AnarchistArtificer @ AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

I imagine it would be useful as a learning experience, even if that level of tracking didn't go on forever.

I'm thinking of how tracking calories feels analogous; the time I spent dedicatedly tracking the calories of my food consumption was super helpful in recalibrating my intuitive understanding.

The first few months were a lot of effort because I had to do stuff like putting a bowl on a weighing scale and add what I considered to be an appropriate amount of cereal, and working out how many calories were in that, then doing similar for the milk. It was shocking to see how many calories were in some of the typical things I ate, but beginning to be honest about that and logging my reality was necessary to starting making positive changes. Because I tend to slip into disordered eating when I try to lose weight via calorie counting, I've found that I need to take a more freestyle approach and go for more qualitative goals like "eat more veg", "cook more meals", "drink glass of water before snacking" — goals that can be specific and towards being healthier, but don't require too much number crunching. However, I wouldn't have made as much progress without having spent a decent amount of time tracking things, judgement free.

The judgement free part is the hardest part, and I imagine that applies for tracking spending too. Did you ever have instances where you saw how much you were spending on a particular thing and cringed so hard that you found it harder to be truthful in your tracking? I know that I struggle with guilt a lot, and that can make it easier to put my head in the sand.

I once heard a baby with whooping cough. I'm almost crying now just remembering. I think that sound would change the mind of many anti-vaxxers, except by the time people hear it, it is too late to prevent their anti-vax beliefs causing harm

I think you have to want to quit smoking for it to work like that. I've found that because vaping is more accessible than smoking, someone's vaping consumption can be far higher than what they were smoking. It can be quite easy to sort of absent mindedly vape in a way that's harder to do when smoking.

But I do know people who have used vaping in this way. Someone I knew had tried to quit smoking before but they couldn't go from one cigarette per day (and they needed to quit fully, or their smoking would inevitably increase during times of stress). When smoking, I guess you could roll a smaller cigarette, but this friend tried that and it didn't work. Vaping allowed them to finally kick the habit for good because their vape allowed them to taper down the nicotine content per puff of the vape

Oh yeah, that's one of the things that I'm tempted by. I just recognise that it'll be a bit of a time sink (not necessarily a bad thing), and I should probably try it on a spare device or drive first. I've just been too busy to be able to sink my teeth into something like that, but hopefully some day.

A good guide or wiki makes a huge difference — I opted for Arch as my first Linux run, for example, because I kept seeing the Arch wiki be a useful resource when learning about general Linux things. Similarly, I have had a nosy at the Gentoo handbook and that too looks like a thorough and accessible resource (though it's more Gentoo specific obviously).

You're great at explaining this, thanks for giving these examples

I learned this a few years ago and my mind was blown because I'm autistic and this is indeed my instinct. I have also found that neurodivergent people are more likely to respond positively to an anecdote.

Neurotypical people tend to react better to "reflective listening" — basically the "it sucks" button, but more expanded. Like if someone is venting about something, I might say "That sounds really frustrating", or similar. It feels like playing conversational ping pong where I'm not an active participant in the rally, but just reacting to my conversation partner's shots.

I don't tend to find reflective listening especially helpful if I'm the recipient of it (I cope with problems differently), so it blew my mind when I was trying to support a friend with these techniques and they ended the conversation by thanking me for the support, and they really needed that. It baffled me because I hadn't felt like I'd said anything really at all, besides just reflecting stuff back at them, which felt sort of like small talk but even more superficial. But nah, turns out that different people find different kinds of support helpful. The_More_You_Know.jpg

I knew very little about Palestinian culture before this genocide. I have learned so much, which I'm immensely grateful for, though I regret the circumstances that fuelled my interest. I have found that learning about Palestine and its people has helped me to understand this conflict beyond the horror of the ever-increasing casualty figures, while keeping me grounded enough that I don't emotionally burn out and have to tune out from what's happening.

You might enjoy this article about Palestinian weaving. It's quite short, but it has some good links for more reading.

Damn it I wrote a long comment and it got discarded because I'm wearing gloves which are already hard to type in.

Ugh, I'm all too familiar with that frustration. Thanks for rewriting what you able to, I appreciate your comment even (especially?) if it isn't as coherent/details as your intended one was.

