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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • That’s not the problem… The problem is Linux isn’t “normal”. Their work laptop comes with Windows or osx. Their home computer comes with the same.

    Now go tell the average person to install Linux… To them, you might as well be telling them to open up their computer and snip a jumper to make their computer faster. To them, you’re telling them to take their working computer and do something they don’t really understand and is beyond their ability to undo.

    It’s an aftermarket modification to them. If you want to make Linux approachable, it’s really damn simple. Hand them a computer running Linux, with a pretty desktop manager, and a GUI for everything you expect them to do with it. Better yet, add an app store so they can try out software and run updates without feeling intimidated

    My point is, if manufacturers start selling Linux machines again, a lot of people will get on board

    People aren’t opposed to learning, they’re just scared of breaking it, and they need to at least be able to use a web browser without going up a learning curve


  • Missiles are super inefficient. You have to overcome gravity while fighting air resistance at the same time, which requires unreasonable energy density

    If only there was some way to use air resistance to fight gravity, or better yet even some sort of metal road to push against to lower required acceleration to the minimum…

    Maybe if we made a super slow missile on rails? Never mind, this sounds crazy now that I say it out loud


  • There’s always the ones where AI are always omnicidal and all digital tech is taboo, or the ones that predate the information age where you have very manual but powerful tech… Like sure, FTL is definitely sci-fi, but without automation (even human guided automation like ripperdocs) you end up with very unequal societies where magic tech exists, but only for the rich or large organizations

    The first is a newer genre so I can’t think of anything well known, the second includes things like the time machine where the time machine is sci-fi, but technology regresses, and the last one could be things like dune. Or 1984, where we’ve surpassed the “futuristic” tech (and unfortunately was mostly used like a how-to guide in recent years)





  • Everyone can’t learn everything. When you watch the news, do you fly down to Maui to interview victims and analyze the state of power lines yourself?

    You have to remember where you got something and learn to evaluate the bias of a source, but going on an active forum full of people with various levels of knowledge on the topic is the best way to get a complete picture in a reasonable time frame. They’ll call out inaccuracies in reporting, give background that might speak to problematic motivations or conflicts of interest, and argue bad takes.

    Is it perfect? No. It’s DD though, more and more usernames are quoted in the news - hell, even in this video forum posts are referenced frequently



  • I’m not sure I agree that you have to give a chance to respond - I think context matters.

    I think if you make an accusation or cover a specific incident, they should be able to give their context, not out of fairness but as this might give a more accurate view of the truth

    In this case, they presented a specific series of events showing a pattern of behavior, and a timeline of communication they made with billet (including their public comments in the subject

    What truth could they add here? They could add more details or make excuses, but that waters down the message - the point isn’t “Linus did something bad and made factual mistakes”, it’s “Linus has shown a pattern of doing bad things, and frequently publishes factually incorrect figures”

    I think you’re coming at it from a place of “you have to give them a chance to respond out of fairness”, but journalism isn’t about fairness, it’s about distilling an easily consumed message from the endless complicated facts that make up any situation. Journalistic integrity is about making every effort to give a “good take”, and should put accuracy above all

    Being fair to the people you’re covering should follow naturally by pursuing the truth, doing the opposite is what we call “softball journalism”


  • That’s a courtesy you can extend, but mostly it’s a protection against libel - if they take you to court about a claim they dispute, being able to say “your honor, we gave them a chance to respond before going public”

    In this case, there’s no dispute over facts - they didn’t bring up any accusations, they just took what LTT posted publicly and presented criticisms of it

    For example, if you report on the president being accused of misconduct you might ask the white house for comment, but if you are criticizing a speech they made or their public actions you probably wouldn’t (unless you think they’ll give you something that improves the story)


  • I forget the name of the bias/fallacy, but it’s something like “I love and support X. If X is bad, then I support something bad, then I’m bad. Since I’m a good person, and I support X, then X must be good or I wouldn’t support them”

    It’s probably a quirk of how we make decisions - we don’t consciously make decisions. Instead, we might weigh out the options and that affects our choice, but in the moment we choose subconsciously. It might feel like we made a decision consciously, but sometimes at the last second we deviate from the course we chose (or upon choosing, realize that despite our thoughts we actually have already made up our mind otherwise)… Then we have to rationalize that choice, or start down a long and challenging road of constant introspection


  • They made a bunch of mistakes that were callous and might’ve smothered a couple guys starting out.

    But then the lack of empathy - “it was a bad product, no one should ever buy it, and so my fundamentally flawed testing is actually valid”, “yeah they asked for it back multiple times and we auctioned it, but it was for charity so it’s fine”, “we agreed to compensate them, but it’s been months and we did that real quick after we got called out, but we’re going to make it seem like we didn’t need a scandal to do the bare minimum”

    It’s all excuses, it’s all justification for why “this looks worse than it is, and actually we’re still the good guys”. It’s narcissist mental gymnastics, he still just doesn’t understand what he did wrong - besides being mostly excuses, every “apology” is totally off base on what they did wrong