I don’t know about how “normal” that might be but you’re feelings are valid. You also can’t stop progress. People are hardwired to make crazy new stuff and we’re really good at it.

But just because it exists doesn’t mean you have to use it. You can live a rich, full life even living like the Amish or other in low tech environments. The Mininites (like the amish but with phones and cars and computers) only adopt technology that benefits them and thier community. They live more primitively than most of the global north mostly for religious reasons, but there is wisdom in focusing on gizmos, gadgets, and software that improve your life in some way and ignoring what doesn’t.

I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

I think a better title for this question might be “What issue do you feel strongly about but have weak arguments for and can only tolerate agreement with your position about?”

Wikipedia says the sportage was a Mazda with kia branding back then. Which probably explains why I only ever had electrical problems that weren’t from unrepaired damage.

A ten year old 1995 Kia Sportage. All sorts of electrical problems, the four wheel drive didn’t work and I could never figure out why.

I will say the engine was surprisingly durable. I got it stuck in the mud and a friend of a friend tried to help get it unstuck by trying to drive it out, but only managed to get it stuck deeper and cracked the block. I had to add new coolant every day, but I drove that car gor another 6 months with a cracked block and only had to spend a few minutes trying to coax the engine to start when it was cold.

Pro tip: Never buy the first year of any car, even used.

Well yes, but also no. Meta fired those folks because they were using their lunch stipend provided by meta for things other than lunch. Petty, given how much they were paying the employees, but almost certainly a breach of contract on the employee’s part.

Meta is probably trying to do layoffs without paying layoff costs or taking the stock hit layoffs can cause. Which is still capitalist AF by any measure, lol. For fans of watching what kind of shit the oligarchy is trying now, Meta is definitely one to keep an eye on. Mark Zuckerberg has been moving very conservative very quickly lately.

Capitalists also say “You’ll own nothing and be happy”, the part they leave out is that it’s because you will rent every from them. In filthy socialism, the state holds everything in trust for the people and nobody makes any profits from ownership (the true power of capital).

The short answer is because autism is different from sexuality and the same system that works for one will not work for the other.

I would actually caution against embracing any label as part of your identity because as you have observed the autism experience is universally different. So too is the gay or lesbian or transgender experience. These are words we use to describe aspects of ourselves, but too often come to define us instead and enable exclusionary behavior such as gatekeeping identity or depening isolation for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into a label.

Kamala will probably win the popular vote, but Trump will take the presidency either through a technical, electoral college win, or a supreme court decision.

If Kamala somehow wins the popular vote and the electoral college, expect more violence. Probably large scale organized violence like we saw in 2021, but also increases in mass shootings and hate crimes. Unless she wins by a landslide (which is very unlikely) the supreme court will likely be involved and the process will drag on into at least January, if not longer. The court will probably find or invent a legal position that gives Trump the presidency anyway.

No matter who is president, Americans living in red states are fucked and any Palestinians living in Gaza are probably going to be killed.

A Trump presidency would be bad for every American and every person living where the US has influence. If the Republicans also take control of congress when they elect Trump, it’s probable that would be the end of the United States as we know it. Trump dismantled a lot of important parts of the administrative state that keeps the gears of government turning during his first presidency. A second round in office, with the other two branches in his pocket, would give him the chance to completely gut the institutions of the united states until the presidency controls everything at the national level.

We would probably see a national abortion ban, a ban on transgender care for adults and minors, the gutting of civil rights protections, most government services privatized, the destruction of countless government agencies and a purge of anyone who might object to any of that.

A Harris presidency would stall some of the efforts of the fascist takeover of the United States but not even a majority of those efforts. Republican controlled states would go into overdrive with their destabilizing agendas. Life will become a lot worse for anyone who isn’t a cishet white man living but has the misfortune of living in Maga country.

The good news is regardless of the outcome Trump won’t be involved in the 2028 presidential election, if we have one. He’s old enough and senile enough that he won’t be in any shape to govern by then so at least we get some new horrors to look forward to.

Yes, but also no.

More users would be great for the fediverse, in theory. Right now Lemmy (and Mastodon) can attribute a lot of their users to people unhappy with Reddit Inc. (or X) in some way. Throwing more unhappy people into the user base would probably not lead to good outcomes.

Personally I think Lemmy and Mastodon will never get the critical mass of users needed to maintain healthy communities because the only thing they have to offer is a less bad clone of an existing network.

X is bad because a malignant political demagogue is actively destroying what most people liked about Twitter. Reddit is bad because reddit inc. cares more about profit more than the needs of the user base. But the platforms they created and/or operate aren’t designed with a federated model in mind.

If the fediverse is ever going to move out of the technically savvy, early adopter nerds phase I think it’s only going to do that through something new and better than what already exists.

I couldn’t tell you specifically why, but I would question the value of such a project. Project 2025 undermines the foundations of the United States and moves the US towards authoritarianism.

Red versus Blue was an entertaining web series, but not an effective system of governance. Things like project 2025 are symptoms of a deeper sickness in the United States. Democrats shouldn’t be playing the same game as fascists, once you play by their rules, you’ve already lost.

The United States is an Oligarchy, the will of the people is almost entirely eclipsed by the interests of capital. Democrats don’t need their own project 2025, the people need representation in government regardless of what color flag their elected officials fly.

Animal populations have been dwindling for years while the human population soars. Perhaps all those humans who were animals have been ranking up lately?

Because the first time I read it I was a poor and stupid teenager slowly being pulled into an alt-right pipeline. After I figured that out I reread it with a more critical lens for closure.

“Nuh uh, it was the illegal immigrants we didn’t kill with the razor wire”, Ken Paxton after Harris wins Texas, probably.

I’ve read it twice, and I agree. The plot amounts to spoiled, rich children take their ball and go home because they’re mad the poors won’t let them strip the world of resources for personal gain. The author makes it clear throughout the text that Dagny, Hank, and Galt are the heros for fucking off to larp as robber barons in the 1880’s.

As a philosophic text objectivism is naive at best and a cynical justification for authoritarianism at its worst.

Oligarchs usually don’t have to.

Ominous.

Validation is one of the things on maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s essential for people to feel belonging and connection with other humans. We’re hardwired for it and the lack of it leads to poor outcomes almost always.

Social media is not a good source of validation. If social media were limited to just the people you knew and communicated with at least semi-regularly it would be very useful for receiving validation. However once you branch out to people you don’t know, healthy validation becomes more difficult. It also introduces a number of unhelpful facsimiles of validation (parasocial relationships, internet points).

100,000 likes/views/upvotes/retweets does not replace respect and acceptance from your peers for your emotional wellbeing, it’s not even a good substitute.

No social media platform has figured it out yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to build one that could be a good source of validation. It’s unlikely though so long as roi is important to the people that build social networks.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

That’s not a retrofit either. With a multi tool those can be removed with a few bolts. The ones on that bench are single mold cast iron. You’d need an angle grinder to remove those, not that any law abiding good citizen would.

So dumb. They could have spent the extra money helping the people they don’t want sleeping on benches not sleep on benches. Most people probably agree, just not in their backyard or with their tax dollars. The amount of work they’re willing to put in not to help someone is absolutely astounding.