First two wallets I had, as a youth, were made of duct tape. The following two I had as an adult were gifts.

I don’t think I’ve ever desired to have speech as an interface for a device.

Yeah, I could yell at it “Open the browser and go to uhh the order of the stick comic index page” and maybe it would get it right. Or I could just… click on the browser, type oot and pick it from the drop down. Faster, no error, no expensive processing.

I don’t drive (cars are a bad form of transit and I’m lucky enough to not need one) and I’m not hands-full in the kitchen often.

I think sometimes people just throw out the accusation of “echo chamber” because their ideas are bad and the community rejects them.

Someone will be like “I don’t think we should have child labor laws but the eChO cHaMbER won’t even consider it”

Sometimes this gets said even when the alleged echo chamber responds with facts and history about why their take is a bad one.

Ultimately, here and in like all other human endeavors, emotions are primary. People feel a thing, and then reach for words to justify it.

Someone’s ideas being rejected by the group? Feels bad. Is it me? Am I wrong? No, that feels worse and the ego won’t accept this. It must be them. But why? Must be an echo chamber. Cool. Now I don’t have to feel bad about myself. I don’t have to change my beliefs. I can just blame them and move on.

So someone saying it’s an echo chamber has only very tenuous relationship to reality.

To your actual point, there’s also the “jaq’ing off” and “for me it’s Tuesday” problems of community management and health. The first being someone asking questions in bad faith. The latter is similar - someone in good faith is asking really basic questions that the community has seen a thousand times before, and people respond with exasperation. From the new person’s perspective the community is unwelcoming. From the community’s view, this is the third guy today that’s stumbled upon the idea that “maybe capitalism is bad” and walking them through that journey is tiresome.

Community is hard.

Most of these ghouls only care about money, so maybe this will help

The little old lady next to me says hello and sometimes let’s me know if there’s a package waiting for me.

The people on the other side I don’t know. They don’t seem especially friendly or unfriendly, but I’m happy to live and let live.

I see no need to install an app for what is essentially a web site.

I don’t think we should have private schools. Letting rich people pull their kids out means those kids will benefit , and the rest won’t. That’s not a good outcome.

None of those things you list are inherent to public vs private. They just take money, and a lot of people are selfish and short sighted so they don’t want to fund schools

If the private school is also for profit (likely), all that profit is waste and theft.

Remember that jury nullification exists. If you’re being asked to convict on something that’s bullshit, you can just say not guilty and the court can’t tell you that you gave the wrong answer.

This is a double edged property. It can be used as easily to shield some guy smoking pot from jail as a hate crime.

Just don’t tell them you’re nullifying because they’ll remove you.

No. I never really used it much. Facebook is bad and everyone should delete it. Staying in touch with friends can be done with email, chat, or federated services.

Big, centrally owned platforms aren’t a good idea.

Reddit did some API nonsense, and that was when I left there. I was already off twitter, and never used facebook stuff.

I need somewhere for my meme and internet highlights supply, and lemmy has been ok so far.

Basic ass Linux mint (xfce desktop) for my desktop. I mostly use it for video games and watching media.

Android for the phone. Gotta have those emulators (though I think you can get them on iPhone now, android is still cheaper).

I should probably do some de-googling though.

Work has us on Macs. They’re… fine. I wouldn’t buy one because they’re expensive and not great for games.

Not my kid, but someone I was dating had a toddler. She was not religious, but her parents were Catholic. She tried to intercept any religious stuff before it took hold in the kid. Firm words were exchanged when the grandmother was telling the kid that her great-grandmother was in “heaven”.

We broke up so I’m not sure how it’s going.

They also told the kid that Santa is basically a fun game people play. It’s not literally true but don’t spoil it for other kids.

I don’t think there are good arguments for eating meat, and I think people get mad at vegans because of the cognitive dissonance. “If eating meat is bad, and I eat meat, then I’m bad. But I’m not bad! They must be bad! They suck!”

