Got cheap, no-name, unbranded LED bulbs off of eBay. Years later, not one of them had broken.

But Philips LED bulbs? Those things don't last a year. In fact, none of the high-rated, "high quality," top-ten-list, LED light bulbs have ever outlasted an incandescent in my experience.

If you want your LEDs to last, buy the no-name bulbs, guys. The Phoebus Cartel is still out there.

Look: a lot of companies would suffer from an office real estate crash.

• the businesses that own the office real estate
• car manufacturers
• tire manufacturers
• petroleum companies
• coffee franchises
• fast food franchises lining freeways on the way to work

And most importantly, funds invested in all of the above.

People who own businesses also own stocks in other people's businesses. Meaning they all fall and rise together. Trying to keep the "work commute" and "office rental" industries alive is just an attempt on the part of those who hold capital to keep their portfolios growing.

In secret, they are probably also trying to hedge their bets, diversify and make themselves immune to the coming collapse. They'll try to position themselves and their capital in such a way so that the working class is the only group hurt when it happens.

But in public? They are not going to devalue their assets by standing by, complacent, as an office apocalypse approaches.

This isn't really an answer to the question, but I just saw a Mastodon post about an online store that's opening this October called Artisans.coop

It seems to be a cooperatively owned Etsy alternative, (and I can only assume it's a response to whatever shenanigans went on between Etsy and Silicon Valley Bank.)

I'm cis. The flag does not belong to me. It does not describe me. You can ignore my complaints...

But nevertheless, my neurodivergent brain is very bothered by the fact that there are only four panels, with the backgrounds going, "blue, pink, white, pink..."

Why is there no fifth panel?

But now I live in Nevada. I will be voting for Biden because

• the CHIPS Act is going to put chip manufacturing at the mercy of union labor
  • and with the solidarity whipped up by places like Antiwork? It's going to be a bloodbath.
• his bans on slave labor solar panel imports will do the same thing. Union laborers won't need to compete with slave owners.
• he halted ICE worksite immigration raids, which were basically used to terrorize migrant workers and keep them complacent (hence lowering their wages, and by extension, lowering the market price of labor)
• he "played the long game" and helped win rail workers those sick days they were fighting for.
• he kept student loan payments paused for the first 33 months of his term and tried to get a decent chunk forgiven
• he appointed trust-busting advocate Lina Kahn to the FTC, where she is now a chairwoman
• he appointed pro-labor lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo to the NLRB, where she recently set an anti-union-busting precedent that, according to Harold Meyerson at Prospect.org, "makes union organizing possible again"

He's silently, steadily, baby-stepping us in the right direction. And that's worth a vote of support, not just a vote for a lesser evil.

"Stupid" or "smart" or "IQ". Take your pick.

Intellectual capacity is a social darwinist fantasy.

That includes insults that go along the lines of, "Trump supporters can't read."

[Aside: I dislike Trump supporters, mind you. But if they couldn't read (especially reading Breitbart, or the Epoch Times, or the text part to Russia-funded propaganda memes) that would actually be an improvement right now. Lower cognition would be an improvement if it were real.]

Anyways my reasons are as follows: I've tutored quite a few people, and never found one actually incapable of learning a particular concept.

I have, on the other hand, found a large number who were underconfident about their ability, citing their "low" intelligence specifically. And unlike their intellectual capacity, this belief in IQ was actually limiting. And harmful.

I have also encountered people (outside of my tutoring) who thought their "intelligence" was a source of superiority over the masses.

They were not superior people. Their vocabulary -- which people often use as a misguided proxy for intelligence -- was offputting because they often used words they had clearly never heard used in context. Indicating these words were added to their lexicon unorganically, pulled from a dictionary or thesaurus rather than an adventure novel, highlighting a strange set of priorities that always made these people suspicious to me.

Every time someone calls me smart, I tend to suspect they're trying to scam me.

Every time someone calls me stupid, I shrug because they clearly haven't met all of the people who call me smart.

But in all cases, they are invoking the idea that some people are just capable of more, and others are just capable of less. It's social darwinism, like I said.

And I find it disgusting.

