (from a variety of sources).
You’ve also probably seen the rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the middle used to represent that warping. To visualize that in 3D, I like to imagine a 3D grid of nodes and edges (like a jungle gym of joints and bars) where the whole thing is flexed inward towards a center point. More warped near the center, less warped further out. That kind of conveys the acceleration from gravity felt by things around that center mass.
Hehe guess what… Nobody exactly knows how gravity works.
So let’s start with Newton. According to his equations, gravity is a force. Why? Well, according to the first law of motion, an object stays in motion in its original direction till a force is applied on it. Newton said, “Gravity is clearly actively changing the direction of an object. Hence, gravity is a force”. As Newton establishes that gravity is a force, we say that it “pulls” objects. However, he couldn’t explain the mechanism behind this pulling force.
Then came Einstein. According to general relativity, gravity is not a force. How’s that possible? Doesn’t gravity change the motion of a given object? Nope! Wait, whaaaaa?! Okay, so according to special relativity, all things in the universe are on a “spacetime”. What’s a spacetime? Well, it’s a four dimensional fabric like thingey that all objects are present on. The four dimensions are time and the three spatial dimensions that we experience. Mathematically, there is no difference between time and the spatial dimensions. However, all objects move only in one direction through spacetime at c, ie., lightspeed through spacetime. If an object moves at c through space, it moves at 0 m/s through time and vice versa. This is how you get the time dilation magic. Cool. Now what if we bent this said spacetime at certain points? The object traveling on this spacetime would be traveling in a straight line always. Hence, no force. Hence, no pulling. Hence, no pulling mechanism.
Cool! So we solved gravity, right? Sike! GR doesn’t work at the quantum level… Aaaaand most of the best models that we have for quantum gravity use a particle called the “graviton”, which has a field that results in an attractive force. How does this force work? The answer is “go fk urself”.
Hence, in conclusion, noone knows whether gravity even “pulls” in the first place, let alone HOW it pulls. Aaaaand we’ve been trying to answer this question for almost 100 years… Cool…
I have decided to assume that OP is already married to said old friend, and has two kids with said old friend. His marriage to this old friend just feels right.
Chicken genetics and probability.I have blue gold rooster with 3 black silver and one Blue Silver hen. Only the blue hen should be capable of ever throwing splash chicks. (splash is white with black/grey mottling) This season I have set and hatched 22 of their eggs. (100% hatch on them so far is awesome but one died from its mom stomping it 😞) If the hens are all laying the same rate 1/4 should come from the Blue silver hen. (5.5) Yet 5 of the 22 chicks we have hatched are splash. The odds that 5 out of 5 chicks are all splash are kinda crazy. (.097%) A Blue rooster over a Blue hen should result in 25% black 25% splash and 50% blue. The blue/black/splash coloring comes from genes that have 2 slots and 2 types. 2 copies of BL gives a black chicken 2 copies of bl+ give you a splash and one of each gene gives you a blue chicken. Each parent contributes 1 copy of one of their genes. So a black and a splash will give you blue chicks every time. https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/fd50e75c-c58a-4566-ba21-fdcee618524a.jpegIt is possible that I set more of the blue girls eggs but even doubling the number of her eggs (very unlikely) wouldn’t make the odds reasonable. The chance that it is some crazy mutation is also low because the mutation would have to be in the hen and be attached to both her BL and bl+ gene and it would have to over ride the male’s color gene completely.
Highly unlikely for an individual isn’t the same as highly unlikely across a population. 0.1% is only one chance in 1000 - rolling the same number 3 times in a row on a 20 sided die has a probability of 1 in 8000, but you’ll find loads of stories of it happening because there’s a lot more than 8 thousand people who play D&D.
Your chooks are rolling along the edge of probability, but there’s more than 1000 chickens in the world so the probability someone will hit that jackpot is close to 100%.
Something I’ve been thinking about is… I often mention that I’ve been trying to look for more friends for a while, because I don’t have any that my mind would qualify as any that I have access to, and I often get two questions, 1) how do I define a friend, and 2) how do I know friends would make me happy.
The first question is a rabbit hole in disguise. Most people, when asked, would list a bunch of benefits, right? Things like “someone I can trust” and “someone who puts me first”. But that’s the thing. Take the first question for example. Do you not have any enemies you might consider at least honest people? And do you not have friends whom might inspire some skepticism? They’re not absolute. So that begs the question, what do I answer to the question of what a friend is? I do in fact have an answer, but it’s goes deeper than words, the same words used to answer the question. It defeats itself in ways that swell the question rather than remedy it.