Sometimes you see this with other things. Like if someone walks or takes a bike instead of driving for the environment. “If driving is bad for the environment, and I do a lot of driving, I’m doing bad. But I’m a good person! Fuck them for making me feel bad!”

Most people are just large children.

Sometimes people try to justify eating meat. Some reasons are more defensible than others. Someone with severe allergies might have trouble getting nutrition from vegan options. Someone saying “but I enjoy it” is acting like a child.

In short, most people are operating mostly on emotional levels. Facts don’t really matter. Feelings drive them. I think this is the root of most of our problems, honestly, that people can’t put aside their emotions.

Personally, I try to minimize how much meat I eat, but I’m okay with accepting sometimes I do bad things.

Someone posted on one of the subreddits I used to read, and I tried it out. I stopped using reddit because of the API thing and a general dislike of private consolidation that you get with sites like it.

It’s been fine. Some rough edges but worth it.

Would rather they invest in, like, housing, food security, climate crisis, any number of other more useful things. I know you could say that about anything- like all the money being spent on movies seems frivolous next to that stuff- but AI is especially dubious.

Our society’s priorities are all wrong, and I don’t think it’s going to get better without a lot of suffering. Maybe not even then.

I have money and they don’t. If I give them $1 or $5 or even $20, I won’t notice the difference and they will almost certainly have a positive change from it.

I don’t give money to the really aggressive homeless lady though, because she scares me.

“artificial difficulty” is poorly defined. Most parts of a video game are artificial. You get 100 health and 5 healing potions? Well those numbers were just made up, and could easily have been 50 and 1, or 200 and 10. The boss takes 5 hits to defeat, or 10, or 3?

I think people say “artificial difficulty” when they mean “I don’t like this”, but that’s not very useful for a discussion without digging deeper.

Your position is about a thousand times better than the denial-ism of most meat-eaters. “Eating meat is morally dubious, but I am making this bad trade off” is better than the usual “Shut up meat is tasty and like they don’t feel pain and if they did it’s only for a moment and it’s longer they deserve it for being lower on the food chain. And the environmental impacts are just made up but even if they were real they’re not a big deal, and if they were then it’s not like it’ll affect me, and if it did well fuck you.”

That is, some people who eat meat refuse to acknowledge that there’s any drawbacks or moral pitfalls. I guess that’s too hard on the self image. Cowards, really.

I try to minimize how much meat I eat. It’s a baby step. It’s hard when like work does an outing and there’s no vegetarian options. I don’t want to make a big stink about it every time. But I’m not going to pretend that eating meat is morally the high ground or good for the environment.

Sometimes people are like “Well I just enjoy a hamburger” as if that’s any sort of justification. Maybe I just enjoy punching cowards in the throat, but we can’t always do what we want, now can we.

Oh, I’m also on that side of the “game difficulty” argument. I mean, I don’t care much about what’s offered in single player games. I usually play on the default settings. But one time I got into an argument with someone who said he should be able to unilaterally adjust his iframes and parry window in PvP, and that guy can fuck himself.

I think I have an undue emotional response because a lot of the time it feels like the other person didn’t even try. It’s like someone who goes to a restaurant and just immediately pours salt all over the dish. Just try it like it was delivered first.

Or they usually eat pizza, but they order this soup dish. And then they get mad they’re burning their hands when they try to scoop it into their mouth. Use a spoon. Stop blaming the soup and use a spoon.

I guess more broadly my problem is I don’t believe other people are any good at introspection and emotional regulation. People just feel things and make up justifications. We all do that some of the time, but I think some people are just always in that mode.

Not great at some of the emotional assuagences. Like, it’s not enough to be right, you also have to make them feel good. Hell, you don’t even have to be right.

Sometimes I feel it’s like “hey don’t eat that it’ll make you sick” -> “fuck you don’t tell me what to do” -> they get sick and learn nothing.

Like, we’re all emotional. Me, you, everyone. But I feel like some people listen to almost entirely the emotional channel, and I don’t really know how to tap into that very effectively.