It pisses me the fuck off that yoga is actually ancient and really good for you. Part of me still feels like it was invented to extract wealth from white socal moms.
I hate New age shit so much I actually get kinda mad when cleaning my room and drinking water actually improves my mood.
Like what do you mean moderate exercise and disciplined self respect actually improve my life. Cut the bullshit and invent cigarettes that are good for me already.
sick of hearing about “healing crystals” that “cleanse your mind and body of negative energy” i want to know which rocks can hurt you and fuck up your vibe so bad
everyone suggesting uranium isn’t wrong but anyone who said “literally any rock if you’re willing to resort to violence” are the only people who can get on my level. you’re hired.
caincore
okay which fandom that sprung up out of nowhere overnight like mushrooms after rain is this a reference to i can’t keep up anymore
oh you meant like. that guy from the bible who invented murder. right.
I’m getting ready to say something that is going to get me doxxed
RELIGION IS JUST REALLY BIG FANDOMS THAT PEOPLE OBSESSED OVER
Who’s joining me to see how many followers I lose over that?
this post hasn’t left my mind since i’ve first saw it
people jest but this is literally how i worked out i was gaslit for like 15 years of my life
People who “want trauma” are recognizing, on some level, that they were traumatized but in a way that’s not “socially recognized” as trauma. What they really want is for people to see that they’ve been traumatized and be on their side
Hold up
I think it’s also important to talk about mental illness, and how the pain and trauma of being mentally ill as a kid is often diminished because of the lack of outside actors. If you spent your childhood being suicidally depressed because your wee little kiddo brain decided to be a chemical shitshow, it doesn’t matter how much mom and dad loved you, that kinda thing fucks you up. And having people only look at your external surroundings and argue that “nothing bad happened” ignores all the pain you went through internally. So wishing you could have something external you could point to in order to justify that pain and enduring stress – just so people could understand – makes sense.
It’s not so much “I wish I had been traumatized” as “I wish I had a name, an event, an explanation for my trauma that other people would understand and accept.”
this post hasn’t left my mind since i’ve first saw it
people jest but this is literally how i worked out i was gaslit for like 15 years of my life
People who “want trauma” are recognizing, on some level, that they were traumatized but in a way that’s not “socially recognized” as trauma. What they really want is for people to see that they’ve been traumatized and be on their side
Hold up
I think it’s also important to talk about mental illness, and how the pain and trauma of being mentally ill as a kid is often diminished because of the lack of outside actors. If you spent your childhood being suicidally depressed because your wee little kiddo brain decided to be a chemical shitshow, it doesn’t matter how much mom and dad loved you, that kinda thing fucks you up. And having people only look at your external surroundings and argue that “nothing bad happened” ignores all the pain you went through internally. So wishing you could have something external you could point to in order to justify that pain and enduring stress – just so people could understand – makes sense.
It’s not so much “I wish I had been traumatized” as “I wish I had a name, an event, an explanation for my trauma that other people would understand and accept.”
It’s easy really. Other than having a soul, it’s because when the Nazis had our people in ghettos, when we were sent to death camps, when we asked for help and nobody listened. We know what it’s like to be begging for someone to listen. Because we know what the pain of loss, of starvation, of losing your home, of being mocked and dehumanised and othered feels like. Because we know that no life is above anothers.
It’s easy really. Other than having a soul, it’s because when the Nazis had our people in ghettos, when we were sent to death camps, when we asked for help and nobody listened. We know what it’s like to be begging for someone to listen. Because we know what the pain of loss, of starvation, of losing your home, of being mocked and dehumanised and othered feels like. Because we know that no life is above anothers.
