christian

christian , 15 days ago

I don’t read five star reviews ever anymore. If I want to find a believable endorsement of a product, I’ll look for a four-star review that contains a criticism that isn’t that bothersome to me personally, but legitimate enough that I can imagine a customer who would be deterred by it.

We moved a year ago, and I found my favorite pizza guy, Tony, by maybe the most convincing online review I’ve ever read. The most recent review on google maps was a one-star that was basically like “I met Tony and he casually used foul language etc etc there is no need for profanity etc pizza was some of the best I’ve ever had though”

christian , 15 days ago

Tony’s great. He does a thing he calls “Detroit style stuffed pizza” which does not really seem to be a Detroit style pizza at all but it’s fantastic nonetheless.

A lot of people like his sandwiches and visually they look very appetizing, but for whatever reason they don’t hit the spot for me. His pizzas are spectacular, and good breadsticks and wings too.

christian , 15 days ago

Mathematician here, I can answer this. Equivalence relations are symmetric, so if staying home is a vote for Trump then showing up to vote for Trump is the same as staying home on election day.

christian , 15 days ago

That doesn’t make any sense. The idea that staying home could be a vote for Biden seems pretty silly on its face. If that were true, there wouldn’t be any point in going out to vote for him, because the majority (or at least a plurality) of the country stays home regardless. He’d win in a landslide.

christian , 15 days ago

Doesn’t that seem strange to you?

It doesn’t seem strange at all. I have never once heard someone suggest that staying home is a vote for Biden, but it’s pretty well agreed upon that not voting is a vote for Trump.

…so Trump should win in a landslide, right? Yet he lost once. This seems like a glaring error in the idea that a protest vote is a vote for Trump.

Only if you believe that election wasn’t stolen.

christian , 15 days ago

I feel bad about this and I’d like to make it up to you.

If you tell me your favorite candidate I promise to stay home on election day to cast a vote for them.

christian , 15 days ago

A vote not cast is a vote for Aaron Bushnell.

This sounds a lot more productive than election day usually ends up. Thanks for making this election season inspiring.

christian , 15 days ago

There was a local r4r dating subreddit I posted to in 2014, somehow my (now) wife saw it like two or three months later. I titled it “Creepy guy seeks woman way out of his league”, which I am still very proud of as a great title for a personals ad.

A little over a year later we took a look back at that same subreddit and it was 100% hookups, the dating part had been completely phased out except for the subreddit name.

christian , 16 days ago

I use an adblocker, but I also drive a very old car and unfortunately my cd player just broke. I can confirm that there are tons of vaginal deodorant ads on the radio, always presented as a conversation between two women. There’s no intention to be funny, they’re trying to sound like a natural conversation two women would have in private and completely failing at coming across as anything short of awkward.

“So it works well for you?” “Yes! It lasts up to 24 hours, and four out of five gynecologists recommend it!”

christian , 16 days ago

I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.

At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.

I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn’t interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.

After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don’t fully understand. I haven’t progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.

In the past five or so years, I’ve to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I’ve moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.

I’ve basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just comfortable with it and don’t want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they’d be like wtf are you doing. It’s whatever, it works well enough for me.

christian , 23 days ago

My favorite thing about this post is that question 2 is asked based on the assumption that you’ve answered question 1 correctly by picking “cat”.

christian , 1 month ago

I want to watch it just because even without knowing a single thing about it I absolutely love this parody video and would like to get a more sophisticated appreciation for the comedy there.

christian , 1 month ago

Came here to post this too. 2011 two-door Hyundai accent, and I really value how small it is with two doors rather than four, easy to maneuver and park and drive in general.

It’s had some issues (horrible repair job after an accident led to me driving it a while with badly leaking transmission fluid, I really think that’s contributed to 90% of the problems over the years) and a few months back I tried looking into new cars and I literally could not figure out if anyone sells a car that size in the US anymore. So I’ll stick with dealing with it breaking down once or twice a year.

