Hamartiogonic

I like to imagine that it was an accident. What kind of next level stupidity does it take to do this intentionally? Well, humanity is known for reaching absolutely epic heights in stupidity, so I guess it’s still possible.

Been there, done that, didn’t end well. Bumping into delusional people and trying to use facts, gradually made me realize some important things. Took me way too long too, so please take a shortcut in this regard.

You may think it’s a debate, but is it really? Does the other person really play by the same rules? If you’re talking to a delusional conspiracy theorist, you can forget about facts. You’re dealing with an emotional matter, so you can safely skip the facts, and use emotions instead. Besides, they don’t use facts, or appreciate them.

Long ago, I met some people who were using fancy physics terms, but were actually talking about quantum woo. At first, I tried to take them seriously, but eventually realized it’s a waste of time. I realized that these people are far beyond my reach, so I just stayed quiet and moved on.

A few years later, I bumped into someone who claimed that all seedless fruit are GMOs. I tried to explain about selective breeding, and how ancient that technique is. At some point, I told him to check the relevant wikipedia article, to which he replied: “Wikipedia, it’s all lies.” I learned something very important that day. We don’t seem to have much common ground, so where do you even start with a person like that?

Fast forward a few years, it’s COVID time, and the hight of conspiracy season. I started looking into this thing, and read a bunch of studies about conspiratorial thinking and the mostly subclinical mental conditions behind it. I learned, that these people don’t have any use for facts. Those will only make things worse. What they really need is therapy.

They work reasonably well, you can update them whenever you want and they are optional. Your Firefox installation won’t suddenly turn into a Flatpak overnight.

This kind of heavy handed management of change is unacceptable. Ubuntu deserves all the bad publicity they’re getting from this.

Then again, change is always hard, so there’s no easy way around this problem. Once canonical has implemented all the major changes they have in mind, Ubuntu could be worth testing again. In the meantime, it’s hard to recommend it to anyone.

Fedora is clearly a safer choice even though it too changes frequently. I used to update my system through the GUI, but over the years, that method became unreliable, and eventually broke completely. I ended up updating through the CLI instead, which isn’t something I can remember to everyone.

It’s true that I enjoy the company of likeminded people, who doesn’t. However, I also speak my mind at places where these thoughts are not necessarily understood or supported. I take risks that may materialize as a torrent of downvotes. Some of those are also 100% justified, because some of my comments can be really dumb. Occasionally, my comment ends up being 50/50 controversial, and sometimes I get downvoted to oblivion.

I guess that’s key detail here. I am subscribed to lots and lots of communities, some of which are nearly dead. I want to keep an eye on several small and special communities that focus on a very narrow niche. You’ll probably never see any of those communities in the All feed.

As you suggested, there’s no other way. I’ve spent enough time browsing all to figure out that I don’t care about 99% of what the hive mind appears to love with a burning passion.

Very rarely I find something worth reading on all, and that’s why I visit that place about once a month. It’s not a completely useless place, but I find very little utility in it.

That’s a fine approach too. You’re essentially using a black list filter, while I’m using a white list.

Maybe not a one in a million rare, but I get the feeling that most people disagree with my approach. Is it 51%, 90%, something else? Who knows.

So it could be seen as a metric that measures the underperformance of the federal government and states, but not each individual city.

Quickly enough to be mildly terrifying, but not quickly enough to be Saturday already. I guess this means it’s just fine on average.

IMO the number of homeless people is an indicator for how badly the local government is doing its job.

Oh wait, this comes from America, so I guess you’re just not capitalizing that capitalism hard enough if you have problems like this. Taking care of people is like communism or something, right.

I saw it on the web. Therefore, it has to be true.