Back in the X11 days, I actively avoided GNOME, because Cinnamon, KDE and XFCE were so much better. I had so many issues with the design philosophy, that using GNOME felt impossible.

However, when Wayland started having some support in GNOME, I got very curious and gave it a try. Then, I also bought my first touch screen laptop, and simply had to try GNOME with it. Turns out, GNOME wasn’t that bad, as long as you’re not trying to tweak every little thing about it. If you’re a tweaker, KDE is definitely the way to go. If not, GNOME might be tolerable or even good.

I’ve done so much tweaking already, that I don’t really have that itch any more. Sure, some things like custom keyboard shortcuts have to be just right, but that’s why you have GNOME Tweaks and the dconf Editor.

Remember these abominations from The Last Jedi?

If the green milk is drinkable, the meat is edible.

Nah. What’s done is done. Hard lessons, but those are the ones I remember.

But let’s imagine I could send a message to an alternate timeline version of past me. I have some ideas.

Don’t hang out with the people on this list. Learn about mental illnesses such as narcissism, bipolar disorder, paranoia, depression, and psychosis. Read a bit about conspiratorial thinking too.

Equipped with this info, you no longer need that list of names. You can notice when it is the time to leave a particular crowd. Now that you didn’t learn things the hard way, you avoided some hardship and trouble.

Even funnier, American food wouldn’t be allowed to cross. That stuff violates so many EFSA regulations.

Oh, that’s a very cool study. However, here’s an important bit that should help with interpreting it.

Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive account of ideology in the U.S. public, but rather it is to make a convincing case that unidimensional treatments of ideology obscure important (and interesting) complexities in the antecedents of political orientations. We believe this goal to be best served by keeping the analyses tractable. We thus exclude a number of issues from consideration, focusing on the two core domains of social and economic conservatism. In particular, we do not address issues associated with race, immigration, or foreign policy. These are obviously core issues in American politics, and future work needs to expand on the present article to explore additional complexities arising from these issues.

I really hope someone has dumped a gazillion questions into a similar process. Would be really curious to find out how many dimensions you would really need to explain the data.

Anyway, the economic and social dimensions definitely are needed as a foundation of any political model. If you did a more comprehensive study, you would obviously add some more dimensions on this foundation.

Hmm. So nowadays that ideology should probably be lumped together with “corporate greed vs. sensible thinking” -axis to keep the number of dimensions reasonable.

How about something about supporting the people who are poor, unemployed, or sick? Socialists and leftists love it, while right-wing capitalists hate it. I don’t know how to phrase it concisely like you did.

And then there’s also the classic socialist-capitalist debate about worker rights. So employee rights could be another axis. Should the owner just exploit the workers or do the workers get to have weekends off, 8 h workdays, various vacations, safe working environment, fair wages etc.

Oh, and then there are various language based divisions too. There are entire parties dedicated to supporting specific language groups, but I guess you could summarize it as “support of minority language groups”. How about just lumping all minority groups into a single axis? How about something like: minority rights vs. majority? Nowadays, that includes sexual and gender minorities too.

How about city vs. rural life? Not too many decades ago, farming was a big part of life, so there were also many farmers who voted. Hence, we had farmer parties, and we still do to some extent. Now that farming is mostly automated, not that many voters care about farming. It’s just another industry, just like steel, paper or electronics. Historically speaking, city. vs rural life was definitely a political axis. Nowadays, not so much.

In any case, it’s a really complicated topic, so we’re going to need a lot of dimensions. Your suggestions are a good start. Just add a few more, and eventually you have enough. If you’re really technical about it, each and every question is a new dimension, but if you should group them together into broader topics. That way, you’re definitely going to end up in at least 20 dimensions.

If it’s technically illegal, but nobody ever gets a sentence for it, it’s actually completely legal.

Yeah. It’s a pretty complicated topic to study. You would have to narrow it down really hard to be able to say anything meaningful about it. If you’re talking about a specific group using Facebook in a specific way, that’s when you can actually start talking about effects.

On top of that, there are also a variety of ways you can use the same platform. What if you’re exclusively focusing on doomscrolling or actively avoiding anything that produces negative emotions? You could spend all day following everyone who spreads doom and gloom, or just pop in for a little bit of #bloomscrolling, and get back to real-world stuff when you’re done.

Just based on my personal vibes, I think social media is harmful if you’re doing it wrong. Most people are. If you allow Meta to manipulate your emotions with fear and hate, while developing an addiction at the same time, you’re not going to have a great time. Quitting that kind of toxic relationship will improve your life.

Mastodon was designed to be less addictive, and that’s why it’s a bit boring to most people. It takes special kind of dedication to get addicted to Mastodon, and I think the same applies to Lemmy as well.

And there’s an “✨Ask me anything” bar at the bottom. How fitting 🤣

Maybe we’ll also have graphene at that point.

1. I spent most of the day troubleshooting computer issues. Installed Ubuntu, Nvidia drivers, CUDA stuff, long list of obvious basic dependencies etc. Almost managed to follow the instructions for installing a local LLM. Turns out, this is not a two hour project. Yes, I know Nvidia is my problem. This is a self inflicted wound and I’m intentionally playing this game in the hard mode.
2. Got a haircut. Fortunately my favorite barber shop is run by Iraqi Kurds, so they don’t give a rats ass about Christmas schedules. 👍
3. I also wanted to have the wrist band of my watch adjusted, but all the relevant shops were closed today. 🙁
   Overall, not a bad way to spend my time.

Cooking, baking and other kitchen skills are valuable. Knowing how to prepare your own food allows you to buy bulk ingredients like potatoes and carrots, turning them into delicious meals. However, pre-packaged items often cost more. Instead, choose ingredients you can select individually, weigh them, and then purchase the whole bag.

Food like this is cheaper, comes with a hobby and tastes great.

Girls and grandmas knit wool socks whereas real men forge knives… or at least that’s the stereotype. Same thing is happening with computers too. Building a PC is seen as a guy hobby while riding horses is seen as hobby for school girls.

Why though? That sort of division is just archaic. People should be allowed to have whatever hobbies they find interesting. Who cares how that activity was viewed a 100 years ago. You don’t need to worry about obsolete perceptions in the 2020s.

If your time is worthless to you and everyone else, that profit margin can be very tempting. Sounds like a symptom of a serious problem to me though.

Confidently incorrect? Sounds strangely familiar. So that’s where the LLMs learned it from. Reddit training data doing its thing apparently.

They call it theft and hijacking, I call it old fashioned piracy.

Rule 1. Never read the article.
Rule 2. React with emotion.
Rule 3. You’re always right.
Rule 4. Anyone who disagrees with you, is always wrong.

At least that’s pretty much how Reddit works. I guess many people imported the rules when they emigrated.

Oh and almost forgot my personal answer: It depends. I try to read the post or article before commenting, but I’ve deviated from my own standards a few times.