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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.

    In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.


  • Alternatively: people have gone out of their way to foster a space where LGBTQIA+ people feel comfortable. In a world full of heteronormativity, this is a bubble where they can truly be themselves. It’s one of the few places where a gay dude can flirt with another dude, without the fear of being punched in the mouth just for being gay.

    And then a straight guy walks into the gay bar, and starts a fight when another dude tries to flirt with him. He starts ranting about how it’s not okay to assume he’s gay, and that he feels oppressed for being straight. He wants the heteronormativity to extend even into LGBTQIA+ spaces, despite the fact that he could go to literally any other bar in town and not have this issue. Instead, he has chosen to make a scene at the gay bar, because he’s upset it’s a gay bar.



  • You got a few downvotes, but you’re not wrong. Another issue is if you have tags for everything except being straight, then it sort of implies that being straight is the default “normal” option, and everyone else has to go out of their way to designate themselves as not normal. It’s something that should be left up to the users to choose, instead of having a default.

    Sort of like if you had race tags for everything except “white”, it would imply that being white was the expected norm, and everyone else has to mark themselves as outside the norm. Or for a more forced-binary example, what if a game had a “woman” tag, but no other gender tags? It would heavily imply that the expected default is “man”, and every woman (or really anyone who doesn’t explicitly identify as a man) has to self-select.

    That being said, it’s a queer game made by queer devs for queer people. They can do whatever the hell they want with it. Not every space is meant for straight people; Queer people have often been required to go out of their way to form their own communities and spaces to avoid judgement from straight people. Demanding a “straight” tag feels a little like a straight dudebro walking into a gay bar and getting pissed when dudes flirt with him. No dudebro, you’re the one who is wrong here, because you have literally every other bar in town to go to instead. You don’t need to encroach on the gay bar, because it’s likely the only place gay people have that is truly “their” place.


  • The time sink is honestly the biggest part. At least when you’re doing laundry at home, you can do other things while you wait on the laundry. At a laundromat, there’s not much to do except maybe bring an iPad or e-reader. Once you’re done folding your current load of laundry, you’re just kind of stuck waiting for the next load to be done.

    It always feels a little bit like when you show up 2 hours early for your flight, but then there’s no line at security and you get to your terminal in like 5 minutes. There’s nothing to do except wait. At least at home, you could go hop on your computer and get some work done, get some other cleaning done, or boot up a game console.


  • The unfortunate part is that Nintendo is likely going to win it. It’s a Japanese company, in Japanese court, and the courts are hilariously biased in favor of Japanese companies. Nintendo has literally never lost a lawsuit in Japan against a foreign defendant, because the Japanese courts are set up to trust Japanese claimants more than foreigners by default.

    Japan has a lot of cute media and a reputation for being polite, but the harsh reality is that the country is one of the most racist in the world. They get away with it because the culture is built upon being polite. But under that polite exterior, there is a lot of overt racism. Japan is one of the most homogenous populations in the world, with 99.8% of the population being native Japanese. That remaining 0.2% includes all of the tourists, visa holders, immigrants, half-Japanese children, etc… Japan has a saying, which roughly translates to “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In a society that is focused on blending in, immigrants stick out.

    Imagine how bad the White Power rhetoric would be if America were 99.8% white, and that other 0.2% (not 2%. Two tenths of 1%) of non-white people included tourists, immigrants, and naturalized citizens. In a packed 20,000 person stadium, that would only be 40 non-white people in the crowd.




  • I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.

    They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.


  • Tankie is a sort of derogatory term for people who whitewash and cover up the horrors of communism.

    There was a rebellion in the Soviet Union. The SU responded by rolling tanks into town and violently busting it. This put two sides of communism at odds; On one hand, there was the plight of the working class (the rebellion) and then on the other there were the actions of the people in control (the tanks). Tankies are the “communism has only ever helped people, you’re just listening to capitalist propaganda” folks who decided to side with the tanks, instead of siding with the working class. It’s sort of like calling someone a fake communist, [insert “No True Scotsman fallacy” argument from a tankie below], because a “real” communist would side with the working class.

