I have the most minmaxed memory of anyone I know.

I can’t remember faces. Names. Barely remember people. Events? Psssh. My coats go missing. Jackets, hats, scarves, you bet I need to attach stuff to myself and keep a gruesomely detailed calendar.

But in school, I could remember concepts really well. Not individual facts, mind you, but concepts. So I had to learn in this sort of concept-first way to “guess” what the individual facts were. I don’t remember the name of the dinner I ate last night but I knew stats geometrically/sum-ly enough to re-guess the formulas I needed to know. History classes definitely got weird with this minmax though.

Tbf I think this style is actually an emerging phenomenon. Salman Khan spoke of an “inventing math” type of learning, and 3 Blue 1 Brown and that one MIT prof forgot his name made a brilliant repetoire for geometrically/conceptually training linear algebra. Makes me wonder what pedagogy will be like in two or four decades. Hopeful c:

A brave, vulnerably nuanced answer. Suspicious… what are you planning?

Sure, but GPL would prevent the Chrome tracking addons and other pleasant closed-source paraphernalia (the difference between Chrome and Chromium)

What percentage of scrutiny should we follow? [1]

Eigenvector. [2]

[1]: Reinhardt, W. (2012). On the trustworthiness of numbers. Cambridge University Press.

[2]: Paper, M. (2022). Station of play, fifth of its variant. Antarctic Publishing. https://jstor.org/stable/12345-paywalled

Yeah, you’re completely right. Microsoft Teams refers to multiple communications platforms, not just one. Wikipedia and Microsoft themselves made the same mistake as OP here. Hope you can help!

( ¬_¬)

When it comes to installing stuff, I’m very trigger-happy. So, from experience…

Installing stuff on Windows (safely)

• Hope it’s on Chocolatey (choco install)
• If not, search for the website online
• Scroll past the AI slop and suspicious Softonic downloads
• Click the website
• Find the correct download button
• Download
• Scan with MalwareBytes (don’t want an STI)
• Run setup.exe
• Verify PATH and wanted feature set
• I do not want to bundle Candy Crush or McAfee
• skim the Privacy Policy to see if they’ll grind my bones to dust
• Install Microsoft C++ Redistributable 2014-2018 (wtf? I already have 4 of these)
• Wait
• Sort the installation shortcuts into my folders

Installing stuff on Linux (safely)

• paru some_software
• If on AUR, skim PKGBUILD
• If not packaged at all (rare), git clone it and either skim the install.sh or Makefile
• Done

Sometimes friends, in their curiosity, come up to me and ask me, Jordan Belfort-style, “Sell me this pen Linux.” Why do I like it so much, they wonder?

And I always tell them:

"Linux is like… the vegan OS. (bear with me) Mac and Windows people don’t really care about OSes. People who switch to Linux either find they couldn’t be assed to deal with it, or they love it, and those who love it love it. Then they always tell people lol.

A good thing though: because everyone’s such an opinionated nerd, the lateral set of problems you run into won’t be ‘solved’ by random Microsoft Forums /sfc scannows or arcane regedits, but by a nut who debugged the entire thing 30 minutes after the bug came to exist to find a workaround. True story.

Buuuut Linux is more of a lateral movement in terms of problems, it’s just a tool after all. You solve Microsoft Recall and start menu ads but run into new but tiny annoyances. I find Linux problems easier to fix than Windows ones because of the nerd army thing but if your Windows setup works for you, it works and that’s really all that’s important. If you do start Linuxing though you’ll learn a lot just by osmosis."

And they usually laugh and decide to keep their routines in place. Don’t hate me vegans.

I use Firefox everywhere else, but for my Android I’m on Brave.

Sure, adblock and tab grouping is a plus but my main reason I use it (i.e. over Firefox) is because of memory. When I have six FF tabs open, my Samsung model shoots at least three down the moment I enter another activity or open a new tab. They survive on Brave.

I’d still use Brave on iOS devices too – as another commenter said, it’s a webkit reskin but at least it’s got good Adblock.

Wow, really interesting take! Made me realize…

Wow. I’m the baddie.

I’ve done my fair share of admit “AI bad, Twitter bad” and felt that shift towards cynicism, I admit – but 'til now I couldn’t see my own hand in the subject. I’d worked hard over the years to avoid the more overt frustrator communities like r/facepalm, but as much as I’d like to presume… I’m clearly not doing so much better after all.

That ambient cynicism… I still perpetuated it, I still wrote those kneejerk comments, I still went on the preordained in-group spiel of valuelessnesses.

It’s so easy to insult the things you mentioned, to partake in the “I Want to be Agreeable and Get Points” mindset and dunk. But it’s precluding our ability to experience the things you mentioned in para #4. I want more of para #4 in my life… I’ll need to think things differently.

Idk. Thanks for the meaningful substance. :p