AnarchistArtificer

Vive la France

This is bending the prompt somewhat, but I was once almost struck by lightning. I was walking home through a park, and based on how soon I had been hearing the thunder after each flash of lightning, the storm was basically right on top of me. I was feeling pretty nervous, and tried to take a route with minimal tall trees, but I was a teenager and didn't know what else to do but to keep heading home All of a sudden, I was filled with a sense of foreboding, and I felt an overwhelming instinct to get away from where I currently was. It was so strong that I dove off to the side, before I heard one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard. Based on where the lightning had seemed to hit, I was very lucky, as it looked like I would have been caught in it had I been standing where I was a moment before. I assume that the wrongness I was feeling before I jumped aside was subconsciously recognising the electric charge buildup in the air or something. I don't know. Either way, I'm glad I jumped. In an alternate timeline, I'd have dove and felt very silly after nothing at all happened. Or alternatively, I might have jumped aside and still been affected. Who knows ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯

Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development. What a G.

I've had a good experience on Feeld, as a bisexual woman. I've found that there are far fewer deceptive unicorn hunters on there (I say this as someone who is open to being someone's unicorn, if they are open and candid about their wishes. I once went on a Hinge date with a woman whose profile said she was a lesbian, but at the date, she ambushed me with her boyfriend. She said she lied because she didn't think I would have showed up to the date if she said she wanted to bring her boyfriend. Gross behaviour)

I'm pretty sure that electric vehicles didn't really exist in a remotely viable form in 2008, because my Dad was a relatively early adopter with the Nissan Lead, and I remember it took an inordinate amount of effort to plan charging stops for a long distance journey. A lot of people will just go back to their old habits, but for many others, this could be the thing that kicks them out of their inertial rut.

The CPU is the silver squarish shape towards the right. It generates a lot of heat when in use, so having good cooling for it is important. So important that CPUs come with a fan in the box. This involves a heat sink to help draw heat away from the CPU. This screws on mounting points around the CPU, but thermal paste is also used to help heat transfer up. Then there's a fan that attaches to that heat sink, so that the hot air from the CPU can be blown away from the CPU.

People spend a heckton of money on cooling for their CPU and GPU, because when things overheat, they throttle themselves and performance becomes super slow. Longevity of components can also be harmed by higher temperatures. If it gets too bad, then it will crash entirely.

This PC has put the CPU heatsink on the case fan on the left. I don't think this is especially harmful in and of itself — the big problem is that the CPU is entirely "naked" and has no cooling whatsoever. This means the CPU begins overheating basically as soon as the PC is turned on.

Edit: you can actually see where the heat sink should match up to the CPU here

And I love it. This is the kind of person who evokes the traditional bi panic in me — do I want to be her, or kiss her? (Both. Both is good.)

Oh my gosh, I can't believe you remembered! Thanks :) (It wasn't my birthday, until I read this post. But now it is, so thank you)

I've had a couple of people recognise me from previous comments I made. It really warmed my heart to hear. I don't post often, but I do comment a fair amount.

That's sort of like saying "I'm overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let's turn on the heating and see how we feel once it's 45ᵒC"

I am a freak who really enjoys linear algebra. It's actually quite heartening to discover that even amongst my friend group of weirdos, there are still freaks

The big silver heat sink that's on the left is meant to be on the CPU, which is the Silver squarish shape towards the right. Keeping the CPU cool is a big deal — CPUs come with a smaller fan which is sufficient for many people, but people who use their PC more intensively, or want to extend the life of their CPU typically buy an additional cooler. Here's an example of a stock cooler, and here's a motherboard that's using the fairly basic aftermarket CPU cooler that I have. It was only $30, but when I was new to PC building, it was strongly recommended, because if your CPU gets too hot, it'll throttle itself and slow down. People who over clock their CPU (running it at a higher voltage for better performance) have to get even beefier cooling, such as water cooling. You can completely fry your CPU if you do something wrong when overclocking, and even if it doesn't get that bad, minor mistakes can cause crashes due to CPU overheating.

So TL;DR: keeping your CPU cool is super important for both performance and longevity of the CPU.

The PC in the top photo has zero cooling for the CPU. Not even the stock fan that comes with the CPU. That heatsink that's attached to the case fan is almost certainly intended for the CPU — you don't even need a heatsink in that location.

