1970, Jan 1st is better for this situation

I disagree that it would be as clear that people would become less isolated. I do agree that people would adapt to life without Internet; we were there once before, we can be there again. However, this dismisses the good the internet has done and neglects to account for the reasons it has turned out the way it has.

I think people would fall into tribalism offline as much as they do online. Maybe it would be regional and physical community based, and they would have more social interaction -in person-, but they would still fall into little insular pockets of one form or another. The cure is a variety of interactions with people of different mindsets, whether that is online or offline. But we, as people, don’t like that. We like the comfy communities where we can form an echochamber together.

Man Shellfish has lived rent free in my mind for over a decade

Underrated joke

Nah, they slap it in like this while living in an apartment so all the other tenents can hear them play the same song on repeat for 5 hours!

Darn Tough socks. Super durable, and lifetime warranty

Ok, but think of it in terms of normal start times vs needing to go in early, instead of the actual hour. If you usually start at 6:30 but had to go in for 6:00 for no reason other than a meeting that could have been an email, it sucks.

I used to have a 6:30 start time when I was younger, had an hour commute, and still had time for breakfast at home in the morning. It absolutely sucked and I hated it. Getting up for 8:30 start times still sucks if you’re used to 9:00 start times.

If I had to pick just one, it was probably Watership Down. But The Forever War, the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, and the Great Tree of Avalon series all were also formative in my tastes and viewpoints growing up. I was also a huge fan of the original Warriors cats books and the Dinoverse series.

Watership Down, though, that book opened so many windows for me.

I agree, without know how OP wants to customize, I’m assuming they want to customize the desktop GUI. If that’s the case, anything KDE will be a good starting place. They also implied they don’t mind if they mess something up, so the specs probably don’t matter for being the most resource efficient. It just needs to be hand-holdy enough to help get a little experience for them, then they can jump into a more hands on distro

I’m a huge fan of glass bottles because of their ease of cleaning and resilience to getting funky. The lid is the only place you have to be careful of, but that’s usually a lot easier to be mindful of

Zuko_thats_rough_buddy.png

I agree, you can get brand new DDR4 32gb at 3200MHz for like $50 when it’s on sale, $60 for DDR3 is insane

Oof, didn’t expect it right in my heart reading these quotes

Your uncle!

That is slightly different, and those are usually (heavily) discounted prices and not available at launch of a game.

Before the advent of LLMs it was a different playground. I agree that now it has poisoned search engines as well, but there are non-Google search engines that are slightly better at filtering those sorts of results.

I think it is an important distinction, still. A search engine will list a variety of results that you can select which ones you trust. It gives you more control over the information you ultimately ingest, allowing you to avoid sources you don’t trust.

If you use LLMs in conjunction with other tools, then it is just another tool in your toolbox and these downsides can be mitigated, I suppose. If you rely entirely on the LLM, though, it only compounds.

The difference is that a search engine result (before they started adding LLM results) will give you individual articles and pages with the information you’re looking up. You will get a lot of fake results, and sponsored articles that push certain viewpoints or agendas, but in theory you can find the sources for that information on those pages (I say in theory because not every article will list where the information was sourced from, but at the very least you can find the author’s name in most cases).

For the results from an LLM, you get an amalgamation of all that data spit out in a mix of verified and fake information altogether. It can hallucinate information, report fabrications as facts, and miss the context of what you’re asking entirely. (Yes, a search result can miss what you’re asking as well, but it’s usually more immediately evident). Depending on how it’s used, the longer the session goes on the more likely the information is going to be tailored to what it expects you want it to provide. If used simply for “what is the current exchange rate between country A and country B”, you might get the wrong answer but it probably is an isolated mistake.

If you start asking it for a second opinion, for it to appraise what you are saying and give you feedback, you’ll start to get answers further and further from impartiality and more and more in line with mimicking your own pattern of thinking.

I can certainly see situations to face the other way, and wouldn’t think twice if I got in an elevator and someone was facing away from the door. It just seems less of a social construct and more of just practicality.

Now, who gets to press the buttons in the elevator, and whether you should ask for someone to press it for you or ask them to move aside so you can press it, are definitely things I struggle with if there is a group of people getting on an elevator at the same time. (I usually just let that one go without me and wait for another one)

Not saying there is a wrong direction to face while riding an elevator (without further context), but it always just made sense to me to face the door you expect to open when the elevator gets to the floor you’re traveling to. Like, nothing stops you from facing sideways on a moving sidewalk, but facing the direction you intend to go when the ride is over is more convenient.

Maybe anymore Minecraft is different, but when it started it was about mining and crafting tools to mine more efficiently.

Terraria always evokes terrarium to me, which makes it feel like a whole little world, but also felt like it was more contained to me (from title alone).