I get what you’re trying to say. But the image OP displayed is actually propaganda. I get the feeling a lot of people don’t know what propaganda means and think it’s only something a government does to make you a gungho patriot.

If the argument, info, message, whatever form of communication being delivered to you, is designed to appeal to your emotions, or sway your opinion, even if it contains some mote of truth, it’s propaganda. Smokey the Bear is propaganda. To guilt you into not starting forest fires. It’s for a decent cause, but it’s no less a mascot designed to alter the behaviour of the populace.

CW: suicide and depression

Two years ago, I was suffering from the worst depression I’ve ever had. It’s chronic. I am often suicidal. But the feelings still range in grey, almost never the far extremes. I’m like a battery constantly bouncing between 10% and 50% charged.

But some time in the summer, it was at 1-5%. I was barely hanging on. Some days I nearly broke and I actively started looking for ways to off myself.

Thankfully, I’d worked on building an action plan for the different stages of severity in my depression. One of the actions I was obligated (to myself) to do was ask for help. But even in my 30s, I never really learned how. I’d almost rather chew my arm off than ask someone to help me, with anything. And even if I really needed help I never know how to ask for it, or know what I need.

After some meditation, I realized I just wanted comforting words from people who cared. So I sent a message to my friend group, told them what I was going through, and asked them to send me kind words in private, but like obviously how they truly feel, not just to stroke my ego. Be honest, be funny, if you care send me anything.

Crying just typing this out. The messages I received in reply… were everything. I got way more than I expected. Friends celebrated having me in their life. They called me funny names, like female goth Garfield. Some surprised me; one of my friends expressed that she thought I was so cool from the day she met me. My best friend’s was one of the best, it was just one line.

He said, “Happy you decided to let others be the kind of friend you would and have been for them.”

Our friends weren’t always curmudgeonly or stoic or anything, but in the aftermath of my request, people changed. Everyone started being much nicer to one another. We patched up old wounds. I’d say what happened was my friends started caring more for each other. It’s disgustingly cute. It melts my heart. My friends are the greatest people in the world. I’m furious that some people exist without friends like these. You deserve it as much as I do.

I know people really want to enjoy these games and I wish them luck. But…

I have thousands of other games I can play that don’t have invasive DRM. Enough I might never need to purchase another game in my lifetime if I felt like it. And I’m happy being away from Windows and their bullshit. It’s hardly even a sacrifice. But good luck to the hacker crackers.

Nothing is real. Nothing matters. There is no man in the clouds judging your goon session. There is no inherent meaning to our existence. So the only things that are real and the only things that matter are what you do.

Friend

I love when my own community decides my gender expression for me like we all share the same viewpoints and struggles. But a few people are going to reply ‘this is so me frfr’ and ‘I feel personally attacked’ so I get to feel even more alienated

I’m usually in the company of friends who hear me laugh out of nowhere and ask me to say what it was, thankfully. But I otherwise wouldn’t explain. It’s often a very mean joke at someone’s expense (mine included), dark, or absolutely terribly unfunny to everyone except me

All the time. It’s usually hard to explain, or it was incredibly inappropriate.

You’re simply not paying attention, because you don’t have to. Not to be harsh. I went from male to female and how I’m treated is night and day. You’ve never tried to see how the other side lives, and when you heard stories that went against your experiences you dismissed them like your mind is trying to do right now.

Why does it happen? Nurture. History. Patriarchy. I could blame a lot of things. It’s mostly that men never get treated the way they treat women.

Don’t have a cow, son

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Take the money and run

This person got so so close to the real answer as to why most software today sucks.

Money.

Capitalism.

Line go up - Forever.

It’s the systems we choose to live in, not the leaders who take advantage of them.

Really cool software has been coming out all the time for the last decade or so, and then the second it goes public and starts trading stocks, it immediately starts going south. A company, making cool stuff I love, goes public, and I know to immediately start grieving for its death. Money makes all creative endeavors so so much worse. And I truly believe software is a creative pursuit. It’s been hijacked by capitalists to automate every living being on this planet out of work. Right now the list of people truly put out on their ass for good by automation isn’t very big. But we’re accelerating very quickly to a future where nothing fun ever happens again. Useful, functional, problem solving software, from now until forever, will be made and used to kick your ass, stomp you into the dirt, and sell your stupid crying face to anybody who wants to purchase it. Then while we’re at it, it’ll take the things you love to do and do them for you. And then make you pay money just to see it.

If you want to see and participate in some of the most unique and amazing uses of software engineering in our time, there are so many open source projects that achieve incredible and fun things for absolutely $0

• Video Game Randomizers
  • And their decomp partners
• Mod Communities
• Free Digital Art Programs
• Open up Github, sort by most Starred projects, and just fuckin scroll until you can’t scroll anymore
  • And even this has been captured. Code made freely for everyone to use, instead being fed to machine learning bullshit. To what end? To fully replace the need for any human to ever write software ever again.

It’s endless. There are truly too many projects for me to list in one post. I’d spend weeks editing this comment, adding all the coolest things software has done for us and can do for us. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I am 100% confident society and its leaders will abuse the good will, passion, and creativity of many a programmer from now until the end of my life. It’ll do that to every profession. As long as we cling to the idea that we only do work to make profits, as long as the only way we can survive is by making money, this will be our fate.

Wanna dogpile onto this comment to add that we can’t even automate robots to mow lawns by themselves. The ones you can buy that do any part of the job well at all require GPS, and also require manual intervention or remote piloting for even getting the bot back to its charging station. I work for a corporation that automates machinery like this and sells it to the US government, which advertises its products as automated or crewless, but actually requires somebody at the helm of a software suite to manually adjust and operate the bots at any given moment during their operations. How the hell are people expecting cars and planes to automatically get you to your destination? Imagine your “crewless” vehicle being piloted by some dude in an office somewhere in your country instead of someone actually being at the wheel. Does that make any kind of sense? Would you trust the delay in instructions? What happens when your vehicle can’t receive any outside connections?

Some level of complex “Autonomous” everything, from now until the foreseeable future, will always have a human in the pilot seat. 100% automation is impossible for us right now with our current level of technology.

The reason is more than just that the last few % points of automating is the most difficult hurdle, though I really agree with that part. It’s that automation can’t account for improvising, adapting, innovating. Automation can’t do on-demand problem solving. Space probes on the Moon and Mars can’t unflip themselves when they get stuck. Programmed machines can only do what they’re programmed to do. We’re beyond anything somewhat complex getting 100% automated any time soon.

Accounting? Helpdesk support? Labor that is repetitive and doesn’t require much ingenuity will get automated fast.

Heavy machinery? Art? Transportation? Medical care? We’re 100+ years a way from completely unmanned complex tasks. People eat up the sci-fi marketing garbage without really interacting with or testing the claims being made.

Capitalism

Literally moved everything to Linux (Nobara) like 3 weeks ago and the only thing I can’t get to work is Bizhawk which I can easily get around. It’s insane how far Linux has come for gaming and whatnot.

Everyone I need to talk to is in my contacts. If you’re not in my contacts, my phone doesn’t even ring. You go straight to voicemail.

I was fine with phone calls when I was younger. Now it’s mostly spam robocalls or scammers or both. Nobody seems interested in solving those problems.

I’m reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It’s perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!

Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford

Your favorite album