The mass wave of pardons has really highlighted to me how broken the justice system is, but for complicated reasons. I can't remember which case it was, but I read of one of the controversial pardons and felt outraged. Then someone, much like yourself, pointed out that this was due to the COVID house arrest stuff, and I conceded that it probably made sense. But then I felt conflicted, because if I didn't want them to be back in prison, why did I still feel so angry?

The unfortunate answer is that prison doesn't give us justice. I have been a victim of crimes that I haven't reported because I have seen how traumatising that process is for victims. When the trial is over and the perpetrator is behind bars, the person most affected by the crime must then struggle to heal from both the trauma of the original incident, and the additional, separate trauma of interacting with the justice system. Seeing someone punished might soothe the sting a little, but it doesn't help one to heal.

Reading about restorative justice approaches makes me feel hopeful, though it's a radical enough approach that we haven't had many chances to see it in action. Even if the cultural consciousness moved away from its retributive understanding of justice, widespread implementation of restorative approaches wouldn't be a straightforward task. However, I feel that for a huge amount of cases, it would be better than we have now.

Cumulative interest is absurdly powerful. Turns out that the best way to earn a fuckton of money is to start with a heckton.

Tangentially related: a friend told me that they worked out that £1,000,000 in the bank/invested in safe options would accrue enough interest that you could retire and have a decently comfortable income just off of the interest (meaning that the million pounds would remain untouched and able to be inherited by kids of whatever).

It weirdly reminds me of growing things like moss, yeast (for bread) or fungi. It takes far more time than work; you set up the conditions for them to grow, and then you leave them to their own devices for a while. I can't imagine treating money like this; growing up poor means that no matter what level of financial security I achieve as an adult, I will always be acutely aware of exactly how much money I have, and how fast it is growing or shrinking.

I love that you did

I think this Tweet is referring to carcinisation, if any of the nerds reading this don't know what that is

That's one beautiful teaspoon

Man, what assholes.

I was at a "know your rights" training thing for protesters and activists, and one of the things that they covered is that a super important and low risk thing way to support a large protest is to have people sort of "on guard" nearby the police station, ready to receive and support someone who was arrested, because the police like to release people at stupid times of night (especially if they're salty that they don't have enough evidence to charge you for a crime). In most cases though, (such as yours), there's no-one to provide this support, and then you're fucked.

I hadn't realised how prevalent this spitefulness was until this part of the training , where multiple people shared experiences of this sort. I was already on team ACAB as it was.

I'm glad you made it home safe.

It sounds like you have this sorted now, but I will share my tip anyway.

My master password was a randomly generated pass phrase of a few words, such as what you can generate with Bitwarden's password generator set to "passphrase"

Using an example I've just generated with that tool, if I had decided on a master password of "Daily-Exorcist-Nappy-Cornmeal", then I would generate a few more passwords and write those down too. So I'd have a list that might look like this:

snowman

daily

uncanny

backer

exorcist

thinner

showoff

nappy

cornmeal

nifty

(I have bolded the words belonging to the actual master password from my example above, but obviously that's not how it'd be written down. To remember that the passphrase has the words separated by hyphens, you could draw dashed lines around the list, like a decorative border. Here, I have also written words all in lowercase, even though the password has uppercase. (Though I would advise keeping the passphrase in the correct order, as I have in this example, because it's easy to pick out the correct four words from a list like this, but harder to remember the right order for them).

I don't have a safe either, but writing things down like this felt like a sufficient level of security against snooping family and the like. Though like I say, it seems like you've resolved this differently, so this is more for others who may stumble across this than for you.

I agree with you that the emergency access feature is great. A couple of years ago, my best friend died and I ended up being a sort of "digital steward" of all his stuff, because I was his tech guy and he had shitty passwords that I couldn't convince him to change. In the end, his laziness meant we got to preserve some digital mementos that would otherwise be lost (such as his favourite decks on Magic:Arena). At the time, I was using a personal system to generate and remember passwords, and I was shaken to consider how much would be lost if I died. I feel far more at ease now with the Emergency Access feature from Bitwarden Premium (I also like being able to use Bitwarden for 2FA codes). I'm sorry that you had the unfortunate experience of being locked out of your stuff, but I'm glad you were able to secure yourself such that you're protected from that in future.