Breaking down can be a huge headache depending on timing, but I’m not interested in buying used because I don’t feel like I have enough intuition for cars to test drive something for an hour and feel confident I’m not putting $10,000 or whatever into a lateral move.

christian , 1 month ago

I don’t think even that’s true. I think any potential consequences this story making the news could possibly incite have already been set in motion from what’s already been in the news the past few months. They won’t take any additional hit from one more thing added to the pile, but this being in the news will make activists think twice about risking their lives to provide aid.

christian , 1 month ago

I think what the number 44 specifically would look like was probably way outside the radar of whoever designed that font. Yeah, it looks similar, but even noticing that I still really wouldn’t have assumed that someone wearing intends it as a nazi symbol. Is there really a need to announce a ban and solidify that it will be one? Just change the damn font going forward. Are they going to ban 88 too?

christian , 1 month ago

Your last paragraph was pretty much where I was a couple years ago. I don’t remember who helped clarify this for me, but housing maintenance is very much a real job and deserves the same respect and compensation as any real job, but it can very easily be disjoint from being a landlord. Making money from owning the housing other people live in is distinct from maintaining that housing, and just because several people do both things doesn’t mean that we should treat them as the same job.

christian , 1 month ago

Like fifteen years ago I would buy physical books, I still have a huge collection. I was getting really into math and would buy textbooks. Sometimes they could be pricey, but for a good hardcover, it can really be worth it if you’re coming back to it a lot.

Very early 2010s the amazon books became awful overnight. You could pay $70 for a hardcover and the damn thing would start falling apart a few days into reading it. I really don’t think I’m hard on my books, I treat them with care. These things just couldn’t handle normal wear for even a short amount of time. Paperbacks were even less reliable and only slightly less expensive. So I completely ditched amazon and started ordering books directly from the publishers. Normally they’d be like $10-15 more than on amazon, but it’s worth it, they weren’t falling apart.

Probably around 2012 I finished reading volume 2 of Francis Borceux’s “Handbook of Categorical Algebra”. Those first two volumes are genuinely some of the best math books I’ve ever gone through, it took me like a year each though. Volume 3 was very expensive to get from the publisher, I think it was over $160, but since I had gotten so much mileage out of the first two I decided I wanted to just pony up. It was clear as soon as it arrived that it was a piece of shit, and did start falling apart immediately. I left emails and phone calls and they just ghosted me and I couldn’t figure out a way to get my money back. That was the last book I bought for like a full decade, and I don’t think I’ve made a book purchase from anywhere over $15 since.

Pretty sure that was Cambridge University Press, and I had purchased something else (although much much cheaper) from them the year before that was good quality.

I still greatly prefer having a physical copy, but I pirate almost everything I can’t find in a library now.

christian , 1 month ago

it takes 162 pages to formally prove that 1+1=2

This is ridiculously backwards, Whitehead and Russell’s motivation for writing the PM was to come up with a set of axioms and deductive rules that the entirety of mathematics could be derived from. When they worked out their proof that 1 + 1 = 2, it didn’t tell the world that now 1 + 1 = 2 is now officially a fact, it told the world that the logic and axioms they built were capable of deducing some very simple facts that we’ve already been confident are true. The hope was that maybe if we keep working at this and modifying our rules when need be, we’ll be able to get a set of axioms and inference rules that are sufficient to determine the truth of any mathematical question. A few years later Gödel came along and completely obliterated any hope of a project like that succeeding, and today literally no one thinks of the PM as more than a historical curiosity. (If you actually wanted to prove 1 + 1 = 2 from first principles today, you’d use the Peano axioms for the naturals: S0 + S0 = S(S0 + 0) = SS0, done.) That’s a tangent from the actual topic but I feel compelled to call it out.

Getting back on track, probably 90% of the points I give on exams are for partial credit, because there needs to be distinctions between having no clue, knowing where to start and getting stuck, understanding essentially every meaningful step but then writing 1 + 1 = 3 to wrap up, etc. I’m grading on both their ability to solve problems and their ability to communicate their ideas. Both are equally important.