If you want my respect, never appeal to social darwinism in my presence.

The entire industry is built on catering to the vast swaths of women who get ignored by doctors and need somewhere to turn.

I highly suspect doctors are taught in medical school, "women are over emotional and prone to exaggeration."

Hell, "hysteria" was considered a valid diagnosis until the 1950s.

Use it on myself? No.

Use it to start a combination movers / electric / tunneling / waste management / highly-illegal-hardware-pirating company?

Yes.

Oh no, if I think someone's name is Joe and it turns out being Jeff, I feel atrocious.

Is this meme pretending Lemmy isn't infested with leftist [transphobic slur]?

Behold: the centrist!

Evangelizing.

If I want to share a cool link with someone who has an account but is not yet active, I have to:

1. ascertain their instance if they are on the site
2. visit their instance on a browser
3. search their instance for the post I want to share

On centralized platforms I can hit the "share" button the moment I find something interesting. When I do, I will receive a single link that will work for all users of the service.

Granted (because the platform then harasses the user who follows the link, trying to annoy them into getting an account and/or logging in so that it can more accurately harvest their data) it's not a ton better centralized.

But it does make it extra difficult to evangelize this way. I convinced a friend to get an account, and yet when I shared a link with him (without taking the above steps), he sent back a screenshot of the banner telling him he wasn't logged in.

I'd like an easier way to pull the uninitiated into a conversation occurring on this network of sites.

When I went to community college, I'd arrive early to one theater class, and sitting there already (from a previous class, I believe) were two girls/women who somehow managed to fill 75% of their conversation, every time, with "Eragon was such a bad movie adaptation."

Which taught me that the movie was so bad they it genuinely hurt fans of the novel.

I don't stop there. I like to give the FULL name of my operating system when I use it. Example:

"What distro are you running?"

"Oh on this laptop here? This laptop is running Mint, daughter of Ubuntu, son of Debian, daughter of Linux, son of GNU! Her ancestors hail from the mountains of Copyleft, where the mighty Stallman wields his hammer Emacs to forge her people's legendary tools!"

Anything shorter is just disrespectful.

If you're into bread tube / left tube, I highly recommend Innuendo Studios. In particular, Innuendo Studios's playlist, "the Alt-Right Playbook." It helps make sense of internet discourse.

The game is hampered by a lack of any retry-mission/save/load feature. Right now, players are stuck indefinitely with the negative consequences of their mistakes.

Not OP, but I imagine "carbon negative" sounds negative because it has the word "negative" in it.

When it fact "carbon negative" means you're reducing carbon, which is generally regarded as a positive thing.

I'm pretty sure I'm also ADHD and I certainly also hate injustice and inaccuracy. (Jordan Peterson talking about IQ will basically send me into a rage.)

More to the point: anger, criticism, shame, fear -- those emotions will have my chest tightening and my pulse racing.

Anyways, a piece of advice that I found once that was weirdly helpful (no idea where I found it) was a cardboard cutout metaphor. But I'll be using a snake metaphor instead.

Get this, we have more than one brain.

We have a brain we share with lizards (that's got our territoriality, our fear, and our anger). We have a whole layer of brain around the lizard one that we share with mammals (cuddling, protectiveness, affection, etc). And then we have the thinking, rational part of the brain. I think it's called the cerebral cortex.

And part of what that last brain does is take in stimulae and interpret it. Only after this part of your brain interprets stimulae does the rest of your brain feel an emotional response.

The Snake Metaphor

The example given in the article was with cardboard cutouts of gang members. But I choose this:

Imagine you're walking on a dirt path somewhere and you come across a piece of garden hose that looks vaguely like a snake. And you're afraid of snakes.

You will either feel terror or nothing at all.

If you think it's a snake, there willl be adrenaline and cortisol pumping through you.

If you realize it's a piece of garden hose -- even with the same exact visual and auditory stimulae -- you will feel no fear.

Because your emotions are a slave to interpretation.

There's a moment when you recognize, "oh, this person is willingly hurting someone." You feel the rage only after that recognition.