"Eeyup, ars thar doin'? Ad be reyt, but av lost me notes of me password— tin tin tin"

(This was an attempt at transcribing someone saying in a heavy Yorkshire accent: "Hello, how are you doing? I would be okay, but I've lost my notes of my password. It isn't in the tin". (I had to squeeze in "tin tin tin" to this somehow because that's one of my favourite mini jokes about heavy Yorkshire accents.)

I'm answering a different question than the one you're asking, but I switched to Linux (specifically Fedora) as my main computer not too long ago. I had been trying to improve at Linux because I work in scientific research, but I was anxious because games seemed far...messier and complex than the scientific stuff I was more familiar with, and I didn't want to kill my recreation. This worry was unnecessary, because I have been immensely impressed by how straightforward playing Steam games through Proton (the windows emulation thingy that Steam uses). There have been a couple of minor issues that were easy to troubleshoot, and it was the kind of problem that sometimes crops up on Windows too.

I still feel quite overwhelmed by Linux, because I still don't really understand why some things work on one operating system and not another. Like, I understand that .exe files don't natively work on Linux (they require something like WINE, or Proton (WINE is like Proton, but not specialised for games)), but I don't understand why. I think to properly understand it, I'd need to become a kernel developer or something silly, so I think I need to make my peace with not really understanding the difference. I think that's okay though, because I don't really need to know that. It's sufficient to just know that they are different, and know how to respond (i.e. Knowing that the .exe version of software isn't intended for my system, but that I can probably run it if I use WINE or Proton).

Most of my teething problems with Linux have been non game related, and although some of them were very stressful to troubleshoot, I found it refreshing how easy it was to learn how to fix problems. Especially given that a big thing that drove me away from Windows was constantly feeling like my computer wasn't my own. Often when Windows goes wrong, it makes fixing the problem harder via hiding away settings, or obscuring information in a way that perversely makes solving small things require a much higher level of expertise. It ends up feeling like the system isn't trusting me to be able to solve problems for myself, which makes me feel powerless. I suspect you may relate to much of what I have said in this paragraph.

Coming to Linux from Windows can be stressful because suddenly, you are trusted with a lot more power. You can delete your entire operating system with one command if you want (sudo rm -rf /* , if you're curious) and there's nothing stopping you. The lack of guardrails can be scary, but there are far more helpful and kind Linux nerds on the internet than assholes, in my experience, so I have found many guides that guide me through solving problems such that I'm not just blindly entering commands and praying to the computer god. You sound like a person with a mindset towards progression, so you will likely do well with this challenge. If you're like me, you may relish the learning. Certainly I enjoy the feeling of progression that I've had the last year or so.

People here may suggest dualbooting or using a virtual box to try it out. I would suggest diving in, if you can. Unless you have software that you know is strictly windows only, setting aside some time to fully switch is a good way to immerse yourself. I tried with virtual machines and dual booting, but I ended up getting lazy and just using the Windows because it was the path of least resistance. I had to fully switch to actually force myself to start becoming familiar with Linux.

Hardly any of this directly answers your question, so I apologise if this is unwelcome; I wrote so much because I am more enthusiastic about this than the tasks I am currently procrastinating. Best of luck to you

Edit: some games have anticheat software that can cause issues. I play some multiplayer games with anticheat stuff and I've not had any problems, but I think I am fortunate to not play any with the kind of anticheat that gets its hooks in deep — they may be the rare exceptions to gaming being refreshingly straightforward. I didn't consider them because they don't affect me, but others have mentioned them and may have more to say.

I got started with Spyder when learning python in biochemistry

I asked a similar question of a writer friend recently (though I am interested in non-fiction). They told me something that I already knew, but was unhappy to hear nonetheless — that the start of one's writing "career" will inevitably involve a fair bit of writing into the void; even for publications that are accepting open submissions, it's useful to have an established presence so that someone who can read more of your work and get a sense of what you're about. "Established presence" in this case may mean a blog/substance that has little to no readership, even though putting your writing out there when you have zero platform can feel pretty demoralising. It is good practice though, and the more your body of work grows, the easier it is to make a sort of dynamic portfolio of the best of what you can do.

One takeaway from my friend was that a lot of opportunities arise from word-of-mouth interpersonal stuff: when people think of you as a writer, they are more likely to suggest your name to publications that may be looking for writers (which is why having an established presence can be so useful).

I don't have platform specific advice unfortunately.