    You see it a lot on Lemmy because many instances have some major communist lean. After all, the “anyone can run their own instance and be in charge. No centralized instances, if you don’t like the mods you can just change instances” concept of the Fediverse jives very well with communist ideals. For instance, the “ml” in lemmy.ml is meant to stand for “Maoist/Leninist”. And that means the entire communist spectrum is on display; From both the more moderate “yeah communism has some cool parts but was also responsible for some major humanitarian crises” to the more extreme “those crises [were caused by individuals, not by the political system]/[never actually happened at all. They’re lies made up by capitalists to deter people from supporting communism!] Communism never actually hurt anyone.”


  • Yeah, booting from USB is something you see a lot in the data security and/or privacy-oriented circles. Because many USB boot drives are designed to be volatile, meaning nothing about the OS is actually stored on the drive. So you can nuke the whole OS just by unplugging the drive.

    Basically every (smart) drug dealer who orders their supplies on Tor uses a USB drive OS, so if the cops ever bust down their door they can just yank the USB and destroy all evidence of their online orders.

    But it can also be useful for test-driving a particular repo. If you ever manage to fuck things up royally, you’re just one reboot away from a fresh start.





  • Yeah, the issue was with Windows doing funky things with GRUB during an update. GRUB is a popular bootloader, which detects which OSes you have installed, and presents them in a menu. But Windows has been setting Windows Bootloader to run instead of GRUB when it updates. And Windows’ Bootloader doesn’t automatically detect Linux installs. If you use your BIOS to choose your OS (instead of using GRUB) you’re fine.

    Even then, the fix is relatively simple in most cases. It’s just running a command in Windows’ Command Prompt, (the specific command is a little bit different depending on your specific distro) to re-enable GRUB after the update disables it.


  • Warning: You basically get no time off. Even when you’re off, you’re expected to be on-call. And no, you’re not paid extra for that.

    With the rise of computers, railroad scheduling got precise. It eventually reached a point where railroad companies began cutting workers, because they were able to bounce one conductor from train to train the same way airlines bounce pilots from one flight to the next. They cut so many workers that it got to the point where a single sick person can bring the entire system to a screeching halt. Instead of actually keeping enough people on the roster to actually fill their needs, they just started implementing increasingly strict attendance policies, to the point that railroad workers have basically zero time off.

    This led to the 2022 strike, where railroad workers were eventually allowed one day of PTO per year. They’re either working or on call for the other 364 days.


  • The most common reason to get a new number is because you were the victim of identity theft. The gross part is that getting a new SSN doesn’t actually remove your old SSN. It just ties your new SSN to your old one; You can use either one interchangeably, because the new one just automatically routes back to the old one. This means there are now two numbers that can be used to steal your identity, instead of just one. And it doesn’t prevent the people who already have your old number from continuing to use it.




  • I could fit 90% of my survival-related stuff into a 5 gallon Home Depot bucket in the trunk of my car. I know this for a fact, because I literally have a 5 gallon bucket full of survival gear in the trunk of my car right now, (because I’m going camping this weekend, not because I’m a crazy prepper…) It holds everything I need, except for my sleeping stuff and clothes, which just get thrown into a duffle.

    It wouldn’t cover consumables like food or water, but it would at least be enough to survive in relative comfort. It’s really just a matter of how off-the-grid you want to be. I have a small saw and hatchet for making firewood. A wood burning stove for cooking and heat. The 5 gallon bucket actually doubles as a camp toilet, (I use compostable bags and toilet gel,) and a few other essentials like cutlery, a mess kit, cordage, etc.

    As for living like you’re always ready to vanish, it can be a lifestyle choice, but is often done out of necessity or survival instead. Victims of abuse, for instance, often learn to pack light and avoid buying things. So if their abuser ever finds them, they can ghost in less than a day.