I find myself using desktop Linux more than my mobile device, even on the couch with the family. Monitors on arms that can swing out of the way ftw. No cute advice for keyboards though. We have wireless ones around but I still use my wired Deck Legend on my lap. It’s an old mechanical keyboard that’s built like a tank, with the PCB literally mounted to a sheet of metal that is mounted inside the housing, lol.

It’s almost a shame, because smart phones are still absolutely amazing to me as far as the amount of scientific and technical advancement that can fit in the palm of your hand. But I look forward to the open options various parties are working on.

I’ll add in addition to the “not where I live” replies, I live in pretty textbook white suburban america and I believe I have never seen anything delivered to me or a neighbor or relative by a two-wheeled vehicle of any kind, even motorized. Every single time it is a private 4-seat passenger vehicle or larger.

It is different in other areas of course, like when visiting cities and other countries.

But damn are such vast swaths of suburban and rural america designed so specifically around cars. It would take forever to change even with a progressive culture & government. With the culture and government we have now, I will be stunned if I am not driving my own vehicle for the rest of my life, and I will not be surprised at all if it’s mostly ICE vehicles. I drive a well maintained 13 year old Mazda3 that gets 40mpg, so it’s not ideal versus more efficient and environmentally friendly types of transport, but at least it’s a more efficient use of the existing infrastructure than most americans.

Yeah, even from inside the US it seems more and more iffy to trust our tech giants even as a paying customer. I love reading the stories about groups and governments in Europe adopting Linux/FOSS, but I’m also surprised I don’t see it more.

Everything in the news is so insane that I could see journalists ignoring/missing such mundane events as public sector software choices.

I also experienced a significant positive turn in my mental health and work/social anxiety when I introduced significant levels of THC into my life. :D

The funny thing is, the mechanisms and results were totally different. I have an MBA and past project/people management experience and I am pretty sure I intend to stay an individual contributor for my entire career. I work on embedded systems and it is low stress and often interesting.

But your story made me realize that the “don’t be afraid to fall flat on your face” thing applies absolutely perfectly to my own recent progress. There are absolutely examples at work, but even moreso at home.

My big hobby is having a koi pond, and I have been doing a massive upgrade this year. Other than the impossible-to-overstate physical benefits of doing hundreds of hours of manual labor outside in the fresh air with my animals, my mental appearance was completely different from my usual.

I am the type to naturally ask people in my family (including my dad who is an outdoors + pond guy) for advice on design decisions, or what they thought about X and Y. I think that was not just a lack of confidence, but an ADHD-related technique for putting off work. Then of course I would invite people over to help work on it (people like parents who enjoy visiting and helping) which would get me off my ass for that entire day.

So this year for the past few months, I have been kindly listening to anything people suggest and of course researching things on my own. And I have been sending updates that they love! But when it comes to the actual work, I do everything with my own two hands. The design behind that work is a game-time decision that only I make, solely based on my preferences and a kind of first-principals approach to “what are the goals I really care about here?” Sometimes those goals center around healthy fish and I confidently go against misinformed advice. Sometimes those goals center around accessibility with a particular joyful young man in mind. I find both of these efforts pleasing and fulfilling.

Getting your mind to act the way you want requires practice and training, just like the rest of your body. I know it is so god damn annoying to hear when you’re in a dark place, but it seems so obvious once you’re more healthy, but it’s true. To be more confident and decisive in your decisions, try making more decisive decisions. To more easily handle social situations, try getting into more social situations. To more easily lift rocks, try lifting even larger rocks on a regular basis. To have a calm mind, try being calm. The monk-like platitudes full of circular logic are all true!

Hell, fun example: I got my first tattoo yesterday and I got some comments about how I was a trooper and took it like a champ. And I smiled and said something fun, but in my head I’m thinking “I get IVs or blood draws about two dozen times a year, and I have had kidney stones multiple times motherfucker! Not that any of that holds a candle to the emotional pain I’ve gone through like many years of infertility and even an adoption falling through, while being unmedicated for the ADHD/anxiety/depression that I have on top of the even worse neurological shit that requires those IVs!” So basically, when you’ve been through some shit you can handle some shit.

And speaking of unmedicated: get medicated! Taking care of yourself is a marathon, and it might be possible to run a marathon with a broken leg but it fucking sucks. The fact that I know the cocktail of drugs (multiple prescriptions in addition to a sprinkle of certain sativa strains) that makes existence not hurt is PART of my mental health process, not a replacement for it.

Sorry for the random extreme length reply! BSing about our shared and differing experiences on Lemmy is some excellent therapy IMO, so I figured I was going to finish writing this damn reply if even one person might read through it.

I used to be able to do them at will, and even overlap images an additional time to get a crazy second level of shape.

But now I can’t, thanks to the american health insurance industry. yay!

Yeah it’s a funny joke, but this kind of shit actually works on people to an alarming degree.

I think it’s an extension of dunning-kruger, essentially. These dummies love “knowing” something that all those smug educated people that study it for a living somehow do not know. It’s something I see in my more conservative relatives too, the need to put others down to establish your legitimacy.

Even decades ago I remember hearing in conservative media the revelations that water vapor was a greenhouse gas, or that methane was, or that the sun goes through cycles, or that the earth’s orbit isn’t perfectly circular. Every single time it was discussed with the wonder of that brain exploding in space dude meme. Just flinging that confusion and doubt in all directions, knowing that each piece will probably be the thing that convinces part of the audience.

Yeah, and this is especially so in the important voting bloc of white middle class people --the ones who probably own their home (with mortgage obviously) and are still making ends meet. The good ones are horrified to see what’s going on in the world, and the troubled ones may still think they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires with the whole master race thing going for them, but other than inflation their day to day life has not changed.

