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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I expect it’ll probably be relatively boring. Trump likely has been coached to hell and back not to say unhinged shit. Of course, he can’t control himself so he’s going to say some unhinged shit, but it’s definitely not going to be to the same frequency and magnitude that he normally is.

    Meanwhile, Biden is going to play the “Trump is unhinged, so Republicans please vote for me” strategy, which is going to be unexciting to both Republicans and Democrats.

    I think the debate itself is going to be dull, and what will really sway the population is what the media and social media run with afterward. ie, it’ll be determined entirely by who has the more embarrassing slip-up. God this country is fucked


  • Linux is really a superfamily of loosely-related OS’s (called distributions). Arch and Debian are 2 of the more common ones. Arch in particular has a reputation of being really beginner un-friendly, particularly in that, to my understanding, you have to build the OS yourself.

    There’s also the caveat that many Linux distributions end up sharing/copying code from each other, so you end up with a kind of “OS lineage.” The most common distribution, Ubuntu, is copied from Debian. And then the most beginner-friendly distribution, Linux Mint, is copied from Ubuntu. Arch, to my knowledge, doesn’t copy code from elsewhere, so much of the advice given from users of other distributions won’t apply to Arch (hence the meme, “I use Arch btw”)

    Anyways, the real advice for a Linux beginner is to stick with a beginner-friendly distribution: either Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. Most or all distributions have various “flavors,” which are basically like how the OS looks. I think the real difficulty is picking a flavor that you like. I personally like the look of KDE Plasma (IMO resembles Windows 10 the most), so my personal recommendation is Kubuntu, which is the KDE Plasma flavor of Ubuntu


  • I can kinda see both ways. I think both systems aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive - I think the old system works more intuitively for pipes with low volumes of fluid, and the new system works more intuitively for pipes that are full or near full.

    I hope that the developers can mix the two systems, so that pipes function with the old system when pipes are empty or near empty, and it switches to the new system when pipes are full or near full





  • If you want a real answer, it’s like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

    Don’t believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That’s just attraction, not love. In some ways it’s similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

    In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need




  • Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.

    If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture








  • I’m not sure I understand the analogy. A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

    I suppose you might be talking about ritualization, or the idea that the people who build protocols are so removed from the people who follow them, that the people who follow the protocols don’t know why they do the things they do, but only know that bad things happen if they don’t follow the protocols.

    But even then, the analogy seems somewhat strenuous, since the point of occultism is exactly to try to study demonology and understand how to work with demons - ie, to try to understand why the protocols are the way they are.

    If you wanted to talk about ritualization, there are significantly more apt comparisons. Most examples of culture or religions could be argued to be practical protocols that ended up gaining momentum and becoming more spiritual than they initially were.


  • I’m personally not a fan of Mint - tried it for a month or so. My impression is that if it works with your muscle memory, it works well. If not… then even Windows ends up more user-friendly.

    I’m particularly not a fan of the “start menu” because you don’t really get a lot of space for pinned apps, and there’s no way to really modify that. I ended up liking KDE quite a lot more. It takes a bit longer to set it up to what you like, but its customization means that while there’s a bigger upfront cost to setup, it’s much smoother once it is set up.

    I’m using KDE Neon (Ubuntu + KDE), which I’m pretty happy with. But I’m also debating whether to switch to Kubuntu (also Ubuntu + KDE for some reason)


  • My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.

    And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun

    To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.

    We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything

    My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)