They probably have to recite a standard company line, gritting their teeth as you both know it’s bullshit.

I don’t envy customer service reps. Most of them probably didn’t apply for the job because they love Microsoft or enjoy the prospect of fielding frustrated customers’ calls.

I had to fall, to lose it all

Open another terminal killall vim

You’ll have to be more precise on the definition of God. There are quite a lot of them.

The existence of an abstract concept is provable by thinking of it. If there exists an idea that you call God, then a God exists. However, that proves nothing about its properties beyond its mere existence as an idea, including whether it pertains to any real thing. Likewise, all attributes you ascribe to that idea become part of the idea, but do not automatically prove anything about reality.

Thus, the question whether there is an idea called God is trivially answered by asking it at all, but has little bearing on anything at all.

What makes ideas useful is that they group properties, and what makes them real is that there exists an actual thing having all those properties.

Thus, the question whether a real thing exists depends on the properties of that thing, so let’s tackle one:

Do I believe that there can be an omnipotent entity? No. The typical argument here is “Can God create a rock so heavy, They cannot lift it anymore?” Either answer contradicts the premise of omnipotence, unless that entity can create logical contradictions, in which case all argument and reasoning is moot anyway.

In particular, do I believe that some variation of the Abrahamic God exists? No, or at least none of those I’m aware of. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to being shown otherwise.

However, the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving God runs decidedly counter to the existence of suffering, even if we ignore (or exclude) the contradiction about omnipotence.

I didn’t think that kind of joke would ever :q

Me, if the goats use me for parkour exercise

That’d be a wack premise for a crazy scientist story

On the contrary, I am quite ideologically sympathetic. I’ve always used Open / LibreOffice, I no longer use windows, never had a Mac or iPhone or anything, I argued with stakeholders for making our university project FOSS rather than proprietary, the list goes on. I’ve spent enough time arguing with people why they should care about FOSS.

I’m just also aware of my biases, and of the fact that most people are heavily biased by their UX. Most people don’t want to spend a long time thinking to understand, they simply want to use. And in that respect, bad==proprietary doesn’t universally hold up. Big companies can spend big bucks on user research, on figuring out what does and doesn’t work for their target audience, on developing features that appeal to people. They also can spend big bucks on marketing and cultivating a brand image so that people start to identify with their products, deepening the attachment.

There is also an unfortunate side effect of FOSS when it comes to setting technical standards: If everyone can make their own, plenty of people will do that. Sure, many things have since been standardised, but how often has a common standard evolved as a side effect of some big corporation(s) adopting or outright developing it?

I don’t need to preach to you about all the ways this sucks. The unfortunate pragmatic truth is that proprietary software is a poisoned, but quite appealing apple. The most common answer I got about FOSS is “yeah, it sounds great, but I don’t care, I just want something that works for me.”

Even if their proprietary system of choice got so bad to use that they’d switch to an open one, that doesn’t mean they’d embrace the ideology. It just means that specific system does what they need it to. If iOS becomes unbearable, they may switch to Android, or perhaps to Windows phones, but they’re still gonna install and use apps that feel good to use, regardless of whether they’re FOSS.

The fight against proprietary software isn’t going to be won on ideological grounds. I feel like some developers and advocates of FOSS miss that fact. If you want to be solid competition, worry about being a viable alternative first. Once people start to use a system that allows them to customise more, they may get intrigued by that liberty and become susceptible to the ideology behind, but unless they enjoy using it already, they’ll never engage with it deeply enough.

I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn’t make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.

But I’m still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.

Absolute big brain move

Wolfman dies, kills some monkeys, does some rope stuff, performs eye surgery and kills himself (depending on what ending you go for).

Suppose I have a javascript file for a node server’s backend access named db.js

Suppose I write tests for those functions and name the test script file db.test.js

Suppose I tar and gzip that file (bear with me), now named db.test.js.tar.gz

Suppose I sign that file with PGP, now named db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now suppose I want to hide that signed compressed tarball of a javascript tests file for my db functions, and to do so, I name it .db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now I have a file that looks like it consists of nothing but extensions. I’m sure you could push it even further though, if you tried.

but but but but you’d get something good for it! You would never have missed it, but maybe you just didn’t know you wanted it? Come on, I’m sure consuming shit that will make you happy twice for two minutes each (once when clicking buy, once when getting and opening the package) will fill that hole in your soul! Spending money on stuff you don’t actually need is good!

(That was sarcasm, if it wasn’t clear enough.)

I’m aware why iOS is bad, thank you. I still don’t wish restrictions on its users. That’s just not a nice thing to do.

There’s also the argument of lasting improvement: If people switch to other systems, I’d rather see them do it out of a positive motivation (i.e. “this is better”) than a negative one (i.e. “the other one so bad I had to finally jump ship and find a different solution”).

That motivation will bias your mindset, and a positive mindset will lead to a better user experience. If they just switch because it’s not as bad as the other, that will taint their experience. They’ll be inclined to think about what they miss, rather than what the other offers.

Example: Me, trying to wrap my head around the communities thing here after leaving reddit. I miss the relative simplicity of finding topical subreddits, which is harder here both because there’s less traffic overall, and because I had a sizeable collection of subs there that I can’t simply migrate here. Part of me wants to return to the familiar hell, even if I rationally understand why it’s shit, and I feel that sours my experience with Lemmy so far.

Humans tend to prefer the familiar, so if they leave iOS for something better, I want that better thing to land as well as possible, to encourage getting familiar with the new environment and expand their horizons, and to make future leaps in other areas less scary and off-putting.

If they gave people more choices, it would be less of a shity ecosystem though, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? It wouldn’t fix any of the other issues, but less freedom is never something to be glad about.

I hate apple as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I have to hate their users or wish them ill. We should strive to stand above the petty us-vs-them mindset.

What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That… is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly “does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members”, particularly the “is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it’s also a multiple of 400?” bit with leap days.

You’ll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it’s a start.

…and if I don’t need the year, my eyes simply skip to the dash and continue to read from there.

Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don’t make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn’t make any sense, and don’t make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.

Germany too

Yeah, automatic voting gets dangerously close to automatic censorship and botting.

Also, human language, context and nuance is complicated and the unknown error bar on “correctly flagged posts” scares me. It’s not entirely predictable what kind of posts people may make, and accordingly not entirely predictable what the plugin would and wouldn’t recognise.

A post chain “Madness?” / “THIS” / “IS” / “SPARTA!” may make sense and be fun in the right context, but the “THIS” comment could get botted to hell.