This is very controversial, but I don’t go out of my way at all to worry about cheating. I don’t want to play policeman and teach with the mindset that my students are potential criminals. Even if I’m 99% sure a student is cheating, if that happens enough times I’ll hit the 1% where I’m giving a student who doesn’t deserve it an undeservedly hard time. I’m not paid anywhere near enough for it to be worth having a more adversarial relationship with my students.

I had a student earlier this month where it looked like he probably snuck out his phone for an exam. I just wrote a note on those problems that I couldn’t follow his work and wasn’t comfortable giving points for work I don’t understand, please walk me through your solutions for the points back. I told him this verbally as well when I handed it back to him. He never took me up on that, but it feels more humanizing than just calling him a cheater. I think OP is getting at something similar, but I think there’s value in not phrasing it in an accusatory way.

christian , 1 month ago

But being charitable to the person you’re responding to, they twice said explicitly that they didn’t understand what was being said and asked for elaboration and both times got a reply that more or less suggested that they didn’t understand because they’re illiterate. At some point it becomes understandable.

christian , 1 month ago

Somewhere in here there’s a joke about the cocaine laced with fentanyl that I keep getting told is a massive problem that requires more police funding to deal with.

The feds can’t imprison me for making cocaine “too entertaining”!

christian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I’m skeptical this was actually taken out of context. Trump had an interview about two years ago where he leveled this exact accusation against Putin. I really recommend watching this short clip for context, it’s still hard to believe most Americans aren’t aware of what was said here.

christian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I mean, much more often than not, and for the majority of the time, they are.

You don’t see this statement as dogmatic? How do you feel confident in this other than just a feeling?

The majority of the time the articles would require actual expertise to make that evaluation with confidence. An individual can take a few minutes to verify the sources, but for so many topics it’s not realistic to rule out omissions of sources that should be well-known, or even rule out that a source given provides an important broader context somewhere nearby that should be mentioned in the article but isn’t. Can you be sure that the author is trustworthy on this subject? It’s not enough to just check a single page mentioned in a book while ignoring the rest of the book and any context surrounding the author.

An expert on a very specialized topic could weigh with accuracy in on whether the wikipedia articles on their subject is well-researched and sourced, but that still won’t mean they can extrapolate their conclusion to other articles.

christian , 2 months ago

This is a disgustingly cynical interpretation and I really wish it wasn’t realistic.

christian , 2 months ago

I know this is a weird choice but the Lustmord tribute album “The Others” is probably my favorite of the decade so far. The first half is pretty close to the dark ambient Lustmord is known for, but as the album goes on it has some more melodic contributions which are really spectacular.

Ethereal Shroud’s “Trisagion” album is really great if you’re into metal. Also with regards to metal - the song “Aggressor” by Vredehammer is crazy good, especially the first 2:20 or so, but the full album doesn’t quite match it for me.

“Aether” by The Moon and the Nightspirit is wonderful folk music from Hungary, but they’ve had a few other albums in the past that match it for me.

christian , 2 months ago

Yes.

I think I have a mental disorder where if people online are angry at me I actually start introspecting a lot rather than blowing it off. Sometimes I have something I want to say anyway and emotionally prepare to eat it.

christian , 2 months ago

Maybe like twenty years ago my Demonoid account had a glitch where it showed my download as a few bytes, regardless of how much I was actually downloading. The number definitely should have been way way higher. Every time I would log on the digits for my ratio would run off the side of the screen.

christian , 2 months ago

Here’s Roto-Borola, who has somehow fallen asleep while sitting up like a person.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/3f45b4e5-a72b-423f-857a-97a1b08c5122.jpeg

christian , 2 months ago

My favorite band is Elend, they’re essentially unknown outside of the metal community in spite of not being metal in any way. (They are one of the only non-metal bands given an exception to be listed on the metal archives.) It’s neoclassical, but at times absurdly violent and their first three albums have harsh vocals. (Note that “Weeping Nights” is more or less an alternate version of “Les Ténèbres du Dehors” where the male vocals have been removed.)