I'm guessing, given your description of your quick rages, you will most likely NOT have time to apply this in the moment. So you'll need to do it all in hindsight: reflect on individual incidents after they occur. Every time you calm down, try to reinterpret the situation and then add it to a databank of reinterpretations. Eventually, you'll start to encounter scenarios you've already seen and added to your databank.

Reinterpret "this person is willingly hurting someone" until it becomes "this person is a wounded dog, biting everything who approaches without knowing or caring who it hurts or who is trying to help. It's not cruelty; it's pain."

Reinterpret this:

Jordan Peterson claims that some people just have low IQ and "that's a real problem. Society doesn't really have a solution to the existence of these kinds of people. They just cost humanity resources and contribute nothing."

until it becomes:

Jordan Peterson only advocates social darwinism because he's a millionaire funded by billionaires. He doesn't even advocate what he cares about. He's a pathetic shill, desperately chasing money because wealth is the only substance in his life. No love, no hope, no aspirations. A wounded animal with tunnel vision, unable to be happy or form meaningful bonds with people.

And suddenly anger becomes pity.

And once you start looking for it, you'll realize a rather profound truth,

Evil Never Emerges From a Vacuum.

I had an older brother who called me an, "outcast among outcasts" and that hurt me deeply until years later, when I found an old essay he wrote where he described his greatest insecurity. It was, word for word, "I felt like an outcast among outcasts." The exact "insult" he had used on me.

Like a wounded animal lashing out.

I have a mother who's deeply immersed in the intellectual dark web. (Hence me hearing Jordan Peterson enough to drive me crazy.) And I thought that was pretty cruel of her until I realized:

humans are scummy and greedy and anyone "advocating" for a better system just wants an excuse to greedily devour everyone else

... was a damn good description of her entire childhood! All of the adults. All of the people responsible for her. And she cannot look past that, because she formed her worldview in the years during which no figure in her life set aside their own self-interest to be kind to her.

And she needs people like Peterson who will tell her that an unchecked flood of human greed and selfishness is exactly what capitalism was built to endure and to harness.

In reality, most people are better than that, and she should have been treated better. And a bunch of teenagers stranded on an island for fifteen months treated each other better than anyone in her life ever treated her. And she can't see that.

Like a wounded dog blinded by pain and rage.

Just the other day, my chest was actually constricting due to some random anonymous commenter getting mad at me. (Yes, that happens to us ADHD folks). And the ONLY thing that helped was when I realized, "the commenter also accused me of being a Fed at the end of his comment. Clearly he wasn't angry at me. He was angry at an FBI agent he believed to be monitoring him and trying to mind-control him on behalf of the globalists or something."

Yet another wounded animal lunging at every shadow he sees.

I don't believe it's possible to dampen an emotion. I certainly don't think it's possible for a neurodivergent to bring an emotion to neurotypical levels. After all, as an ADHDer, your hyperfocus will always amplify the shiniest thing in the room, and rage and shame and fear are always the shiniest thing in the room.

But you can cut them off at the source. You can choose to interpret the situation as one that does not call for an ounce of rage in the first place.

Firstly, we must recognize that our empathy and compassion are a privilege -- we were loved at a crucial, formative time in our development. We were cuddled at a very specific age that allowed our brains to develop empathy. We were loved at enough pivotal moments that we believe kindness can be expected from people.

Which -- at least for me -- is impressive, because it was a traumatic upbringing that could have been a hell of a lot better. It's impressive that such a childhood created someone "good." But as twisted as our parents and relatives and role models may have treated us (I don't know your story, but there sure is a lot of trauma in mine) we both still got enough affection to understand human connection, which is a form of happiness that exceeds all of the other forms of happiness combined. Ludicrous wealth? Being top dog? Preying on the weak? None of them come close.

Not everyone got what we got.

Have you heard the phrase, "hurt people hurt people" ?

Edit that. Change it to, "ONLY hurt people hurt people." Turn it into a mantra: every time you're upset, look for the hurt that causes the cruelty. I promise you, you will always find it. And when you do, your anger will abate, because you will recognize: it's not cruelty. It's pain.

Yeah, the FBI has caught bombers by monitoring them before the bombers were able to break the law.

