My parents are both conservative - white Protestant evangelical Christian conservatives. In my 20s, I first became liberal, then atheist, then leftist. I’ve given up talking to my dad because he won’t discuss in good faith, but my mom still… tries.

I genuinely think the problem with conservatives is that they pay attention to and trust the wrong sources. We all have to trust people at some point, we can’t experience or verify literally everything ourselves. And the people we listen to have to trust who they listen to, forming large and complicated trust networks.

Most people don’t spend any significant time or effort vetting their sources. And if you don’t weed out bad sources, or learn to be skeptical of people you might already trust, then your trust networks become corrupted. By that point, questioning someone you trust could be a slippery slope - if they were wrong (or worse, lying) then that means soooop much of the trust network might fall, too. And that is legitimately terrifying for folks. It certainly was for me. It was honestly hellish, realizing that I had to rebuild from the ground up my entire trust network, and now I have anxiety about needing to keep my mental guard up at all times lest I be fooled again.

No wonder people get invested in politics and culture wars as team sports, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. It’s painful to stop.

I could go on and on about this, but I don’t have these thoughts formalized very well, so it’d just be rambling at this point.

Stay safe out there, gang.

Directionless is definitely a feeling a lot of us have out here. I’ll keep an eye on the inbox!

Yeah, actually. But weirdly, it also makes me feel way less guilt. Like, the constant self put-downs about not being as “productive” as I should be. That all got way quieter on meds. Even if I’m still not doing what I “should” it feels like a controlled choice instead of inescapable guilt-inducing procrastination.

It’s weird. I’m new to both my diagnosis and the meds, so who knows.

Well, I think we’d have to give some of the Eastern seaboard to the UK. But some goes to France, some to Spain. And tbh a lot could be reallocated back to American Indian groups and councils. Oh, and a bunch would go back to Mexico, too.

I don’t know you, but boy I’ve felt that. Not as intensely or as long, for sure, but the helplessness and inner desire for… meaning? Adventure? But being stuck instead. Yeah that sucks.

If you ever want to just chat or whatever, feel free to hit me up with a dm. I may not be able to make the world at large better, but I can at least offer an ear.

That is about as clear cut an example of political censorship as there could possibly be.

I’m generally in favor of legalization, but we should go into it with the best, most accurate information we have about the potential impacts so preparations and safety nets can be made in advance.

I can get behind this, generally speaking.

An important caveat though:

“The authors explain that one of the limitations of this study is that drug harms are functions of their availability and legal status in the UK, and so other cultures’ control systems could yield different rankings.”

Cocaine is still illegal, and by extension less available. I’m no expert, but I have to imagine that is affecting the rankings here significantly.

Fascists will still count him if his knee doesn’t bend enough.

Holy shit. I knew the painting was about manifest destiny. I knew that was the face of the streamer Destiny. I somehow completely missed the pun. I’m ashamed. I kept thinking there had to have been some sort of weird online drama I just hadn’t heard about. It’s a pun. I LOVE puns. My shame is immense.

I… do not know what is being referenced here. If anybody wants to help a bro out, please and thank you in advance.

I’d be interested to see, too!

Hey I leave comments. And half decent ones at that!

So, kinda. “Steam Machines” was the old initiative from 2013(?). The idea was to build a coalition of 3rd party machines with a branding and hardware guidelines for Asus, Acer, etc to build a ton of console-likes. Basically trying to replicate the PC market of diverse hardware from a bunch of OEMs to create a new market segment in the console space.

The difference here is that Valve is allegedly building a console themselves, fully 1st party with their own hardware and software, like they did with the Steam Deck. I imagine if this one has enough market traction (as determined by Valve), they’ll iterate on the software hard for a couple of years (and possibly the controller, too), then expand with guidelines for OEMs to make their own versions of the console using SteamOS. Basically, just follow the Steam Deck playbook and hope it works like last time.

I think the care for being not identified and covering one’s tracks provided in the above comment is a pretty obvious indicator for why their comment history is scrubbed lol.

That is a much more succinct way of putting it without any real loss of accuracy.

I’m no expert on the topic, but Nature is an exception rather than the rule, given its history and prestige.

Academic journals were around well before the Internet. Real capital investment was required to review applications, provide editing advice, typesetting, printing, and distribution. All of those are still things, now with additional online publishing, which also has its own technology costs.

What’s wild and out of whack, of course, is that peer reviewers generally aren’t paid, submitters pay to get published, and readers also pay for access. Other than the relatively minimal office staff to keep things running, there’s very little overhead. So why is it so damn expensive?

I think the answer is that they can get away with it. You can publish in an open source journal for free, of course, but there may or may not be quality control. Plus, it’s an attention economy. If you publish in Science or Nature, you’re almost certainly getting prestige that can turbo boost your career because that many people will see and likely cite your work.

And on and on it goes. I think we would pretty strong regulations to stop this system.

Neat!

I don’t know what the next thing after Reddit would be, but if anything fediverse wants to be that thing it needs to be prepared in advance of the next exodus.

That means developers need to work on smoother onboarding, from account creation to in-app guidance to help users find what they’re interested with as little effort as possible. On the backend, we need the ability to handle a huge influx of users. I don’t know shit about either of these things, but it’s what tech startups ALWAYS focus on to build their user base, to my knowledge.