violent, harsh vocals

violent, no harsh vocals

beautiful sad music

absolutely gorgeous shit with screams

(just giving youtube links so you can redirect to your frontend of choice)

christian OP , 2 months ago

You could have answered my question a bit earlier, I broke my nose this morning and now her divorce lawyer has informed me that my neighbor across the street has gone up to 12% better than me.

EDIT: I just went over and broke the guy’s kneecaps and am now happily married again.

christian , 3 months ago

We had a cat a while back with horrible flatulence among other stomach problems for a couple years. He was kind of a dumbass and at one point he ate some bristles off of the broom, caught him chewing on it and didn’t realize he had actually swallowed anything. A tiny bit after I had taken it away from him he coughs up the bristles with a tapeworm tangled in there.

I swear we did like a million stool samples the first couple years we had him that showed no parasites. We had just brought in two of them a couple weeks apart in the past month when that happened. My wife took a photo of the worm, we went straight to the vet and he got medication that solved all his issues essentially overnight. For the record, if this ever happens to you, the vet we saw suggests putting the worm in water to preserve it and bring it in, rather than just snapping a photo and trying to get the thing as far away from your household as possible immediately afterwards.

I think “Thank god our cat ate that broom” is a phrase not used very often outside of our household.

christian , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.

I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he’d point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn’t feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.

Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He’s giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn’t really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris’ post where he addresses zero of Chris’ points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn’t actually care about free software.

At that point I didn’t really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.

Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I’m pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called “PureOS”) because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren’t taken seriously.

Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word “functional”.

I’ll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.

edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads “PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops.” Sounds like a community of happy customers.

christian , 3 months ago

Good comment. I’m pretty sure “public money, public code” used to be a slogan a while back. It didn’t get a lot of traction but it resonated with me.

christian , 3 months ago

I’m considering getting back into pc gaming, it’s honestly been a couple decades so I’m ludicrously out of touch. On top of that I don’t know shit about wine, in my 10-15 years of running linux I think I’ve only run wine one time, right after making the switch. I quickly decided using native apps was easier and I’ve never really needed any software badly enough.

Anyway, my assumption is that linux piracy is so scarce that I’d be better off just looking to run windows cracks through wine, is that accurate? Are there any decent private trackers for games with a reasonably low entry barrier (an interview process for example)?

christian , 3 months ago

The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.

Oh wow, I had totally forgotten that it started as phoenix. I only remember that name because the first time I downloaded the browser, the homepage read “Phoenix is now Firebird”.

christian , 3 months ago

Yes, it probably is the best that you personally can reasonably do, but I think the point is that the responsibility shouldn’t be put on working individuals who cannot really do anything beyond that. It’s very plausible that public transportation that doesn’t suck could be implemented in a few years if there were political will for it. It’s just hard to believe that if you live somewhere that has never in your lifetime had the political will for public transportation that doesn’t suck.

christian , 3 months ago

Honestly, I think it’s even overblown as a thing on reddit, I feel like virtually no one who is over fifteen and using reddit recreationally cares about karma. I’ve heard it presented like people are out there karma-farming because they feel a sense of pride in having a high number and I kind of think that’s an invented caricature to get mad at. I’m skeptical that anyone actually cares.

Obviously there are people and businesses/institutions who use reddit for promotion and narrative shifting and there are bot accounts to be sold to those institutions, and all of them definitely care about karma, but I think that’s distinct (and more harmful).

In the present discussion, the people posting want to share that they’re trying something new. I don’t open these posts myself but I think that’s fine. It’s very unlikely there’s some hidden motive here. As someone who cares about free software and the linux ecosystem, I would hope that the community is receptive and encourages newcomers to participate.