As for the second question, that’s where it becomes like anhedonia embodied by words.
No, you can be close with someone but not tolerate their presence. I've had this manifest as high maintenance friends that I knew a lot about and spent a lot of time with, but were ultimately draining to be around and asked too much of me to be sustainable.
I thought about that too. Though it hadn’t made me wonder less. I have people I thought to myself may be considered my friends, but who I’ve discovered have occasional demons that make them unenjoyable to be around. To use an example even though I was never particular close to them, one came back from the military and it shows.
Though also this isn’t to say I disagree with whether they should be considered friends, I mentioned once that the point of being friendship is prioritization. Just the other side of things doesn’t sit well either.
I thought about this stuff a lot for years. The thing that broke me out of it was choosing to focus on myself.
No one else can make you happy. Happiness comes from within. So focus on yourself. Develop new skills and hobbies, spend your time doing what you enjoy. If you find other people who enjoy the same things, that’s great, if not, also great because there’s nothing wrong with enjoying life on your own.
I’ve heard that many times before, that happiness comes from within. I think about it though, and it gives me a little doubt because, if I was my own source of happiness, why do anything? I could starve to death and be happy because it’s within me.
I swear some people legitimately could do that. Some people really are high on life. But most of us aren’t.
The happiness from within thing is just a cheesy way of saying you have to make yourself happy. If the phrase isn’t useful to you, you don’t have to use it. It would be a lot more realistic to say “Happiness comes from putting in the effort and work to make yourself happy, primarily through delayed gratification.”
You can definitely count on me to keep negotiating with the universe on achieving happiness, but don’t count on me succeeding. That much I learned by now.
You’re welcome for the extreme motivation that you just received. This was thanks to the free trial of my “extreme motivation course”. To access “full extreme motivation very hardcore”, buy my course for just $999.99.
I developed tinnitus earlier this year, and now I’m never gonna be able to just sit somewhere quiet and far away from everyone else and be alone with my thoughts. This ringing will follow me everywhere, drowning out the distant sounds of cars disturbing puddles in distant streets on a rainy night, obscuring all the subtle little noises that danced on the edges of my perception. But most of all robbing me of any truly quiet moment for the rest of my life.
Condolences. I have a rain sound app on my phone. With earphones and practice, I can sometimes focus on that sound instead of the tinnitus, and get some semblance of peace and sanity.
This is not advice, because if I had heard this posted as advice in my first year or two of tinitus I would have been pissed at the person giving it. Also, to a very large degree even your emotional reaction to this is not something you can control.
I was absolutely devastated and hated myself when I got tinitus. I and a co-worker teaching international folk dance were invited to a dance party / concert.
Amazing band, flown in from another continent, but I knew it would be too loud. I’ve always had minor hyperacusis and been very concerned about protecting my hearing. Before the party started I offered disposable earplugs to my co-worker, she declined. I had my own pair, in my pocket, the entire night. For some reason I never put them on.
At the end of the night I leave the venue and have terrible ringing in my ears. I freaked the fuck out, and kept everything as quiet as possible for the rest of the night and the next day to try to allow my ears to heal. Immense guilt and kicking myself. And fear.
The ringing never stopped. Saw an audiologist, who said it would definitely go away in a few weeks. It did not.
Tried supplements that did seem to reduce the volume of the ringing (Lipoflavinoid. No idea if it was all placebo or not).
Saw many more specialists and eventually met one (more than a year later) that told me (no idea if current studies back this up) that sometimes Tinitus is not physical damage at all, and that it’s damage in the way that our brains process the input from our ears.
He recommended that I “try not to think about it”. Said that sometimes even helps the ringing decrease. I told him that I was not the type of person who could ever not think about it. Nor did I want to be. Exactly the opposite, I had pledged to myself to never just not notice it. Saying that now doesn’t really make sense to me, but at the time it absolutely did. It was an integral part of my self-image.
So, I religiously took Lipoflavinoid every day for more than a year. Normally with my ADHD I would struggle with that, but every time I forgot it I would notice the ringing getting louder and remember.
Then, maybe two or three years in I would sometimes forget to take Lipoflavinoid and… Not notice. I still hadn’t heard a second of silence for 3 years, but I didn’t notice the volume increase.