I’m a white dude living in the swing state of Pennsyltucky, in a very white republican suburb a good distance from the city. My town is growing and some good companies have large offices here (access to infrastructure plus the tax benefit of being in the next county over), so it’s attracted residents from just about every ethnic background. But to get an accurate mental image, you have to sprinkle that diverse mix over a base layer of 80% white people, lol.

Just mentally going through our family, close friends, social acquaintances, and various local parents we run into (I have a kid in elementary school, and we’re active in the school district), it is almost all white families living in single-family homes or sometimes townhouses. Many are two-income families, some are one-income families (working professionals in a reasonable COL area, not exactly CEOs). I know everybody has their own problems including the ones they don’t share with me, but for most of these people life just looks normal. If you followed me around all day and could not see the awful news on the screen when I sat down at my PC, you would be hard pressed to tell which decade we are in. You would need a clue like peeking at my phone model or seeing an old covid mask on a shelf.

There ARE exceptions. People who are not white have absolutely been fucked with by ICE. Thank goodness the best Mexican restaurant in town got raided so that my fellow whites aren’t tempted by amazing food from non-white sources. And I do know of one white family where both parents are civilians that work for the government. Both remotely, before Trump 2. They are amazing people raising three great kids (the kindest people we know are usually single child) and they got all kinds of unnecessary stress and fuckery in their real lives thanks to all the chaos and ill considered return-to-office mandates.

“Well, we both want to improve the country”

Did they though?

One of the most consistent features of conservative “politics” is their ability to get lots of ordinary people to vote against their own interests.

Sure it was nice when the rank and file weren’t cheering on the New American Gestapo (good band name?) but the money > humans goals behind the policies were the same. The bigotry and tribalism and other-ing have always been tools in their propaganda machine. We’re witnessing those chickens coming home to roost.

Who could have known it would be a bad idea to systematically poison american culture so that a handful of old white dudes could hang on to the dream of dying as billionaires instead of pleb-ass run of the mill multimillionaires?

It was far too recent for somebody with my background. I learned how the UNIX command line was different from DOS in the late 90s, but it was only last year that I switched from a VM to a native Linux install at work. Then I swapped over the home PCs during winter.

After defaulting to Windows for so long because of games and employers favoring it, it was almost frustrating how fast, smooth, and “clean” feeling it was to install Linux natively on a system compared with the recent versions of Windows. And that’s without any special lightweight distro. I am a proud Linux Mint Cinnamon user, lol.

Ah ah ah! You didn’t say the magic word!

sudo edit the file!

…

Ah ah ah! You didn’t say the secret word right after!

God damn it, I had actually forgotten about that in the decade and a half that seems to have elapsed since October.

They don’t care how they’re remembered, as long as people keep saying their names.

This is the only thing that could explain Musk’s actions of the last several months as a believable rational choice. He realized he is not going to be around to see immortality or brain downloads or whatever, so he has to make his name and image immortal instead.

Of course, there are numerous other reasons that could explain it, many of them personality flaws.

When I look at her eyes in a photo or video, I see the kind of evil where as she squeezed the life out of a kitten she would not laugh, cry, or grit her teeth. She would just stare, then tilt her head like a curious alien or Labrador without blinking.

Please note that I am a fan of both dogs and space, so I am sending zero insults their direction in that comparison. It’s like if I were to compare the number of times Trump shit his pants throughout his first term with the number of times my baby boy – born right after the inauguration – shit his pants over the same interval.

My official guess for the name of this new slavery program is the “Essential Guest Worker” bill/order.

Yooo, Democratic Senators, fuck youuuu!

Signed, an independent US citizen who has repeatedly voted for your shitty controlled opposition candidates because it was glaringly obvious to me SEVERAL YEARS AGO that anything Trump brings to the table is significantly worse for humanity than your bland business as usual.

Like, Trump was so, so bad that in retrospect it makes more sense that HE was the controlled opposition so that status quo capitalist corporate democrats could win their elections and keep the people “happy enough” while letting the elites play their games.

But no. Now he is much worse, mask-off, nominating unqualified morons and traitors to help administrate the federal government, and you fuckups in the “at least we aren’t an openly bigoted death cult” party did not stop it in cases where you could have.

The TIE Defender of the lunch box.

Too bad there had to be an argument or disagreement…

…about whether the victim(s) crying over their dead dog in front of their burned down house deserved to live?

I wonder what the chances are that the fire, the dog skull, and the murder were all the same shithead.

Did the bully look like this and hang out with kids that look like Dragon Ball Z characters?

The problem is that so many of us INSIDE the US still sleep like that, especially the ones who match homer’s kind of “dopey white middle aged boomer dad who raised a family on a single factory job” demographic.

I match some of those demographics, like the dopey white middle aged USAmerican dad raising a family with his one income. I don’t match him in other areas because I am an over-educated tech worker living in an old cheap blue collar neighborhood to make it happen in current day.

I am extremely unhappy and embarrassed about just about every single thing that has my country is in the news, to say the least. It makes me sad and worried for the entire world. Giving a shit about other people while evil morons are grabbing power will do that to you.

But for people who look like me and don’t follow what’s going on in the world or care about other people? My day to day real life in my local physical environment is comfortable and privileged as hell, and so is a lot of theirs.

Combine that with our culture where a “successful” life is constant stress over the rat race and keeping up with the Joneses, so that you are worried about making the payments on your luxury SUV rather than whether your government is destroying people you don’t know while funneling your resources to people who already have 1000x more than you.

Ooo, I might have to put this up against Fira Code at work tomorrow.