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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

    It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

    Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

    A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.






  • For real. It’s an amazing game that just can’t be the same again once you know all its secrets.

    I bought it for two of my friends, and they both ended up hating it lol. I don’t blame them, but I think it’s very much to do with the mentality of how you approach the experience.

    One friend just got plain stuck and gave up. The other found it frustrating that they were doing the same thing several times over, and just wanted to rush as quickly as they could to make progress.

    Personally, I enjoyed the slow pace of discovery. I loved that feeling of being a true explorer, discoving facets of lost civilisation. Watching in melancholic awe as a world crumbled around me. Finding just a small piece of new information was always a joy, and made it feel worthwhile to get there, even if I’d done 90% of the journey before.

    Slowly getting richer in a game where the only currency is knowledge.




  • The findings here seem like a real stretch.

    Saying that people can “Accurately” identify names for adults but not children feels tenuous when they only answered correctly less than 25% of the time for children and slightly more than 25% for adults, among four options. That’s barely better than random chance.

    If there really even is any correlation between name and appearance, then as other people have said, this is likely due to factors of age, and popularity of different names at different times. The child group used children only from a narrow range of 9-12 whereas the adult group was broader, so it would be easier to see the influence of age in the adult group.

    I assumed those conducting the study would be very familiar with that bias and try to eliminate it by only using names that were equally popular at the same time as the person’s actual age for each question, but I couldn’t find that information.

    If we assume they DID try to eliminate generational popularity as a factor, there are still more plausible explanations IMO.

    For example, different names are going to be popular among different socioeconomic backgrounds - wealth, education, political leaning, geographic location of the parents will all affect name choice!

    So if there is any correlation at all, my personal conclusion would not be that the name determines who people grow up to be, but that someone’s physical appearance is influenced by their socioeconomic background, and that name also correlates with that background.

    So name is simply a predictor for what background someone grew up with, nothing more!



  • Google absolutely made a calculated decision when they decided to allow device manufacturers to fork AOSP and introduce closed-source modifications. If it wasn’t for that, I can’t imagine OEMs would have wanted to get on board, and so we wouldn’t have seen the huge adoption that happened, and Android might have become just another failed operating system.

    I do truly wish for a fully open-source “Linux on the phone” type experience, but what always kills that is apps, because companies just don’t make them unless the market share is there. Even Microsoft had to pull out after pumping so much money into Windows phone, and I think most of the reason was because they couldn’t incentivise developers to make apps enough.

    So I’m glad at least I can run Calyx, and have just a tiny bit more freedom while still keeping the apps I need, even if it’s nowhere near perfect.



  • Ah, awesome. I just read through your comment and that makes a lot of sense.

    I stand by my ideology, but your comment helps me appreciate the reality of that situation, and that if you are smoking or doing other non-alcohol things, you should probably keep that very much to yourself.

    From the perspective of an attendee who is going completely ‘cold turkey’ on everything, I can see how even the idea of someone else using different substances could be offensive, because it could feel like it undermines the effort they are putting in, and is confrontational that you get to have this other vice, while they are doing it ‘the hard way’

    I dont really agree with that perspective, and in some ways it seems toxic in its own right, but I can understand why people would feel that way.



  • I assume you’re asking the question on the basis of hypocrisy, I.e. “Is it hypocritical to smoke weed while you’re an AA member?”

    My take is that no, it wouldn’t be.

    People who are in AA are there because they struggle with alcohol addiction and they need community and support around that. And that’s why you’d also be there too. There’s nothing hypocritical about having other vices in your life aside from alcohol if those vices are not the source of your troubles. You can still attend in good faith for the right reasons.