It’s easy really. Other than having a soul, it’s because when the Nazis had our people in ghettos, when we were sent to death camps, when we asked for help and nobody listened. We know what it’s like to be begging for someone to listen. Because we know what the pain of loss, of starvation, of losing your home, of being mocked and dehumanised and othered feels like. Because we know that no life is above anothers.
jewish people said “ok you’re leftist but are you normal about jewish people” and so many leftists have confidently answered with a resounding “lol fuck no”
there’s no other conclusion to draw
i saw leftists reblog the occasional post about antisemitism when it was popular to punch nazis, but during a global surge in antisemitism it’s been nothing but crickets for months from the left
actually scratch that, it hasn’t been crickets so much as supposed leftists violently perpetuating antisemitism while anyone who calls it out is automatically ostracized
been going insane over Bruce in his eating dome for 24 hrs now
There is so much story telling here. A person got this pacific parrotlet named it Bruce which in and of itself is amazing but then this person went here my little bird friend a raspbebe for you to enjoy and Bruce said hell yeah and went cataclysmicly and irreversible ape shit ham on that berry. And that probably happened more than once. So instead of never again allowing this little dinosaur the joy of the succulent flesh of the delectable raspberry they went what can we do for our little baby boy. and then boom they got some kind of cake cover type deal and cut a door into it so that Bruce would Not Be Trapped in a fruit prison (altho truely it is the berries who are trapped in there with Bruce but none the less) and so he may go to his pent house and freak it as crazily as his little bird heart desires.
Anyway i love pets they are each distinct little guys who are carred for by the funniest ape to ever exist bc we love animal so much
I’m in this group and Bruce’s human posts eating dome updates when he’s done a particularly good job!
One thing I noticed talking about Linux and free software is that a lot of people seem afraid of learning things about technology. I constantly read things like “I hate windows, but switching to linux would mean learning a new OS, and you have to be some super-smart programmer-hacker to do that.” Or even: “Switching to firefox would mean switching browsers and I don’t know how”
And that is precisely the attitude tech companies like Microsoft and Apple try to instill in their users in order to control them. They create these simple and “friendly” user interfaces for their products, but these hide information. From their OS being pre-installed to their settings apps, they keep people from learning things about how their computer works, and letting the companies make the decisions for their users.
I think people are underestimating themselves and overestimating how hard it is to learn new things are. It is like Windows/Macos have taught them some kind of technological learned helplessness. Not knowing how computers work and being afraid to learn how is how companies like Microsoft controls you, and justifies that control.
For example, people hate the forced and automatic system updates on Windows. And Microsoft justifies it as necessary because some people don’t know that their computer needs security updates and therefore don’t update, so they have to force the updates on them. That’s definitely true, and Microsoft’s tech support people is definitely very aware of that but it is a operating system that presumes that the user is incompetent and therefore shouldn’t control their own computer. And of course Microsoft abuses that power to force privacy-invading features on their users. Windows updates are also badly designed in comparison, no Linux distro I’ve used required the update program to hijack the entire computer, preventing the user from doing other things, but Windows does.
This is the dark side of “user-friendly” design. By requiring zero knowledge and zero responsibility for the user, they also take control away from the user. User-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUI) can also hide the inner workings of a system in comparison to the command line, which enables more precise control of your computer and give you more knowledge about what it is doing.
Of course this is a sliding scale, and there is a sensible middle-ground between using the command line for everything and user-friendly design masking taking control away from the end user.
There are Linux distros like Linux Mint and MX Linux who have created their own GUI apps for tasks that would otherwise use the command line, without taking control away from the user. This is mainly because they are open source non-profit community-driven distros, instead of being proprietary OSes made by profit-driven megacorps.
Still, giving that control to the user presumes some knowledge and responsibility on part of the user. To return to the update example, by default both Mint and MX will search and notify you of available updates, but you will have to take the decision to download and install them. Automatic updates are available in both cases, but it’s opt-in, you have to enable that option yourself. And that approach presumes that you know that you should update your system to plug security holes, something not all people do. It gives you control because it presumes you have knowledge and can take responsibility for those decisions.
All this also applies to the underlying fact that practically all pre-built computers nowadays have an operating system pre-installed. Few people install an OS themselves nowadays, instead they use whatever came with the computer. It’s usually either Windows or MacOS for desktops/laptops, and Android/IOS for smartphones (which are also a type of computer).
