I was trying to use an example from personal experience to illustrate the benefit, but my point is that immediate answers wasn’t an option not too long ago, so curiosities you actually did want answered would necessarily have that delay. Being able to learn things well in spite of this shift is becoming a skill not everyone has. It’s something that needs to be nurtured, and it’s now easy to neglect, which really can affect everyone, although obviously some attitudes and lifestyles will be hit harder than others.

Something of a tangent but honestly I hate the way academia works here in general and I resent my role in contributing to math being used as a barrier to a better life. Unfortunately, I do need a career of some sort and there are worse things I could be doing. So I play by the rules well enough to keep my job and just try to do my best to be understanding.

I didn’t even enjoy math myself until I took an analysis course because I thought a math minor would help with job prospects. I always had an easy time with math and when I took analysis I got a D the first time and barely scraped by with a C the second. Math is actually interesting when you feel there’s creativity required in problem-solving, but it’s not reasonable to demand that in a lower-level math course because it doesn’t mesh well with a course existing primarily as a roadblock for students.

A hardworking student might still struggle to develop that creativity quickly enough to get through the course unscathed, which is fine if you’re enrolled because you just want to learn, but not fine for students trying to get good grades or at least pass everything to get through as quickly as possible. A student might have the crazy idea that failing is a financial hit or something. The result is you’re simply put through a grind until you voluntarily take on a course beyond the calculus sequence.

What I’m getting at is that I think your complaints all stem from the fact that, in spite of what we’re all forced to pretend, education is not the main purpose of academia.

I think there are many questions where it’s very easy to convince yourself the solution is obvious after you’ve been shown it, but it’s less obvious for someone who is taking the time to try to figure it out on their own.

I teach college math courses (usually around calculus-level), and for every exam I give I will write a practice exam to post online a week before, and I’ll devote the lecture prior to the exam to reviewing those problems. I try to make every problem that appears on the exam very similar to one that was on the practice. The students who attempt the problems before the review session, even the students who get incorrect solutions in the process, will bulldoze their exams and will say it was essentially identical to the practice, while the students who just watch me give the solutions and copy down what I’m writing will tell me the practice was easy but this was barely similar at all.

When you see an obvious solution immediately, you completely bypass seeing potential stumbling blocks which might have tripped you up.

I read somewhere that the existence of the internet massively stifles our ability to reason. For every question I have, spending a few minutes to ponder what the most plausible answer is provides a small workout for my brain. If everything I’m curious about is answered within seconds, I don’t get those mental workouts.

In the primary the Trump campaign had a couple noteworthy attack ads against DeSantis, like the one that had no mention of policy and was entirely focused on the reports that multiple people witnessed DeSantis eating a cup of pudding with his fingers. I’ll also mention that the attack ad put out by Trump’s campaign like an hour before DeSantis did a twitter event with Elon Musk to announce his candidacy will be a topic of great interest to future historians trying to understand our culture.

My thought is that if Trump has any area of expertise at all, it’s being petty towards haters and losers. If there were any position under him where that man could actually discern between a sycophant and a competent employee well enough to make firings based on poor quality of work, rather than based on not kissing his ass or simply needing a fall guy, it would be this. A position like attack ad concept design, where the most crucial skill is your ability to talk shit about someone you hate.

I’m really skeptical he makes meaningful decisions or does much of anything anymore, he seems like he’s stopped caring and we’d probably be seeing discussion of mental decline if we hadn’t had such a long period of Trump being totally overshadowed by Biden’s extremely conspicuous mental decline. With that said, the culture around his campaign was formed well before this election.

Looking at this now, you are correct, and while I wasn’t proud of myself for having thought the song titles were funny, I feel a bit more embarrassed now than I did two minutes ago before looking it up. Edgy teenagers were clearly this band’s target audience.

It didn’t make sense to me either until I realized that cleaning your house is probably also gay if you’re not expecting visitors.

Tarja-era Nightwish is so good.

I haven’t thought about this in like 20 years but when I was in middle school late 90s some kid had an album where one of the songs was titled “You Rollerblading (f-slur)” and I remember thinking it was the worst music I had heard in my life. 90% sure it was grindcore music, I didn’t know what grindcore was at the time but my memory of the sound kind of fits that mold and the album had like fifty tracks and every single one of them was like 10-15 seconds long.

Using the phrase “serious question” or “honest question” will make me immediately assume your question is the exact opposite of that. Probably I’m overreacting, but expecting that anyone might respect that declaration you’ve made about your own question, that gives me narcissist vibes.

