Because as much as they want to claim they’re logical and rational, no logical or rational argument would ever be the thing to convince them. Identity politics prevents people from accepting anything from the “other side”, so they ask for sources so they can point to it as biased and unfair etc. There’s really no point in arguing with someone like that using facts. The things most likely to change their mind is their own personal experience or writing an entirely new narrative about the world.

The “laughs” all felt from the outside. There was very little humor aimed at the people who would self identify as nerds and way more “haha look at these nerds and how quirky they are” set ups. Sure there are misogynist asshole nerds but usually they need to grow beyond that to find friends and partners. As far as I could tell none of them did. Sheldon and Howard were still super sexist, Leonard was still passive and whiny, but the story pushed forward foisting “perfect matches” on them.

Throughout the whole thing there was very little actual geek humor, and it felt denigrating to actual nerds.

I’ve posted this a few times but here it is again for you:

I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.

A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:

Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk

Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.

Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious

Some general recs that apply if you’re in the US:

For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter

For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb

For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.

For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.

For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites.

For cosmetics, skin care and some home cleaning things, there’s Hive or Grove Collaborative which try to prioritize sustainability

For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites

For that “everything store” experience, Costco will ship a good percentage of its offerings for free with a membership in the continental US.

For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.

I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet

This reminds me of Althea Chrome, the artist who made all of the knit accessories for Coraline.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NQCf8fjgoJQ&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD

Sounds great, Photuris for supreme dictator!

It calls itself Murderbot but it’s out of a sardonic and pessimistic acceptance of its role in “The Company”, and a nod to a traumatic experience it had. In the books there is a clear delineation between bots, which have either no or limited machine learning, constructs, which are like human/machine hybrids, and augmented humans, who have cybernetic implants. It’s explained that constructs are made of cloned human tissue, and might have even been made of humans at one point.

However, there IS a character in the books that is described as an extremely advanced artificial intelligence bot, that has either no or limited biological components, and it’s characterized in the same ways that seem to bother you. So each to their own I suppose.

It’s not a robot. In the books Murderbot is a construct, made of hybridized biological and artificial components. However, there is an AGI characterized as having empathy and enjoying media in the books, so I suppose the series is just not going to be your cup of tea.

I love the books and have read them through multiple times now. I just started the show and finished the first episode last night.

I’m hoping as Murderbot learns more about Preservation Aux in the show that they will be characterized less… degradingly. In the books rhey’re competent, empathetic and sensible humans which comes as a shock to Murderbot, and I was disappointed to see them played as silly naive goofballs.

I also have some major issues with the intro and general way they handled Murderbot’s origin so far, but there were also scenes that were straight out of the book so I will keep watching.

I think you’re confusing Gurathin and Dr Mensah

For me, a 32oz pot of black tea brewed for 5-6 minutes consumed at least 12 hours before I go to bed does the trick. It gets me going and takes away the fog, and when I’m following the timing rule it doesn’t mess with my sleep at all.

However, people have all sorts of tolerance and sensitivity levels to caffeine, as well as individual reactions, body chemistry etc, it’s probably something you will have to experiment with to find the right balance for you.

Caffeine has a calming or even sedative effect on a decent number of people who have ADHD, so that may be a part of it. Personally I have to cut off all caffeine intake about 12 hours before bed or I have trouble sleeping, but my grandmother used to have a cup of coffee before bed and drop off within 20 minutes.

A humble farm boy’s guardians and village are burned, leading to him leaving his home and finding refuge with a wise old man who has special powers. He tells him he knew his father, that he was a knight and they fought together. He gives him his father’s sword, and teaches him to use his own special powers. They receive a message from a princess in distress, who tells them she’s being held hostage by the evil emperor. They travel to save her with the help of a roguish anti-hero and free the princess. Once freed, they learn of a crucial weakness in the emperor’s fortress, and together they lead a raid to siege it. They succeed with the help of a rag tag bunch of rebels and the princess awards them with medals in her throne room.

That doesn’t sound like a story about how technology, science or knowledge effects people or society to me.

Removed by mod

Yes, because context matters. Exceptions don’t make the rule, and speaking generally about things is allowed when they are related.

So what is the exception here? You said, and I quote, “science is by nature unethical”. So you’re saying any experimental methodology in any school of science exploring any number of completely benign things is somehow unethical.

This isn’t debate club.

I see you’re new to the internet.

Ah yes, everyone knows how famously unethical astronomers are, they should respect the privacy and consent of supernovas. Filthy perverts peeping on those innocent stars!

You said “science”, not any specific type or category of study, so if you mean a specific school of science is unethical you should make that distinction.

Why do you think that asking questions, making a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis and writing down the results is unethical?

I’ve been tinkering with my Linux machine for the past 8 months or so, and having random issues like the ones I listed and more besides that I’ve already solved. Meanwhile my old Windows 7 machine has been working flawlessly for about 8 years, no regedits or crap software issues. I think I had a driver issue with my mouse a couple years ago that I clicked a button and it fixed it. My laptop running Windows 7 also has been working flawlessly since about 2016 beyond prompting me to format media that I connect to it, but I press a button and that goes away. Recently I’ve been having compatibility issues with software because it’s such an old OS but as you said, that’s a 3rd party software issue, not a problem with Windows 7.

Glad your Linux experience is so smooth though. Must be nice!

I think there’s a difference in personal interpretation of what a “Linux issue” is, here. It sounds like you might be interpreting “Linux issue” as problems with the software itself, or its capabilities, features and processes etc. Personally, I am using “issues with Linux” to mean the entire user experience from start up to using the GUI and whether or not I can do the things I want and need to do on a daily basis easily and intuitively. Certainly, Linux as a software plays into it, but the things you are brushing off as 3rd party incompatibilities are absolutely part of the Linux experience in my opinion. I’m not trying to throw blame, but when introducing new people to Linux it’s best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.

Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don’t have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.

I’ve been trying to adapt to Linux Mint/Cinnamon as my daily driver and yes, stuff breaks. My sata and nvme connected drives kept disappearing every time I started my computer so I had to learn about mounting and auto mount (they are just there on Windows). My game and program installs on Bottles and Lutris kept going “missing” and losing their .exe’s. I downloaded 70gb of Guild Wars 2 files at least 8 times because I thought each time I had fixed the “files missing” problem only to have them disappear on reboot. I still didn’t figure out what was happening and am only able to play now because I found out how to use the provider portal on Steam. I can’t make launcher short cuts from the actual executable, I have to go to the desktop and do it and when I do, it won’t let me drag it to my panel for some reason. When I thought I had found a solution, I reactivated some launcher applets and ended up with three different instances of my panel launcher icons and still no ability to add new ones. My systems connected to the same ethernet used to show up in my network panel and I was able to access my shared folders and media files but they all stopped showing up a few days ago and I had to learn all about Samba share and minimum and maximum server protocols and still am trying to find a solution.

Yes, Windows breaks stuff too, but Linux is NOT a perfect product that works flawlessly for everyone and [@cRazi_man@europe.pub is right. All of their points are things I’ve been struggling with and would warn a Linux noob about. I personally would rather trust those random forum posts than LLM summaries (and have solved some issues that way) but otherwise I agree with each of their bullet points.