I was a little curious myself, so I found an article about it.

I admit that I don’t know exactly how a freezer works, but my impression is that the cold temperatures not only make it more difficult for the freezer to run, but apparently regardless of if it’s running they can damage the insulation.

So I suppose that even if you do disconnect the power, the damage to the insulation will cause more work for the compressor, which will increase its energy costs and cause more strain for the part.

Knowing that, if it was me, I’d probably bring the freezer in for the winter. Although I suppose if you want to keep your food on your balcony you could swap the freezer for any insulated cooler. The winter is pretty long here though, so I guess I’d just find a more permanent home for the freezer if I could

I can’t speak to public domain…

Commenter admits that it isn’t public domain. So Wikipedia isn’t a great suggestion for this answer, although I would argue that it is indeed “very valuable or worth archiving”

Wikipedia is under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License which again, isn’t public domain. However it is a largely permissible license which allows people to do close to whatever they’d like with the material - which some people might find similarity with the public domain if they don’t know how the licensing works.

I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager.

I thought that too, but it turns out I just got fat

I think it depends on what you may or may not have an opinion about.

Extreme example: if you don’t have an opinion about nazis, you might be a nazi

There’s a couple things at play here when you talk to people online.

Ultimately, there’s a difference between feeling attacked and being attacked. Both are common in online discussions.

Why do people attack people?

The anonymity and distance of the internet makes it easier for people to share strong opinions - for better or worse. There’s a certain amount of psychology around the design of social media that pushes people towards confrontation.

Sometimes aggression is the default state for people. Depending on your world view that might be either sad or necessary.

That said, I believe there’s a difference between a justified attack and an unjustified one. If someone is spreading hate, we all owe it to the community to fuck that person up with our words. If someone shares a harmless opinion then there isn’t much call for a personal attack.

Why do I feel attacked?

If you feel attacked on the internet, there’s ultimately two possibilities: you’re being attacked or you’re mistaken. For the sake of this section, let’s say you’re mistaken.

Non-verbal communication is an essential part of communication between humans, and is something that’s hard to replicate in text. Ultimately, our non-verbal cues set an expected tone.

Sometimes when writing we recognize this and use a tonal indicator to set expectations. Emoji 🙄, gestures *rolls eyes* and, appending flags /s are all ways that we might set tone. These three examples all indicate “sarcasm” which for many people seems to be the default way to express themselves.

Sarcasm in particular is problematic because it often inverts the meaning of what was said. The phrase, “oh yeah, brilliant idea” has opposite interpretations if you’re being sarcastic. Sometimes the writer assumes the reader will know what they intended because they were feeling sarcastic when they typed it. Of course, as a reader we have no way of knowing what the writer’s feelings were at the time of writing.

Another element at play here is that a good deal of conversation on the internet is debate. Some people equate disagreement with condemnation, so if your feelings are hurt by that it’s common to lash out. Many debates on the internet start civilly enough and then deteriorate to name calling and cursing in short order. It’s wise to try to be the bigger person and assume no malice, because once it gets out it’s hard to put back.

Statistics and Bias

You probably had the right idea that only about 1% of users are active commenters. Similar to that, there’s also a phenomenon where the most vocal (and often inflammatory) users represent a similarly small portion of the group.

Our brains are evolved for survival, so they pay special attention to negative stimuli. Basically, they’re always looking for trouble, and if you’re looking for trouble you’re likely to find it.

What this ultimately means is that we remember the bad things far more memorably than the good things. It also means that even if a small percentage of people are attacking others, because they dominate the conversation we start to believe that everyone carries that opinion. But as you point out, 99% of users aren’t even commenting, so we really don’t have a good grasp on what the larger population is like.

It also means that if you exercise your block list, you don’t have to put in too much work to remove the most hateful people from your feed.

Closing

Anyway, I think you have the right idea. It sounds like you don’t go looking for fights.

I try to keep a similar philosophy. If I disagree with someone then I’ll seek to empathize or educate. However, if someone is vocal about my erasure or directing hate and violence towards people then I’ll let them have it. I figure those people are looking for trouble and by golly I’ll give it to them - it’s always morally correct to punch a nazi.

Coolio, thanks for the detailed reply

I’ve got lots of new stuff to check out now!

Oh sure, I don’t disagree with that.

But I also don’t think a group of teenage soccer players are the people who deserve to receive extrajudicial violence

Sounds like you need an ice cream eating partner.

I volunteer as tribute

Is that why the back lot of the hospital smells so enticing?

Reading articles like this you always want to be careful. People are often pretty quick to pick sides when it’s about whether or not a mob was justified.

There’s a genocide being perpetrated by Israel, but not all jews are Israeli, and even if they were you can’t really hold individuals abroad culpable for the sins of their government.

So this mob is racially motivated and engaged in terrorism - what else do you call turning an armed mob loose on a bunch of teenagers? This will surely come back to say that Palestine supporters are terrorists, and now you’re right back to lumping everyone into a group.

There would be a certain amount of irony that goes with racially profiling a racist mob. Too bad that means lumping a whole people in with the shitheels who’d be prepared to threaten kids with knives

Yes, because surely all adults know better, that’s why they so frequently swallow propaganda and vote against their own interests.