This means that this person's CPU will rapidly overheat soon after it is turned on.

Edit: you can actually see where the heat sink should match up to the CPU here

Thank you. I love you too

Props to you for taking your outrage and funnelling it into something productive. I'm a nightmare for saying "I'll do it later", which, of course, means I never will (though I'm getting better at not doing this).

Something that I think is grim is that a Jewish friend with family in Israel told me that they strongly suspect that the percentage of Jewish Israelis okay with ethnic cleansing is a fair chunk lower than 82%, but that because the media landscape in Israel is so homogeneous, and there's a lot of social stigma around being anti-genocide, that there are almost certainly people who don't agree with the ethnic cleansing, but say they do due to the pressure of social shaming. She went on to say that of course, the people who disagree inwardly but loudly agree outwardly are functionally the same as people who wholeheartedly agree with ethnic cleansing. However, this highlights how fucking tragic the state of Israel is even for Jewish Israelis; stuff like this is why she considers Israel to be an insult to Judaism. She has a small amount of sympathy for Zionism in theory, in that she understands why so many people felt like they would only be safe if there was a Jewish state. However, modern Zionism has taken an ideology that she already disagreed with, and turned it malignant — "and now we have a state that is in opposition to Judaism, through its endorsement of disgusting attitudes and actions in its Jewish citizens". I hadn't considered it that way before, and it made me feel sad to reflect on figures like 82%. I don't know what would be more tragic: if only 40% of people were actually pro-genocide, with the other 42% of people not being pro-genocide, but succumbing to social pressure and acting like they are; or if only 10% of people weren't pro-genocide but too scared to speak out. Both of those options are depressing, but in different ways

It's less about the ability to find the clitoris, and more about the will to do so. I think that it is more than a meme, but in the sense of "men seem so oblivious about the clitoris that surely they must not be able to find it". Some women do seem to genuinely believe this to be the case. I guess that, as absurd as it may sound, it may be more palatable to believe than "most of my partners don't give a fuck about my pleasure and I'm functionally little more than a fleshlight to them" There have been a few times where I have been a bi woman's first experience of sapphic sex, where they have told me that the sex was so good that it basically redefined for them what sex could be like. I don't know if it makes it more or less grim that I have slept with plenty of men who were invested in my pleasure enough that they actively enjoyed helping me to have a good time. I guess they have just been fairly unlucky with their partners.

Oof, yeah, that's gross as hell. I imagine that must make the already pretty demoralising experience of online dating even worse. Guys like this get super defensive if you call them out on this transphobic bullshit too.

I don't think it's necessarily the goal — Discord is just a helpful yardstick to compare things to as a baseline (and some people are looking for something that replaces Discord as closely as possible). Having to switch services is a pain, and whilst it's not optimal in the long term to just try to replace a thing with a clone, I can see why people don't have the executive function energy to think too hard about this.

I'm sorry that you lost something of such sentimental value

Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them (I'm reflecting on how many times I've been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often. Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: "if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I'd have two nickels. — which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice" I think I'm just most people's token techy friend. Or more specifically, I'm the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)

Man, that highlights how unhinged Zionism is as an ideology

It makes me glad for having been born when I was. I am a younger Millennial, so I wasn't online for the early internet, but I am old enough that when I read this blog post, it reminds me that I have seen firsthand that it wasn't always this bad — even if, like you, I was surprised to realise how bad things have gotten. I feel like a frog boiling in water that started cool, but gradually became hotter^[1] I feel sorry for Zoomers and younger, who have grown up only knowing the walked gardens of big tech. It invokes an odd sense of ethical duty in me; many of them believe they hate tech in all its forms, because all they know is the toxic cycle of dark patterns and a culture that expects them to be always contactable, making it hard to disengage. However, there's an entire world that they don't know that beyond the walled garden. I wish I could show them what I have seen, but you can't easily convey the magic of a memory — after all, the internet that shaped me no longer exists. So I guess the challenge ahead of me is trying to figure out how I can work with them to co-create a vision of a better internet. We can't put all the enshittification and spambots back in Pandora's box, but maybe we can build something new if people like us can use our memories to distribute hope to where it's needed.

