In a number-go-up kind of sense, yeah - it’s inherently gamification of social media and it is fun for some of our brains. However, I also think that karma or any other kind of “engagement accumulation” turns social media from a place of discussion into a competition for attention, where you’re more incentivized to post solely for upvotes. Only a small minority takes posting seriously like this I admit it, but it does make the experience worse for everyone.

That’s not to say the mindset doesn’t exist without karma, only that it gets amplified.

That’s pretty normal, we all do stupid shit as kids because of our environments/friend circles or just general growing pains.

Recognizing that what you’ve done is actually horrible is the most important step in terms of maturing and growing up, though of course it’s not the full battle. After all, how would someone change for the better if they don’t have such realization?

All in all you’re likely not a bad person, just someone who needs to/is in the process of maturing.

Speaking of YouTube channels, I like Josh Strife Hayes when it comes to talking about toxic masculinity, bad role models, becoming a more positive and better person - things like that, though he mostly does this on streams, clip channel of which is Josh Strife Says.

I like this video in particular, but there are other clips that speak about similar topics.

Been there, all depressed because of current state of the world, and learning that the “solutions” or “ways out” by the media are false or just delaying the inevitable/distractions, and judging from your comments you might be feeling the same thing.

However, if you do that, not only would your daughter suffer but the world would also lose someone truly radical in today’s society, someone who would truly sees past the ideology and propaganda we’re subjected to. If everyone like that were to off themselves or start heavily abusing substances as a tool of escapism, the world would never change and people with a future ahead of them like your daughter would be doomed for certain.

It’s important to cling onto hope - a better world is possible and you can be a part of building it, both individually but more importantly, collectively. Drop subtle hints in your conversations about what you think is wrong nowadays, who the real enemies you see are, plant the seeds in your colleagues and hope they’ll come to the same conclusions by themselves. If you see any resistance organizations aligned with your views politically, why not join them - after all, you’re not alone. Point is - there is still hope for change.

Though if it works and it does make you feel better, you can also start focusing on positive/good news, even though I’m skeptical it would work, pandora’s box and all. Maybe even seek counseling or therapy if you have access to it.

Coal mining, I fucking love mining coal

I’m on Linux, using Bottles to run pirated games. It adds a little bit of sandboxing, compatdata is usually a weird environment for malware to effectively work in (unless the malware is written specifically for it), if the game is really sketchy then I’d just disable network access for bottles flatpak too just to make sure.

All in all, I do sometimes have a little bit of paranoia and look through processes to see if there’s anything running and periodically go through some folders to see if there’s anything weird or unusual there, I’d still consider my machine to be safe.

As for the last question, PDF’s are an attack vector and should be used with caution. As for other file types, it depends on the software you use to run them - if it’s something pretty barebones that just plays it then it’s usually fine, but if its something more complex and reads some custom data embeded into those files, then it can be a vulnerability. Not a security expert though, but it’s the gist I got from looking at some historical vulnerabilities.

Usually with Linux, once you start out you’re gonna get a ton of issues and you’ll have to troubleshoot them one by one. However, afterwards it should just be a smooth sailing.

Also as a word of warning from my personal experience, official support isn’t something you should be that concerned about. When it comes to software, when some corporation makes some official version for a specific distribution (like Ubuntu), it usually is made by some B-team and doesn’t work that great. If the program is good, it should be available on most major distros rather than just “an official version for just one” if that makes sense.

Also good call - if one distro is causing a fuck ton of issues, just give another one a try. The main difference for users between distros is what kind of software setup they are going with, and some setups are just prone to issues on some hardware or wasn’t tested properly. Still, I do hope Fedora treats you better.

Finally, some good food

plot twist - they’re gonna do a whole revolution just to go back to pre-trump liberal status quo with dems in charge + maybe some healthcare (dont count on it)

Depends on context - if it’s a yes/no question or something that can be replied to with a simple “great” or “okay”, thumbs up serves as a “yes” or as a gesture that the person has read the message and doesn’t have any problems with it.

It might be considered rude though for more complex discussions, where you need to respond in sentences

Realistically, it’s an impossibility. This view is mostly propagated via liberal news sources, having the main battle be conservatism vs progressivism or left vs right (as opposed to class struggle, the poor vs rich, working class vs capitalists), and since the democrats are more progressive than republicans, they’re the “good guys” who should be supported.

For it to be destroyed, we’d have to catch up to their level of influence and reach or even surpass it, to show people that they’re a party of capitalists who sometimes are progressive, and not an actual ally of the working or middle classes but only pretending to be one. Maybe going one step further too and influencing progressive movements democrats support to pay attention to economic aspects too, given how their root causes aren’t purely social?

But again, it’s impossible for us workers to have such reach, given how well funded media is.

Reminds me of the student-led protests going on right now in Serbia, where students and the opposition party both have this mutual agreement of “we’re both against the current regime and we both want good liberal things so we are aligned” but absolutely 0 cooperation, with the opposition sitting on the sidelines just occasionally cheering them on, with an expectation they’ll get put in power because who else is it gonna be.

If this comparison isn’t just a misinformed delusion, then get comfortable with the way things are right now USA.

My european mind can’t comprehend making tea without an electric kettle, something that is very rarely used in the US

Replace with something else - back when I was actually addicted to soda, I realized how expensive it all was and replaced it with drinking tea.

Of course, might not be viable if you’re an american.

There are some setups that allow you to do this.

• nixOS or nix + home-manager on some other distro, but it’s a high skill-floor way to manage a computer so wouldn’t recommend

• window manager heavy setup where you just set it up then copy over the config files to the new install, a bit of a pain to first customize but viable if you’re willing to ditch mouse-heavy desktop experience in favor for keyboard and shortcut focus to control everything.

Apart from those two cases, not really.

I had issues with keeping a stable sleep schedule for years, but now I found a method that works for me: every day, set your alarm clock to the same time no matter what (in your case 5 AM) even on weekends. Then, try going to sleep so you always get full 8 hours, if you fuck up and go to sleep too late then tough shit - you’ll feel tired tomorrow which will serve as a punishment that your brain will hopefully recognize.

They key is to be consistent and not sleep in.

It’s just a sad state of affairs. Digital video games are 1’s and 0’s that you can copy for basically free (with the only cost being hard drive space which is dirt cheap), so preservation shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, we live in a world where logic sometimes has to take the backseat in order to maintain the current ideology, and video game preservation is one of those sacrifices.

A somewhat political fact, but one that made some of my friends dumbfounded:

When a bank issues a loan, it generates that money literally out of thin air and credits that money to the loan account rather than using deposits they already had. For example, if you want to borrow $100,000, the banker approves the loan and doesn’t hand over cash or move existing money around - instead, they just go on their system and credit your account with the sum, that’s it.

I’ll get a bit conspiratorial here, but if what Bernie has said is to be trusted in his video about oligarchy, up on his youtube channel, then Democrats are largely owned/influenced by billionaires who would benefit from the increased Trump support. It would make sense to do this, but yeah it could also just be a blunder, given how Trump was the first one to propose the ban and Democrats could take it as “hey if we do this, we’ll win the moderate right support again!!”, though who knows.

I personally use bottles installed through flatpak for non-steam game needs. Especially if you’re pirating, you can use flatseal to disable things like internet access for bottles (and games that you run through bottles) and inter-process communication, making it just a bit safer if you have trust issues.

Setting bottles up is a bit of a pain, but once you do that you can pretty much run anything through it easily