Ask Lemmy

Cannabis is fun and has some medical benefits, like if you're a cancer patient trying to stimulate your appetite, but it also genuinely does lower your IQ.

Chrome is a browser. Google is a website. They are not the same. It flabbergasts me anytime I find out that someone I know doesn't know what a browser is.

That it's actually totally possible for most people to live without a car.

That a whole foods plant-based diet is healthier and better the environment and yet people do their utmost to refuse to learn more about it.

If the point of getting a job is so that you can eventually retire one day, and you know what you want to do when you retire, you should start doing what you want to do now while you can enjoy it.

Similarly, If you feel like the place you were born in makes you unhappy, move to a different place. There are so many places.

That if you are not paying for a product, you are the product. If a product you love is free, and/or you use it because it's free, think of what you are paying for it with.

Where the turn indicator lever is, and how to use it.

That we'd all be better off if we accepted our own fallibility. That we are not perfect little robots, and as a result more tolerance and forgiveness in the world is necessary.

Spelling, punctuation, and the use of contractions. The part that really sells the irritation factor is when they try to say they’re correct by making up some definition for what they said or claiming “common usage”. I guess it’s because people don’t really read much anymore. Reading someone else’s words that have been carefully edited, corrected into good sentence structure, and spellchecked can really help get it your own head.

They place the burden on the reader to decipher their made-up vocabulary. It really isn’t too awful, it’s just that people have to have read the correct way something is used yet insist on not changing.

That Israel is committing a genocide, and seemingly the majority of people don’t care or worse believe propaganda or dehumanise a whole population of people.

Also, when people defend massive corporations and don’t see the negative impact they have on industries.

Russia will not stop warring if Ukraine surrenders. Russia's war will stretch to every corner of the earth.

The term is Lemmings, btw.
Because :

I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)#History

8% of 50 is 50% of 8

Put your dry erase markers in the holder basket thing CAP DOWN. jfc, the amount ruined, dried out markers could probably fill a landfill

We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

The original computer "AI" craze was started by "cybernetic systems" and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of "cyber-" that don't have anything in common with the original concept.

The original concept goes like this:

1. set a goal
2. perform an action
3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
4. If you are at your goal, you're done,
5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is "feedback" and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It's the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It's how autopilots autopilot.

The idea that "nobody could have predicted..." or "nobody responsible" is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

Didn't catch something "going on for years", maybe someone should check more often. "Crazy single individual causing a tragedy"? No, that's a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn't take care of before, didn't flag, and didn't stop in time.

"Nobody wants to work on our open source project" Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

That you should never use the same password for more than one site, especially some random Chinese eshop. I don't get why people refuse to use password managers, ffs...

*lemmings

Probably people who yell at cyclists for following traffic laws, bonus points for them also violating said laws without repercussion.

stronger products need less advertising, so an over-advertised product is likely inferior.

That the start menu has a search bar. You would think that everyone would know this after almost 2 decades, but too many people still navigate through their computers like it's 1998.

Due process. Freaking due process. Or the scientific method or whatever you want to call it.

What do I mean to be implied by saying this? Suppose you encounter a situation where accusations are thrown around. Normally this starts by asking what the claim is before talking further about what is wrong with the action in question plus what separates it from hearsay. You might consult testimony/proofs/cross-examination for this, with some of this being more defining/damning than others. Things like you'd see in 12 Angry Men, like "you just said X when you're now saying Y", "what makes this indication of what happened, inarguable enough to not be found within reasonable doubt", and "you have all this testimony on one hand and the physical remnants telling us another thing".

In short, it's supposed to be instinctual that what people want to do is to mark the truth via scrutiny when it would otherwise blend in with everything else.

Alright, so you might be asking what I mean when I say this as my answer. The pen being mightier than the sword is not an idiom that anyone should have to say, but seldom has someone here ever had any issue randomly walking up to a crowd and making damning remarks about someone they don't like and instantly denting another individual in ways that should matter. Relatedly, someone might have what they insist is solid indication of something but isn't for the very fact that it's arguable and leaves room for doubt.

I've seen an individual in particular do this, they go up to people and say "this person is a pedo", they then go up to another crowd, same thing, they say "this person is a pedo". Usually it has some super long elaboration too, complete with a mixture of things without solid indicators, things with no indicators, and actions which were already compensated for years ago. People in charge typically know better, but the common people have this idea in their mind that "this is a damning claim, logically it wouldn't exist for no reason", like have you ever seen a spiteful ex before? I myself am an arguable victim of this, chronically on numerous occasions, in all spheres of life, being unable to do so much as engage in hobbies without the paparazzi wannabe we know as the human populace chiming in. Sometimes they'll even pull the "well then prove the rumors are false" card which requires that you can prove a negative (which would make it not a negative in the first place). The social equivalent of chopping down trees so that I have to walk over them while walking on a path, hoping one day maybe a branch will jab me or something.

One day a few of us asked about this and the response every time was "it's human nature to forego due process if someone can sense due process would be dishonorable", and that was one of the last straws that led to my misanthropy and the fact that, in a profound way, I detest the very essence of humanity, and why I often contrast neurodivergence with human nature, because it's often those of us who are neurodivergent who are considered as having the lesser states of mind. I beg to differ, we're not the ones who are showing how profoundly self-defeating we are. One might say I've even self-reflected months at a time just to contemplate if maybe I was the asshole. I'm sure I am the asshole sometimes, but that doesn't mean a learned person cannot see the holes. And people wonder why I feel sorry for the ultra stigmatized.