Now all this is very convenient and user-friendly, since it means you don’t have to learn how to install your own operating system. The OEM takes care of that for you. But again, this is a convenience that takes choice away from you. If you don’t learn how to install your own OS, you are stuck with whatever that is on the computer you bought. It’s probably precisely this step that scares people away from Linux, few people have installed even Windows, and installing your own OS seems impossibly scary. But again, learning is the only way to take back control. If you learn how to install an OS off an USB stick, you now have choices in what OS to use. (Sidenote: the hard part IMO is not the actual install process, but fiddling with the BIOS so it will actually boot from the distro on the USB stick. This old comic strip illustrates this very well).
That’s how life is in general, not just computers. Having control over your life means making decisions based on your own judgment. And to make sensible, rational decisions, you have to learn things, acquire knowledge.
The only other alternative is letting others take those decisions for you. You don’t have to learn anything, but you have no control. And in the tech world, that means big corporations like Microsoft, Google and Apple will make those decisions, and they are motivated by their own profits, not your well-being.
Computers have only become more and more capable and more important in our lives, and that can enable wonderful things. But it also means more power to the tech companies, more power over our lives. And the only way to resist that is to learn about computers, to enable us to make our own decisions about how we use technology.
One thing that was hard for me to get used to when I started learning math was what I call “static thinking”. Math doesn’t have any time evolution; everything either is or it isn’t.
When non-mathematicians think about operations like addition, they think of them as “processes” that “occur”: you take 2 and 8 and “combine them” to get 10. The expression “2+8” is like a sort of command, telling you to perform this process of addition. People think of math this way because it’s basically how math is presented in schools.
To a mathematician, the expression “2+8” is not a command and it does not signify a process. “2+8” is merely another way of writing “10”. They are two expressions with identical meaning. That’s what “2+8=10” means, it means “these two expressions signify the same thing”. There is no “process of addition” which “happens” and “results in 10”. “10” and “2+8” are just alternate spellings of the same number.
For a more advanced example, consider the formal definition of a finite state machine. Intuitively, we think of a finite state machine as a network with various nodes and directed edges and so on, into which we input some string in the machine’s alphabet. After inputting the string, it travels around the machine according to the transition functions before finally arriving (or not) at a final node, and by this process a computation is performed. Of course, mathematically, this is nonsense. A finite state machine is a network with various nodes and directed edges and so on, but the notion that you can “input a string” and it will “travel around the network via the transition functions” is bullshit. A string is recognized by the machine if and only if there exists a valid path for that string via the transition functions from an initial node to a final node. The string never actually travels the path, because such a notion does not exist in mathematics.
A finite state machine is not a machine, it never actually does anything. It sits there in the realm of abstractions, unmoving and static. Every string which it “recognizes” it recognizes by dint not of things that it does but of facts that simply are; every string recognized by the machine is so and has been so since the dawn of time, without the machine ever in fact going about the process of recognizing it.
This is philosophically a little bit trippy, but it can also confuse early math students in practice, too. As I mentioned at the top, I was very confused by it. For instance, in the finite state machine example, a perfectly ordinary statement to encounter in a proof might run something like
[Block of reasoning establishing that some string w is recognized by the machine M]
[Block of reasoning establishing that all transition functions into a final node F of M have label x]
…since w is recognized by the machine M, there must exist a transition function T whose target is a final node and which sends w to that final node on the last character of w. Thus, since T must have label x, the final character of w is x.
To a mathematician this seems perfectly trivial. To me as a young math student, this kind thing seemed almost miraculous. We don’t even know what w is, and yet we can run it through the machine? And from the fact that the machine recognized it, we can conclude things about what w is? We can tell its final character? How is that possible? I felt like this kind of thing involved “reaching into the future”, reasoning about processes from the end when we haven’t even begun them yet.
But, of course, we can do this, because there is no past or future in mathematics. The machine is simple there, the string is simply recognized or not, its last character simply is x or it isn’t x. Nothing has to “happen”.
Programming languages are generally divided into two distinct paradigms: Imperative and Declarative. Imperative programming languages define instructions, step by step commands for a computer to follow. Declarative programming languages define what is desired, but leaves the matter of control flow to the computer.