Something that I'm super chuffed with is that a few years back, one of my most cheapskate friends asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. When I presented their options to them, they were reluctant to cheap out and get a mediocre laptop that wouldn't last them very long, but they also balked at the price of even the midrange laptops (they weren't keen on spending more than £250 on a laptop, which wasn't enough to get anything that they'd consider to be decent and worth the effort/cost). As a long shot offer, I told them that I could always try installing Linux on their laptop if they wanted to wring another couple of years out of their existing laptop. I was a tad surprised when they opted for this, and even more surprised at how well they took to it; I jokingly call them one of my "normie" friends, because they're one of the people whose perspective I ask for when I'm trying to calibrate for what non-techie people know/think. I only had limited experience with Linux myself at that point, having only played around with things on live USBs before. I had heard that Linux could give new life to slow computers, but I was surprised at just how effectively it did this. (A small amusing aspect to this anecdote is that when I was installing it, I said that one of the side benefits of running Linux is that it could boost nerd cred amongst folk like me. They laughed and said that they didn't expect that this would be a thing that would ever end up being relevant. Later that year, they got a girlfriend who saw that my friend was running Linux, and expressed approval, which is quite funny to me)

That's sad. Regardless of whether it's one of the reasons for Microsoft's nosedive, it does make me feel some unexpected sympathy for Satya Nadella. I also feel pity, because most high up CEOs do not seem happy with their lives — Many of them spend an absurd amount of time at work, even if they never seem to actually *do* much work, and I can't imagine how hard it must be to weather grief under such conditions. No amount of money can buy you more time with a lost loved one. It really seems like a hollow existence.

It's usually safe to assume that If there are people who seem to find a thing difficult despite you finding it easy, it's probably difficult for them. For some reason or other, they have needs or struggles that you don't have. You don't need to understand why they struggle, just accept that they do.

I would probably step out of the way of the trolley, but I admit that I would hesitate. If you saw my hesitation and if I was doing okay, I would say that I'm doing as well as I can be, under the circumstances. I am fortunate to have good people in my life. When things get to be a lot, connections with people I care about helps keep me grounded. The world often feels so awful that I feel hopeless. I also often feel awful, sometimes due to the world, sometimes due to brain weasels scurrying around in my head. But in the end, I figure that if I am someone who is able to see all the bad stuff that's happening as bad, then that suggests that I am probably a force for good, however small that may be. At least I can see the problem. If I died, there would be one less person who understands that things need to change. My resolve is weak and weary, but it endures. As long as it does, I would step off the tracks and give the gun to someone responsible asap. Edit: I know that the meme is a commentary on the recent murder of Renee Nicole Good. I was just waxing poetic on my own mostly-managed despair, which certainly is relevant to the topic of ICE's crimes. It's an interesting contrast: ICE would shoot the driver, whilst the rest of us are left to battle the dread that causes some of us to contemplate willingly falling to the trolley. *That's* why I'm trying to stick around — because if I let myself die, then that's just another injustice in the world.

Explanations aren't excuses. Especially because the things that drive individuals are systems; we can strive to hold individuals accountable for their actions whilst also recognise the systemic oppression that makes it harder to make good choices

I do agree that there is much that remains. Indeed, I have found a lot of joy by discovering all the weird little personal websites that people are building as an act of rebellion. However, the culture has irrevocably changed. It makes me think of the line "man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man". Many of us who grew up on a more free and chaotic internet have become jaded over time. If I went back in time, I wouldn't be able to enjoy the internet in the same way I used to because I'd be too acutely aware of what lies ahead. That's why I prefer to focus on moving forwards — it feels like a kind of healing

That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?