Secretely surveiled them right up until they dropped the duffel bag on the sidewalk.

My memory isn't great right now, but I think I recall reading somewhere that they catch over a hundred would-be bombers a year.

Who knew a company with an unhealthy obsession with harvesting every screen tap of data from every person using their services... would chicken out from connecting their servers to a bunch of clients they couldn't monitor.

... That said, I actually didn't see this coming. It baffles me that I didn't, but I didn't.

Wow. That's Linus Torvalds levels of screaming, "ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?!"

People got really worked up back in 2008.

The ice we skate is getting pretty thin, indeed

Ah, a Strom Thurmond Democrat.

Damn. This lemming found a fountain of knowledge somewhere and decided to kegstand the thing.

I recently started a Kbin account and noticed that a few of the communities I searched:

1. were empty, and
2. had, in their info, the claim that they had started right when I searched them.

Which tells me that the Kbin instance only stores local information about a community after the first of its members searches that community.

Yeah, the commenter above you is saying 200k installs, and you're saying $200k money.

I didn't. I was in California, so my vote was irrelevant anyways. I've been living with my mom, so I decided to use it to make a point.

I was like, "look Mom! I don't approve of Biden's hair sniffing, so I'm voting for Jorgenson! You can do the same! That's an option!"

It didn't work. She voted for Trump. (Don't worry. She was also in California so her vote was also irrelevant). You'd think with her personal history, she'd have been AGAINST serial sexual predators... but I guess his cult of personality was just too strong. She still genuinely believes he "stood up to the globalists."

💯

This right here! Specify!

Replace stuff like

"Marjorie Taylor Greene can't read"

with stuff like

"Marjorie Taylor Greene's remarks on "globalism" should be alarming to anyone who has encountered the phrase 'the International Jewry' as they studied history."

I tend to tutor people randomly. Siblings mostly, sometimes friends, occasionally strangers. It makes me feel good. I get a pretty strong shot of vicarious triumph when I help them achieve a goal.

And I would always hear the same things from people who struggled.

"I'm just not good at this" I would hear.

"I suck at math" would be pretty common too.

This was never spoken by people whose minds were actually incapable of comprehension. Each and every one of them proved smart enough to perform what they deemed an impossible task. But in order to instill the confidence necessary to make it through the problems, I always had to set them straight, open their minds to the possibility that they were wrong about themselves.

At first it seemed kind of inspirational: "no one is too stupid to accomplish their goals," you know? But after it happened enough times, I started to feel like I was some brain surgeon pulling the same damn tumor out of patient after patient, skull after skull. It was a fucking epidemic of self-doubt so strong it literally affected people's entire life trajectory.

At some point, unrelated to tutoring, I wound up chatting with a stranger who had just walked out of some, "Donald Trump's key to success" kind of conference that had taken place on my campus. (It was like, 2013. I didn't know who Donald Trump was back then.) He asked me a few questions. My answers impressed him, and he called me "smart."

And I hated him instantly.

The second that word came out of his mouth, a wave of distrust and enmity washed over me, and I felt like he was trying to scam me. Mind you, I am a 5'11" 180lb man. It's not like he was practicing pickup on me. It was almost-certainly an attempt at practicing the "networking" skills he picked up from the conference he just attended. And the only reason it didn't play well to his audience was because I hated the word "smart" and hated anyone who believed in the concept.

And then, some years later, I was able to finally articulate it after someone chastised me online for calling my own actions stupid -- for using, as a commenter described it, "an ableist slur." Boy did the pieces click together after that.

This is going to seem crazy, but ladies, gentlemen, esteemed in-betweens: there is so such thing as "stupid." There never was.

The human brain is a miraculous thing. It can literally rewire itself if it needs to. With the right techniques, a brain can even be induced to repair itself after certain kinds of strokes. Meaning if, hypothetically, one were "stupid" then the proper application of societal resources could actually turn that same person smart. Just like how I was able to tutor "bad at math" students into "good at math" students.

Which is probably why Rockefeller and Carnegie were so keen on making everyone believe in the concept. Because what I just described is expensive, and if there's a ceiling on a person's potential (like "stupid"), then that gives society a really good excuse to give up on that person before spending a dime.