Imperative programming languages are far more common in industry, as they are seen as more straightforward and more in line with how the average programmer considers problem solving. Declarative languages (specifically Functional Programming), is far more popular with researchers and mathematicians, and is seen as particularly elegant by its proponents (and unnatural by anyone who has only encountered imperative programming).
Ultimately, both paradigms are able to accomplish the exact same results. Any fully complete language, whether imperative or declarative, is exactly as strong as any other fully complete language. The language paradigm only affects how the programmer treats it, not what it is capable of.
Within the subset of individuals who know how to code in the early twenty-first century, it is generally possible to estimate their academic background by measuring their preference for declarative vs imperative. For those without any coding or higher mathematics background (the vast majority), it is a meaningless question.
The above text-replaced comic is a reference to the XZ vulnerability. XZ was an open source library (that is to say, a piece of code that is freely accessible to anyone), which was used by the Linux operating system.
A developer who was determined to be malicious spent years and years gaining trust with their innocuous code, getting to the point where it was included in many devices, and that updates to their code would automatically be sent out to new versions of Linux.
The developer proceeded to introduce malicious code into the trusted software, infecting newer versions of the Linux operating system. It was caught quickly. This introduced a new conversation to the open source community, as they have been relying on the ability to trust and vet its membership to avoid bad actors.
However, the above comic points out that trying to be a bad actor in the open source world required a LOT of effort AND was caught quickly, compared to the alternative. This is a comic reaffirming the security and value of open source.
There is no possible reality where this is in any way capable of being passed off as self-defense. It was never self-defense. It is, and always has been, a genocide.
Crying babies. Crying babies. This is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, meant to draw out and kill civilians while also making it far more difficult to locate and aid children who are trapped or alone.
Ur telling me there isnt one mutant zombie that wants to eat other zombies -_- youre telling me there isnt one mutant zombie that just wants to lez out 🙄
purpose of this poll: basically im wondering if my gran having a pistol was a typical american experience
Ok I’m gonna fix this poll
Have you seen a functioning, non-display-piece gun in person? (A private citizen’s private property–not a cop’s gun, a display at a museum, at a shooting range, etc)
furries are at least 2.25x more likely to have been diagnosed with a form of autism, are on average 50-100% more likely to have experienced bullying unrelated to being a furry growing up than their peers, only 10% identify as heterosexual, and 50% of furries are found to experience some form of disability
i’m just really tired of seeing people in 2023 still acting like there’s no possible connection to be made with seeing furries as disgusting sex perverts who deserve to be ostracized and bullied or made fun of when 9 out of 10 of us are queer
Boy do I got news for you if you’re shocked and appalled that the United States is willing to maim and kill its own populace to maintain global power
I saw a post with that question and I shared bc I understood the point, it just.. it was funny bc who’s the target audience, you know? Because there are many groups of people here who can attest to the constant, widespread violence that is Maintaining The Status Quo of the American State. From Day One to The Present.
If you’re lamenting the fact that you used to be able to shoot through a 500-page novel in like a day when you were in middle school and now you can’t, it’s worth bearing in mind that a big part of that is because when you were in middle school, your reading comprehension sucked. Yes, mental health and the stresses of adult life can definitely be factors, but it’s also the case that reading is typically more effortful as an adult because you’ve learned to Ponder The Implications. The material isn’t just skimming over the surface of your brain anymore, and some of the spoons you used to spend on maximising your daily page count are now spent on actually thinking about what you’re reading!
Reading as a kid: “I can tell that this is supposed to be an emotionally moving ending, but I genuinely cannot remember who two-thirds of these characters are.”
Reading as an adult: *reads a paragraph* *pauses* *reads the same paragraph again* *flips back and re-reads the preceding page to make sure you didn’t misunderstand something* *stares into space for ten minutes as the Implications sink in*
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
the weirdest take I’ve seen on this site is “if you follow hundreds of blogs, why not just use the for you page?” well if you like hot showers, why don’t you just bungee jump into an active volcano? that’s what you just said to me
This genre of posts is so stupid… it’s because they’re homophobic like it’s really not hard to understand. Every gay man knows that homophobic straight guys jokingly act gay with each other because they think gays are deserving of mockery. They are not allies they’re disgusted by real gay men obviously
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