It’s controversial and it has its own problems with enforcement, but it often seems like there should be some kind of civics and media literacy test before voting. Of course, whoever is administering the test is going to have their own biases and agendas, so it’s no magic bullet solution.

There’s a vast gulf in maturity between children at different ages, and everyone develops at their own pace. Some thirteen year olds are more mature than many eighteen year olds, and some forty year olds needed more time to cook but they still graduated anyway.

This seems to be about oppressing women while uplifting the creepiest sort of men.

To give the maximum benefit of the doubt (which frankly, I don’t think they deserve), there’s evidence to suggest that birth defects become more likely as the mother gets older. I’ve always understood that to happen in women of a more advanced age though, 30 is too young to be a cutoff.

Also, women can’t marry older than 25? What kind of bass ackwards handmaid’s tale bullshit is that? If you want to have a family I guess you’ve got to hitch your wagon to any horse you can get your hands on. They’re so fortunate though that the law doesn’t apply to men, so they’ll have plenty of creepy fifty year old dudes to choose from.

I think as a rule we should start sterilizing politicians who endorse sterilization. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Of course, a hysterectomy is quite an invasive procedure compared to a vasectomy, so maybe in the interest of equitability we should begin with castration.

Anyway, this kind of rhetoric isn’t really for women - they just happen to be the ones affected by it. For the men that this appeals to, they’re probably believe they’re more likely to attract a virginal beauty if they start removing women’s options. It’s truly abhorrent.

The Tao of Pooh is awesome. I had a similar experience to you when reading it, where I realized that it was already pretty close to my philosophy.

The Te of Piglet is also there if you want some more reading through a western lens, but really the Tao of Pooh is all you need to get yourself thinking

I kind of hate to say it because I’m not a big fan of it, but video content seems to have the widest appeal.

I don’t know that you’ll ever be able to get to a single absolutely clear method though. People have different learning styles. For example, I prefer reading a book by text, but I just can’t absorb an audiobook. Meanwhile I have several friends who can’t focus well enough to sit through a dense book and can retain the whole thing through audio.

Anyway, videos check a lot of boxes that other formats miss. For example, so much of our communication relies on non-verbal cues which are missing entirely from books. While an audiobook might capture the tone, you still miss the body language.

Another advantage to videos is that depending on the tutorial, it can be both visual and experiential. A step-by-step video recipe is more accessible for new cooks who might not know what “mix until smooth” actually looks like.

So why don’t I like videos? Well, to use the cooking example again, I already know how to cook. I don’t actually need step-by-step guides, and usually I just need to refer back to the ingredients or a single step. It can be difficult or time consuming to scroll back through a video and find the exact right spot. My personal peeve is all these tiktok videos that get shared to me showing a recipe, where each ingredient flashes once for a half second, and if I miss it I have to let the whole video loop to find it again.

So anyway for broad appeal and for introduction to a subject, I think videos are probably the most enjoyed format. For a deeper dive or a reference it’s got to be text for me.

I was in a thread the other day about what things make us feel stupid, and for me it was front end development. Saying it out loud made me realize that I should probably take another kick at the can, and I’m starting on React today.

Software’s one of those tricky things where sometimes you never feel like you’re very good at. Every thing you learn makes you realize there’s more to learn, and as you become more knowledgeable sometimes you might actually feel less knowledgeable. The Imposter Syndrome kicks many a new developer’s ass, so try to bear in mind that you probably know way more about software than before you started, and now you have about a year’s experience to boot!

Good luck to you!

Oh hey, that’s really cool! A lot of the music I like to sing along to frankly isn’t popular enough to get the karaoke treatment

How do you get started learning about that? Do you need a high quality source with a separate vocal track, or can you somehow isolate the vocals from a simple rip?

Super cool hobby, good luck to you

Oh yeah, and if you want any online services, you’ll want to look up what those cost. I don’t know if they offer a family discount for multiple accounts

I guess ultimately it depends on what kind of games your family likes

As you mention, party games you only need one. If your family’s into single player or portables then each person needs one

How is it affordable? Well, it isn’t really. Although I guess a switch probably retails for about half the cost of a PS5

It’s funny though, if you compare it to other consoles, I think people are far less likely to buy an Xbox or Playstation for each family member. And yet, people would do that for the gameboy and DS without batting an eye. The switch is trying to be everything, for better or worse.

When we got ours, we were pretty content having just one and then playing party games or taking turns on single player games. Sooner or later though, we had to get another so we could play pokemon together. Which is a shame because my interest in pokemon seems to have suddenly fallen off a cliff and now my switch is collecting dust

So I guess all that to say: your mileage may vary

How do you know they’re a clown if they’re naked?

They might just be a juggalo

I heard a report recently that suggested that Microsoft Recall (the program to take a screenshot of your PC every few seconds to process in AI at huge ecological damage for dubious benefit to the user) is an unlisted dependency for the file explorer.

What that means is if you somehow manage to remove Recall entirely, then you won’t be able to view your files.

And sure, they’ll probably fix that. And they’ll probably also include a “disable AI” checkbox hidden eight levels deep in the control panel to give the user a small sense of control over their own machine - which will turn itself back on with each update because Windows

I don’t think you’ll be able to actually remove AI from Windows. At least, not easily, and not permanently. Your plan to switch to Linux seems like it’ll be less headache in the long run