I do understand how OP could be annoyed at seeing a lot of these in his feed, but I think the solution is to get them off his feed, just block the community. Letting newbies have their moment is more likely to grow the community.

christian , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Yeah, probably a little, but this same change was 1000x more noticeable like half a year ago when reddit banned third-party apps. I think it’s reasonable to lament the change, and I kind of miss the tight-knit community from the first three years I was here, but it’s still worth celebrating the platform taking off. Ultimately all you can do is be the change you wish to see in the world.

That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.

christian , 3 months ago

I don’t anymore, but it definitely still doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as reddit is.

In the past, the security fortress Lemmy has had that reddit doesn’t is the userbase being too small for organizations to feel astroturfing is worth their time.

christian , 3 months ago

I saw the picture before reading the edit and was trying to imagine what OP was doing that made the end key significantly more useful than the home key, like not going backwards on principle or something.

christian , 4 months ago

There is expensive because of brand and expensive because of material quality, do your research.

If “do your research” means take a couple minutes to make sure there aren’t glaring red flags about a purchase, then yeah that checks, but I see this phrase used as a more serious concept which just doesn’t seem realistic given my experiences.

I feel like if you don’t already know what to look for in your specific product of interest it’s impossible to do research and have confidence. Like when I don’t know where to start and try to research products through a search, I go through so much SEO bullshit in such a short timeframe that I have no confidence in anything I’m looking at, including the stuff that looks like it has a good chance of being legit. Maybe I can find a forum of some sort, but I’ll need a way to tell that the users aren’t just talking out of their asses (or bots, or paid sponsors). Major review sites are a mess.

The phrase “do your research” is way overstated, because someone who knows what they need to look at is already going to do research and is not the target audience. The time it takes to filter through all the nonsense and form a coherent opinion researching something from scratch is so enormous that it’s hard for me to imagine someone actually doing that diligently for anything less expensive than a car. What actually happens is you just give up partway and make your best guess like you would have done in the first place. At that point your research has led you to seeing a bunch of ads and a few conflicting opinions. Yeah, that will influence your decision and possibly be helpful, but the benefits are marginal compared to the time investment, it’s rarely worth more than a few minutes if it’s not a major purchase.

Or maybe everyone else is a lot better at this than me and I’m making a fool out of myself by posting this.

christian , 4 months ago

One of mine likes chewing on wires to electrical devices. He used to do it only occasionally, but at some point he got the hint that I’m shooing him away when he does it and now he’ll start whenever I’m at the computer and he’s upset I’m not giving him adequate attention. He stops by and stands up against the chair to let me know he wants attention, and if I explain to him that I’m working on something and you’ll need to wait, he’ll immediately move to chewing at the wires.

This along with the fact that he’s more interested in me the second I start talking on my phone means I have to leave the room absolutely any time I want to answer or make a phone call.

I love him and he might have the happiest disposition of any cat I’ve met, but he’s really an asshole sometimes. He pounces me when I’m sleeping sometimes too which can really hurt if his nails get me.

christian , 5 months ago

There are a lot of awful things here but to focus on just one, holy shit monthly rent could go over the asset cap in a few years.

christian , 5 months ago

I know I’m not making a helpful contribution here, but I’ve been wondering about this stuff for a while myself and this thread has some great answers. Thanks for asking this OP.

christian , 5 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

This is kind of tangential, but I don’t think I ever would have known that “poof” was an anti-gay slur in Britain if I hadn’t played Pokemon White. I wanted to.use that as a nickname and had to look up online why the game was preventing me.

christian , 5 months ago

Eastward? I actually learned about this game on lemmy a year or two ago.

I thought the pixel graphics were incredible, gave the game such a beautifully creepy atmosphere when it needed it. Even though I was really disappointed that the game just ended without tying any of the story together, I did think the story was great before I finished it. At times the game was unsettling and eerie and at other times it was heartwarming, and the dialogue throughout seemed very well-written.