Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m saying you should do your own research

    This is the calling card slogan of someone who’s bought into reality rejection…

    The educated world is built on a web of trust whereupon subject matter experts must necessarily yield to others when something is outside of their realm of expertise. I am a planetary scientist and geophysicist and spent nearly a decade studying. I am constantly learning things in my own field, and by no means do I have a full grasp on every detail. But I can call out BS when someone talks about orbital mechanics or earthquakes or whatever. I do not, however, know anything about the digestive tract of my cat and yield to the veterinarian who has spent their whole life becoming an expert on these sorts of things. I don’t argue with the vet that I’ve done my own research (watched a few youtube videos) and thus am qualified to disagree with them. Because objectively I know less than them on that subject and no cursory review will solve my ignorance.

    When rating the bias of news organizations, what qualifications do you have so that you can do your own research? Do you have fundamental knowledge of the journalistic process? Is the media source covering a topic you are a subject matter expert in? Or are you just lashing out because it doesn’t vibe with your worldview?



  • So, federated network advantages here: you can always modify your instance’s hosting code to patch this out, at least for the users on your instance.

    What you cannot do is prevent other federated instances from publishing the votes submitted to content on their instance. But if you’re accessing that content through your local instance, they can modify the upvote button to pop up a dialog saying something like: “The instance that hosts this content has elected to make usernames visible for upvote/downvote. Would you still like to vote?”

    Personally: In many ways I don’t mind. I’m on the internet with my real name. I don’t mind being accountable for my behaviour online. I might be a little more cautious about upvoting something controversial or NSFW, but largely it wouldn’t change my behaviour.





  • As a former slackware aficionado, I’d have to say that the general mood of the users and development team was super chill. Hell, the name slackware comes from “slack”, the goal of the Church of the SubGenius. The whole thing is a meme that’s been going steady for decades.

    I had the privilege of meeting Patrick and much of the core Slackware group at the KDE 4.0 release party. They are all awesome.

    I can expect that users that tolerate the Slackware style are also those that are pretty laid back to begin with. Probably they were happier people already, and using slackware just vibes with them.