I only discovered encabulation is a thing like a month or two ago and it’s been life-changing, I’ve seen the original paper but finding videos on youtube is like a treasure trove. The Chrysler version is probably my favorite I’ve seen, entirely because of the tech guy that the video switches over to for the second half.

The SANS ICS HyperEncabulator video is also really special. The throwback “I don’t understand you” scene at 1:53, I can’t even make out most of what he’s saying but somehow the delivery and the grin get me every time I watch it.

As a very stable genius, I completely agree with this.

I have one personal email (posteo, 1 euro per month) that I use for personal correspondences, and one shitty personal email I signed up for in high school that I use for anything where there’s any chance it might make it to some corporate mailing list. I have the posteo address set up alongside work email to notify me when new mails come in, and the junk address I’ll login through firefox like every few days (unless I’m expecting something specific) to skim and mark the most recent mail as read so I know where to start skimming next time.

For work, anything I actually need to deal with I’ll mark as unread until I get around to it, because it’s annoying seeing the icon show I have unread messages. Sometimes “getting around to it” does just mean putting it in a calendar or some other way of making sure I don’t lose track.

I have a lot of trouble with this, I guess issues with egocentrism. For me, listening is trying to understand their perspective, and picturing how I would see things from where they are standing very often wraps around to finding an experience that I’ve had, or things that I understand, that are analogous. Those things help me get a better grip on what this person is saying. I haven’t really found a way around this, when I really try to not inject my own anecdotes I end up not really contributing much substance and often not following as well, and I feel like a much worse listener because of that.

As I’ve grown older I’ve realized that I’ve always had some trouble with auditory processing in general, so interjecting is a way I can slow down the conversation before I get lost and make sure I’m still on track.

It really bugs me when people don’t comment their code at all. I have no idea what this is supposed to do.

About ten years ago I was really hesitant on claws because at that time the interface looked ugly and extremely dated, but I gave it a shot and found that once I got past that, it works perfectly for me, it did everything I needed it to do, and with one exception it still does. The interface has not had a facelift in the decade since, so it is ten years more dated than it was back then, but I’ve had so few other complaints that the ugliness is now endearing.

The one issue is that my work uses office365, and for a while I thought it just wasn’t going to work with claws, but at some point I discovered a miraculous piece of FOSS called davmail (in the AUR for arch, if you use debian it’s in the main repositories) which allows you to access microsoft email through any client.

I’ve been on arch for years, but have recently started pc gaming. Lutris has been surprisingly easy to get working. I have a nintendo switch already and decided I want to try to use the joycons for the computer, don’t want to buy gamepads but it gives and alternative to keyboard and mouse. Getting them consistently recognized by bluetooth has been a massive pain, but after searching I’ve figured out a package that I can install that fixes the issues. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who found a solution to this issue without installing this specific package.

That package is pulseaudio-bluetooth, even though the nintendo joycons do not have an audio jack or capability to receive audio. I’ve had my audio set up and configured with alsa, and alsa does everything (relating to audio) that I need it to, but pulseaudio-bluetooth requires me to install pulseaudio (duh) and will not work unless I enable the pulseaudio service, which fucks up my alsa config. I’ve spent a while dicking around trying to get pulseaudio to pretend it doesn’t exist except for connecting joycons, but there’s always some nuisance popping up. I also tried using a different usb bluetooth controller and plugging them into different usb ports. Given up for the moment and will probably just buy another gamepad and hope it works better without needing pulseaudio-bluetooth.

In all honesty I still don’t really know what the hell I’m doing on arch, I originally installed it to learn this stuff better but all I’ve really learned is how to read documentation well enough to get things working by trial-and-error. I’ve had a stable system for like ten years now though and I’m too comfortable with it to warrant switching to a friendlier distro, but this specific issue is a pain in the ass.

About a year ago my wife and I did a zoo date and when we got out of the car there was this bird walking around the parking lot. Not sure what kind of bird, flew off after like a minute but I thought it looked really cool.

I turned it on and was confused about why they were both speaking calmly and coherently. I thought this was a debate? Booooooring. I only turned it on to get an update on if they are still eating the dogs, but no one had the stones to pander to my special interest. This sucks, wouldn’t be caught dead watching the full thing.

I know I’m getting wildly off-topic just three comments deep in this thread, but comedy that warps into existential horror is a genre that I’ve recently discovered I love but probably never would have expected to be my kind of thing. This video is one of my favorites.

Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.

Fantastic one-line explanation, I don’t think I’ve thought about this before but now that you’ve said it it feels like something obvious that I really should have understood already.