Eventually I was forgetting it more often than not and didn’t want to keep the hassle and pay for it so I just stopped.
Work got difficult and I would have other things to think about than the ringing, and every one in a while there were days where at the end of the day I would realize I hadn’t noticed the ringing at all. (If I had that realization in a quiet room, I’d immediately start noticing it again)
I gave up trying to fix it. I managed to convince myself that accepting it did not go against the fiber of my self concept, and my experience got better.
It’s been more than 10 years since that concert and I can say that I haven’t been bothered by the ringing in years, and I’m in a relatively quiet room typing this out now and don’t hear it.
Again, not advice. I can’t tell you to “just ignore it”, and if you’re like me you can’t make yourself do that even if you wanted.
If you’re early in your experience with tinitus, maybe it will be helpful to hear that at least for one person, it got better. And that by “it” I mostly mean my experience of life with tinitus, moreso than the ringing itself “going away”.
If anyone has read this far, fun fact that kind of goes against the general gist of this narrative:
Once I had tinitus I realized that I could be a surprisingly accurate and precise human drcibal meter by comparing perceived volume of my ringing to perceived volume of the environment.
Could get within about 3db in the range from 40 to 75 without earplugs, at which point I would put in earplugs and know how much to adjust to get the same precision up to 100db.
I generally refuse on moral grounds to participate in activities above 95db without all participants strictly being required to use ear protection.
Anything above 80, I set up a small table with free earplugs, even if I’m not the organizer…
Also, I haven’t really tried to measure db this way in a few years. Don’t know if I still can or not.
It’s brutal. It also just kind of becomes normal, eventually. Do what you can to protect your hearing going forward to prevent it from getting worse. Good luck.
Agreed. To me, the ringing is just what silence sounds like now after 15 years of the ringing. Mine isn’t very bad, so I only really hear it in quiet spaces, but I protect my hearing as much as possible now to prevent it from getting worse.
I want to be able to offer exclusively vegan dishes at Bancho Sushi, but dishes that involve the rape and murder of sentient shrimp are bigger money makers.
I wouldn’t say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I’m trying to volunteer and work in.
I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.
I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.
I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.
I’m not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.
It’s insane, I even made a complaint to the director who of course is a woman, and she effectively denied that it was happening or could happen.
I told her I don’t even want people not to think these things, everybody who is in their own place of trauma has to get their shit off their chest.
All I wanted was a place where men didn’t have to hear this crap.
And that’s being incredibly neutral in my opinion because there are a lot of opportunities for men to talk about just how insane and shitty women can be. But I don’t want to talk about those things, I just want them to stop shit talking men especially their own clientele.
Pushing any sort of socio-political agenda on people who desperately need help should be grounds for losing your license to operate. If someone was having a mental health crisis and the people who were supposed to help them instead tried to convince them that women have it worse, I could see it pushing that person over the edge into committing suicide. That sounds so incredibly invalidating and possibly malicious.
This is a ridiculous comment. If you can’t handle the way your actions affect others than get out. If you think you know how to “heal” better than nurses then go do it yourself
And the bigots can’t stand to understand that their actions need to be consitered and they aren’t the end all be all of the world? If sexists don’t like the service then they aren’t under any obligation to use it
There are many jobs that I don’t bother to apply for despite knowing I’d excel and enjoy it, simply because I’m male. Many people aren’t comfortable with males in certain roles. Obviously the reverse is true and disproportionate but most people seem to be oblivious that men are oppressed too.
That’s an excellent point and it’s one of these elephants in the room that people can’t see.
Does anybody wonder why there’s virtually no male kindergarten teachers? Convicted before the crime as if women have never acted inappropriately towards children?! I mean for fuck sakes my own mother sexually abused me.
If you’ve ever known any male nurses, they will tell you the stories of being outnumbered 30 to 1 at minimum, and then facing constant sexual harassment, abuse, and career suppression because of their gender.
And my own story, I work in a system of power, the healing sector, which is dominated by women. And as the one guy they’re trying to do the right thing and serve men, we face nothing but abuse. It is driving me out.
I’m thinking about purchasing a new clarinet mouthpiece and investigating and trying them out and I don’t know that many other people who care about it as much as I do
There’s a part of me that really wants something to take over my body or replace myself with an entirely different person who does all of the things I struggle with. Even if it wasn’t a person, if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.
if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.