"We're already doing all we can for these people." the well-intentioned steel monopolist tells you, "They get every opportunity they need. The reason they struggle so much in this society? They just... aren't that bright. They were just never capable of that much to begin with."

"Stupid" is, in other words, a social Darwinist myth created by billionaires to abdicate responsibility for the poverty they were creating. And if someone expresses a belief in, "stupid" I know I cannot count on them. I hope to someday surround myself with people who despise the word and everything it stands for. Because those are the people I can trust to actually improve the world.

It's very Putin-esque to sully the reputation of every institution and democratic process that could inhibit your power... by shamelessly abusing those institutions and processes so much that ordinary people associate them with shameless, partisan abuse.

The ice we skate is gettin pretty thin

*in Dread Pirate Roberts voice*

You have a dizzying intellect.

But what can you tell us about the Irish people's fight for liberation?

"What's that make us?"

I am contemplating stealing this and turning it into a prompt for !writingprompts@literature.cafe

Something like,

"you have recently noticed that your friends will do everything you tell them. Is it a prank? A superpower? Doesn't matter. You won't let this opportunity go to waste."

Such an eloquent response

I think leftists currently refer to all pro-capitalists as "liberals."

An algorithm is the meat of a function. It's the "how."

And if you're using someone else's function, you won't touch the "how" because you'll be interacting with the "what." (You use a function for what it does.)

You will be creating your own algorithm by writing code, however. Because an algorithm is just a sequence of steps that, taken together, constitute an attempt at achieving an objective.

Haus is saying all the little steps that go into approximating sine occur directly on the hardware.

At the end of the day though, it's just that most people aren't willing to admit to themselves that they shouldn't be driving because they're too easily distracted in the first place.

Is there any room in your mind for the possibility that some people simply have different values than you?

You're acting like the only people disagreeing with you are people who have been in accidents and are looking for something outside of themselves to blame. You're acting like deep down they agree with you that all error comes from a lack of competence and responsibility.

(Aside: I hate cars and our car-centric infrastructure and I haven't been in any accidents, which means I don't fit into your narrative here. But that's not likely to sway you. And I know that's not likely to sway you. Because I know you don't share my perspective.)

But is it remotely possible to you that some people out there might just believe:

mistakes and errors are inevitable for everyone -- not just for stupid, careless, irresponsible, incompetent, hopeless lost causes masquerading as people.

And even if mistakes were only made by those kinds of people -- meaning a single mistake could mark you as a "bad person" -- saving "bad people's" lives is still better than letting those people die. Just because they couldn't figure out a car doesn't mean they deserve to die in an accident (or starve to death because their suburban house is too far from the nearest grocery store and they accept that they can't drive.)

Is it really impossible for you to imagine that some people might just place value on human lives, regardless of cost and regardless of personal responsibility?

Prehistoric humans are now known to have spent years dragging around and caring for their paralyzed tribe mates millennia ago. Meaning the kind of people I'm talking about have existed for thousands of years. People who don't care about personal responsibility. People who just want the best for everyone around them.

If you told these people, "some of your tribe mates will be incapable of safely driving vehicles. How should we build this city?" They would (once you showed them what all of those words meant) have intentionally laid out the city to allow those poorly-driving tribe mates to walk or use transit. They would place nearby grocery stores. They would direct high density housing to go up in the area. They would try to make it possible to avoid using cars. And the city they built would have 90% less cars because of it.

To them such a city would be an obvious choice.

You don't have to agree with the cavemen who cared for their dying relatives. But please acknowledge that they existed, and didn't hold your beliefs. Please acknowledge that the people you're arguing with, don't hold your beliefs.

Descent 1 & 2

There's a Descent 2?! And 3!?

(Also, I didn't know Interplay was a well known company. I had a whole set of Interplay CDs I used to play as a kid. Fond memories. Descent, Conquest of the New World, Whiplash...)

The person hosting lemmy.myserv.one is trying to acquire more users because they want to take some of the load off of lemmy.world.

If you want something less burdened than lemmy.world, you should make an account over here. Do your Lemmy browsing from here, you know?