It’s because there’s a significant proportion of people whose preferences are something behind “skinny, white, conventionally feminine woman”, and so when people outside of that demographic are featured in media, it freaks them out because their preferences are limited to people who fit within that narrow description, so wider diversity of people depicted in media is, to them, synonymous with a push for unattractive people in media. That in and of itself isn’t a problem — they have every right to their own preferences, and I have no interests in trying to convince them of anything. The problem is because they have attached themselves to the idea that their personal preferences are the objective standard. So when they see more diversity in media, and others thirsting for people they would consider to be objectively unattractive, this destabilises the idea that their preferences are The Truth. This means that, rather than just accepting that people like what they like, they contort themselves into believing that this is all a big conspiracy to try to push objectively unattractive people into media. Framing things like that means they end up seeing this as something that is entirely a political push to erode all foundations of society as part of some Woke ploy. They feel threatened and genuinely scared that there will be a future where there is literally no-one who they find attractive represented in media. Which is to say that someone who is accustomed to being the boot distrusts people who want there to be no boot, because surely they must be lying so that they can seize power and be the boot and crush everyone else. At the heart of this is a zero-sum way of thinking of the world. They have deeply internalised that if one group in society gains rights, or power of any sort, then it must come at the cost of someone else. Some of them occasionally show awareness of the moral awfulness of them using their privilege to oppress others in society, and they briefly have moments where they understand that if the oppressed wished to take our retribution against them, we would be justified. However, they are incapable (or unwilling) to actually reckon with all the cognitive dissonance they’ve built up, and so their fear causes them to become ever more rigid in their worldview. I find it fascinating, really. I am a fat, queer punk, and my existence is viscerally horrifying to them, because I am the epitome of so much of what they hate, and it breaks their brains to imagine that someone could find me attractive (tbh, it still sort of breaks my brain a bit too, but I’m getting there with improving my confidence). They genuinely believe that THE WOKE LEFT want everyone in media to look like me, even though that would be the opposite of the diversity we actually want. They don’t believe us when we say this though. Their zero sum thinking combined with their willful inability to acknowledge that their own preferences are as subjective as anyone’s means they don’t believe us when we say this though, and that this is all part of our dastardly plot to seize absolute power for ourselves and make them be the oppressed ones. It’s quite sad for them in the end. I’ve found that a huge part of what has allowed me to become more confident in myself has been acknowledging and embracing all the non conventional things I find attractive in other people. For instance, I firmly believe that the most beautiful point on basically any human body is the point where the curvature of the calf turns from being convex to concave. And because I don’t feel the need to convince other people of this, I can just let myself like what I like and be free to bite my partners’ calves. Even if their tastes do genuinely align with what is considered to be this narrow notion of “conventionally attractive”, I can’t imagine they feel very free to actually enjoy their own desires and their own bodily potential

What it’s meant to mean is “yay us! We’re doing inclusivity!” What it actually means, to me, is “we will make a show of valuing disabled people, but we won’t go so far as to actually include them in the design process, thereby making this bench an artifact to our own self congratulation, as well as making wheelchair users feel excluded in a far more insidious way than they already did”. And I feel like an asshole to say it like that, but it’s so annoying to see well intentioned people fall at literally the first hurdle. Like, if they truly do see us as people who have intrinsic value that means we are worth including, then they also need to see us in our full personhood and include us in the process. The alternative is that their enthusiasm will just cause more money to be pissed down the drain on symbolic gestures that don’t fulfill their intended purpose

I can appreciate the thought, because as a part time wheelchair user, it does often wear me down when I feel like I’m perpetually perched on the periphery of any conversation. However, like you say, this is just far too impractical for most people. I have a small, active wheelchair, and even that would probably put me in front of friends sitting on the bench beside me. However, I can totally believe that this was made in earnest. I’ve seen some ridiculous “accommodations” that are ostensibly for disabled people that just show that the able bodied designer just didn’t involve any disabled people in the design process at all. And that’s why “nothing about us, without us” is a long used slogan used by disability rights campaigners. If anyone wants to see an example of good accessibility design, I love how they designed the packaging for the Xbox Accessible Controller. They included lots of people with varied needs across multiple stages of the design process, and it really shows. And the end product is so elegantly functional. I like this quote from Solomon Romney, a “Microsoft Retail Stores retail learning specialist": “The whole thing sort of blossoms open in this really beautiful, fluid way. The package just sort of opens and hands you the controller. What’s wonderful about it is the effortlessness.”

This is not a zero sum game. If we’re looking at existing staffing levels, then sure, giving some people flexibility would come at the cost of other people’s flexibility. But that premise is exactly the problem here — it’s fucked up that when people who aren’t parents are in need of flexibility, their employers often say that it’s not possible because staffing levels are too low. But this is a problem that arises because employers are cheapskates.

There’s actually a lot of trans women in the professional modelling world. One friend told me that due to preferences for taller women with particular bone structure, that the field actively selects for trans women. Like, there’s still way more cis women in modelling than trans women, simply because there’s way more cis women in the world, but trans women are disproportionately represented in modelling