Why can’t they be proud that you are happy? Why do you need them to be proud of you? It sounds like they are projecting their desires/dreams on to you. You could be honest with them and tell them you aren’t happy trying to make them proud the way they want. You want them to be proud of you for being you. Or you could ghost your family and friends who sound like they want you to be someone you don’t want to be.
But reading it was some of the best therapy I’ve ever received. If you’re at all like me, maybe it will help you too. I am happier, as are the people I love and who love me, in large part because of K.C. Davis’ philosophy. (The people I love and who love me are also very empathetic and understanding, which I know is definitely not true for most people unfortunately).
It’s less than $20.
It’s short.
Buy it. If you can’t afford it, I might even be willing to buy it for you / venmo you $20 to get it.
I’ve been dealing with this back pain under my right shoulder blade for like 6 years or so and I can’t seem to figure out what’s causing it or how to treat it. I think it’s called “rhomboid pain”. I’ve seen a doctor once and physical therapist twice and the best they can do is recommend I stretch and go get a massage. Yeah thanks guys. Totally haven’t tried any of that.
I’ve always had a bad posture but it’s been getting better yet the pain has gotten worse so I don’t think it’s that. I doubt it’s weight lifting either because I had been lifting for almost 10 years before the pain appeared and taking a break doesn’t make it better and lifting heavy doesn’t make it worse. I don’t think it’s mountain biking either because the pain started before I bought my bike. I also got a new bed, tried different pillows, tried sleeping on my back, pillow under my knees. Sleeping on both sides with a pillow between my legs. Nothing. Also it’s rarely bad in the mornings but rather on the evenings.
Well - it’s still early to say, but I have a new idea what might be causing it and I think this might actually be it. I think it’s because I switched from a desktop computer to laptop. It perfectly correlates with the time I started experiencing this pain. I now sit for hours and hours every day with my right hand extended to reach the trackpad. It has to be that. I now switched to mouse and a keyboard and let’s see if that makes a difference. Only been doing that for few days now but I have zero pain right now.
I was getting something similar a few months back and it’s funny you mention a laptop because I started using one around the time my pain appeared, I think I was a bad knot in my muscle, I helped it go away by lying down on a tennis ball and massaging it out, hope ya find some relief dude.
For anyone wanting to try this tennis ball thing, that might not give you enough of what you’re looking for. Lacrosse balls offer less resistance and more pressure
Dude, that’s exactly what it is. I get the exact same pain when I’m editing on my laptop. I swapped out for a trackball myself. I can type all day long because I can get things set up to eliminate that strain, but editing takes a lot more awkward movement using the trackpad.
I like a trackpad, they’re convenient as heck, but they just aren’t good for sustained use imo.
I hope the new keyboard and mouse do the trick! I also was experiencing wrist/arm/shoulder pain after I started working primarily on a laptop. I got a split keyboard that i can angle in a more ergonomic manner, and that single change cleared my pain up. Repetitive stress injuries suck. and I hope you find relief with your new work setup.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m also literally sitting in front of my dining table on a shitty chair, but it’s not like I had some super ergonomic computer station before either. I really hope this helps because otherwise I’m out of ideas.
I would definitely suggest getting a good chair. Being able to adjust the height and stuff is really important, especiallyfor shoulder pain. Take a look at used gaming chairs and/or keep an eye out for recently discontinued models at brick-and-mortar office supply stores (mine was super cheap because they only had the floor model left).
I have had chest discomfort for decades. I’m 46 and it started when I was about 25. Doctors never found anything. I’m lucky to have good benefits and have been going to masseuses for over 10 years.
A couple of years ago tried a new masseuse mentioned the tightness and she found a huge lump of scar tissue she massaged out. I’m still not perfect but I’m light-years better.
My point is, get a massage and never give up. You just need to find the right person to find it.
Yep. I even got this back when cleaners moved my mouse from in front of key keyboard spacebar to the right of the keypad, until I noticed what had happened.
I put my mouse between my body and the keyboard and it goes away.
I had this from having my shoulders curled in while working as well as sleeping on my side. I was picking fruit which requires lots of reaching. Try to be aware of keeping your shoulders square and get a friend to jam their elbow in there and grind it out.
Yeah I’m a side sleeper aswell and my bad posture includes shoulders curled in. I’ve been meaning to get one of those elastic things that’s supposed to pull my shoulders back. It’s interesting when sitting against a backrest or using a foam roller my shoulder blades don’t feel symmetrical. Like the right one is sticking out more.
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