Contramuffin

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Contramuffin , to No Stupid Questions in Is my girlfriend gaslighting me? (Edit: No, she is not gaslighting me, but may have some other issues.)

Not gaslighting, and from what you seem to describe, doesn't appear to be manipulative either. She just seems to be angry. Not to say that you can't be both angry and manipulative, but I don't see clear intent for her to try to guilt trip or gaslight you.

Gaslighting would be if she lied and said that she sent you a message when in fact she didn't. i.e., lying with the intent to make you question your judgment and perception

Guilt tripping would be if she pressured you into giving her a gift as compensation for ignoring her message. i.e., taking advantage of someone's feelings of guilt to get them to do something for you.

I don't see any lie, and I don't see hee trying to extract anything out of you. Worst case interpretation, she's being a bit petty. Best case interpretation, she's scared of being alone outside.

I noticed your final paragraph, and I would be cautious in general about saying that someone who's trying to convince you that their anger is justified is automatically manipulative. That's kind of just how anger works. People think that their anger is justified. Otherwise they wouldn't be angry. Manipulation occurs when you start to feel like you are being used for their own motives.

Either way, you should probably talk to her about it. It seems like she thinks the issue is more severe than you appear to think, and that is something that should be discussed with her

Contramuffin , to Ask Lemmy in What do you think the Great Filter is?

My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don't really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct

Contramuffin , to No Stupid Questions in How did we switched from "Dinosaur are giant lizards" to "Dinosaur are giant birds"

Not a paleontologist, but I think it's a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

I'm pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can't.

And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like

Contramuffin , to Linux Gaming in Sorry I can't do it.

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

Contramuffin , to Not The Onion in Louisiana's new "Ten Commandments" law actually contains eleven commandments

I see that Louisiana is run by Clay Puppington... How many "lost commandments" are they going to include?

Contramuffin , (edited ) to No Stupid Questions in Disable windows updates

Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don't need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don't fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.

Contramuffin , to Ask Lemmy in which one is the best anime in your opinion?

Dr. Stone. It's not for everyone, but if you're into STEM, it's probably the closest you'll get to media accurately portraying science and technology.

It also puts into perspective just how much knowledge, expertise, and experience went into basically everything that we take for granted today. Makes you at least a bit hopeful for the future of humanity

Contramuffin , to No Stupid Questions in In our post-AI era, is job security strictly mythical? Or How to believe in careers as a concept worth doing?

There are certain careers that can't be replaced by AI - anything that requires working with your hands will not be replaced by AI unless robots suddenly get invented. But if robots exist, then there's likely bigger things to worry about than your job.

I would look for non-routine jobs that require a lot of handiwork. Non-routine because it will be hard to replace with general, non-AI automation, and handiwork because AI is currently digital only.

Carpentry, plumbing, engineering, laboratory research, teaching all likely fall into the safe category

Contramuffin , to Ask Lemmy in A bit of a weird question: Can modern medicine be a threat to humanity long-term by greatly reducing effects of natural selection?

Hmm, that's an interesting question. I'm not an evolutionary biologist but I am a biologist (more specifically, a microbiogist).

The crux of the misunderstanding, I think, is that the definition of what counts as advantageous or "good" has changed over time. Very rapidly, in fact. The reason many diseases are still around today is because many genetic diseases offered a very real advantage in the past. The example that is often given is malaria and sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia gives resistance to malaria, which is why it's so prevalent in populations that historically have high incidence of malaria.

Natural selection doesn't improve anything, it just makes animals more fit for their exact, immediate situation. That also means that it is very possible (and in fact, very likely) that the traits that we today associate with health will become disadvantageous in the future.

If we remember that natural selection isn't trying to push humanity towards any goal, enlightenment, or good health, it becomes easier to acknowledge and accept that we can and should interfere with natural selection

Contramuffin , to Showerthoughts in descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are

Sure, I get that, which is why I make the point that the OP may be taking about ritualization. But that isn't made clear in the original post, and especially with how the post is presented, the OP appears to be actively discouraging that notion. The last sentence is particularly confusing because it's implying that most if not all company protocols are just as arbitrary and supernatural as attempting to summon a demon.

Contramuffin , to Showerthoughts in descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are

Nowhere have I said that programs are perfectly fine. In that exact quote that you have quoted me on, I even said that unintuitive features may be bugs passing off as features.

I am making the claim that no matter how much technical debt there is in a code, it is not remotely comparable to occultism and demons. If you read and understand what I have said, I make clear that it is not even that programming and occultism are dissimilar, but more accurately that the two cannot even be categorically compared because there is nothing to compare. You are not comparing apples to oranges, you are comparing apples to chairs.

Contramuffin , to Showerthoughts in descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are

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.

Contramuffin , to PC Master Race in Why Mint and Ubuntu?

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)

Contramuffin , to Reddit in If Reddit had a soul/conscience, I think it was us, and we're all on Lemmy now...

Thanks for the input.

I personally interpret your story not as evidence that Lemmy is insular. Or at least not in the way that perhaps you intended it. It seems to me (and this has generally been by experience with Reddit) that Reddit is generally really good at putting people together with others of a similar viewpoint. To me, the fact that you are more accepted on Reddit seems more indicative of the fact that Reddit prevents people who disagree from even talking to each other. Downvotes and upvotes, after all, have basically never been used as a measure of discussion. Both here and on Reddit, they just measure how many people agree with you.

My experience on Lemmy has generally been that even while people disagree with you, they make a more earnest attempt to engage with your viewpoint.

Contramuffin , to Reddit in If Reddit had a soul/conscience, I think it was us, and we're all on Lemmy now...

I think, beyond simply offering counterpoints, Lemmings are also better at accepting nuance and taking measured opinions. It would be really interesting to track changes over time in the usage of certain keywords on Reddit that would imply nuance. For instance, words like "but," "however," "think," "believe," "may," etc.

I have no doubt that the usage of these words would go down after seeing how Reddit is like now, but it would definitely be interesting to see the formal data on it

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