I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.
One Christmas when I was like seven years old, my great aunt Ruth stayed with our family. She was a nun and for some reason this meant that, on principle, we had to attend Christmas mass at the proper time (Christmas morning) and we were not allowed to open any presents until mass was over.
The sermon was over three hours, I had a cheap casio watch and was timing it.
I was trying to use an example from personal experience to illustrate the benefit, but my point is that immediate answers wasn’t an option not too long ago, so curiosities you actually did want answered would necessarily have that delay. Being able to learn things well in spite of this shift is becoming a skill not everyone has. It’s something that needs to be nurtured, and it’s now easy to neglect, which really can affect everyone, although obviously some attitudes and lifestyles will be hit harder than others.
Something of a tangent but honestly I hate the way academia works here in general and I resent my role in contributing to math being used as a barrier to a better life. Unfortunately, I do need a career of some sort and there are worse things I could be doing. So I play by the rules well enough to keep my job and just try to do my best to be understanding.
I didn’t even enjoy math myself until I took an analysis course because I thought a math minor would help with job prospects. I always had an easy time with math and when I took analysis I got a D the first time and barely scraped by with a C the second. Math is actually interesting when you feel there’s creativity required in problem-solving, but it’s not reasonable to demand that in a lower-level math course because it doesn’t mesh well with a course existing primarily as a roadblock for students.
A hardworking student might still struggle to develop that creativity quickly enough to get through the course unscathed, which is fine if you’re enrolled because you just want to learn, but not fine for students trying to get good grades or at least pass everything to get through as quickly as possible. A student might have the crazy idea that failing is a financial hit or something. The result is you’re simply put through a grind until you voluntarily take on a course beyond the calculus sequence.
What I’m getting at is that I think your complaints all stem from the fact that, in spite of what we’re all forced to pretend, education is not the main purpose of academia.
I think there are many questions where it’s very easy to convince yourself the solution is obvious after you’ve been shown it, but it’s less obvious for someone who is taking the time to try to figure it out on their own.
I teach college math courses (usually around calculus-level), and for every exam I give I will write a practice exam to post online a week before, and I’ll devote the lecture prior to the exam to reviewing those problems. I try to make every problem that appears on the exam very similar to one that was on the practice. The students who attempt the problems before the review session, even the students who get incorrect solutions in the process, will bulldoze their exams and will say it was essentially identical to the practice, while the students who just watch me give the solutions and copy down what I’m writing will tell me the practice was easy but this was barely similar at all.
When you see an obvious solution immediately, you completely bypass seeing potential stumbling blocks which might have tripped you up.
I read somewhere that the existence of the internet massively stifles our ability to reason. For every question I have, spending a few minutes to ponder what the most plausible answer is provides a small workout for my brain. If everything I’m curious about is answered within seconds, I don’t get those mental workouts.
Looking at this now, you are correct, and while I wasn’t proud of myself for having thought the song titles were funny, I feel a bit more embarrassed now than I did two minutes ago before looking it up. Edgy teenagers were clearly this band’s target audience.
It didn’t make sense to me either until I realized that cleaning your house is probably also gay if you’re not expecting visitors.
Tarja-era Nightwish is so good.
I haven’t thought about this in like 20 years but when I was in middle school late 90s some kid had an album where one of the songs was titled “You Rollerblading (f-slur)” and I remember thinking it was the worst music I had heard in my life. 90% sure it was grindcore music, I didn’t know what grindcore was at the time but my memory of the sound kind of fits that mold and the album had like fifty tracks and every single one of them was like 10-15 seconds long.
Using the phrase “serious question” or “honest question” will make me immediately assume your question is the exact opposite of that. Probably I’m overreacting but expecting anyone might respect that declaration you’ve made about your own question gives me narcissist vibes.
I only discovered encabulation is a thing like a month or two ago and it’s been life-changing, I’ve seen the original paper but finding videos on youtube is like a treasure trove. The Chrysler version is probably my favorite I’ve seen, entirely because of the tech guy that the video switches over to for the second half.
The SANS ICS HyperEncabulator video is also really special. The throwback “I don’t understand you” scene at 1:53, I can’t even make out most of what he’s saying but somehow the delivery and the grin get me every time I watch it.
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.
Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.
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”.
As a very stable genius, I completely agree with this.
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.
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.
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.
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 studied math and my first thought here is Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.