Not op, but I bet that I can guess. Bad water heater. Legionnaire thrives in a very specific band of temperature. If the water heater is faulty it can’t keep the temperature high enough to kill it but it does keep it warm enough that the bacteria grows out of control. Open your mouth in the shower and voilà. You get the shits for a week straight. There’s a reason that heater’s temperature is mandated by construction codes and it should be part of inspections. A badly configured one is a biohazard in waiting.

That and poorly managed buffets are the bane of hotels.

I thought my use of capitalized Discord would be subtle but noticeable that it was a joke. I guess I was too subtle.

Here, I was keeping it in a drawer because I thought I wouldn’t need it, but obviously I did.

/s

The problem mister Alexander here makes is to assume geniuses exist, or that original ideas are rare. They don’t and they are not. Spend more than 15 minutes with any toddler and you’ll easily reach those 100 new original ideas. Humans are new ideas machines, it’s what we do. It is spontaneous, not extraneous, to us. To assume otherwise is very cynical and disingenuous. Every person has the capability to be a genius, because genius is just a social label granted to extremely narrow interpretations and projections of an individuals abilities in an extremely concrete set of skills or topic. For example, re-contextualize with a diagnosis of autism and now suddenly they are not a genius, they have an hyper-fixation.

Also, the premise that every idea, specially brand new, can be judged and ruled as good or bad in a vacuum, right out of the gate, is also very stupid. The category of genius is a very recent concoction, stemming from the halls of Victorian moral presumptions and the newly developed habit of nobility of worshiping the writings they didn’t understand of people they had never met. This is what motivates the myth that genius whatever is always positive, in the popular mind. But, Goebbels was a genius at propaganda, everything that we do today in publishing is based on stuff he invented. That doesn’t mean all his ideas were worth listening to, and were he alive and you followed him on Twitter (lets be honest, he would have a Twitter), that would shed a rather poor light on you.

Because, and this is the important part, humans are not a loose collection of isolated ideas. We are not modular, freely separable and reconfigurable beings. We are holistic, evolutive and integral. Sure, we might be different things to different people (privately) and audiences (publicly) at different points in time, but our own sense of identity and being is not divisible. Steven Pinker is perfectly capable of simultaneously being a liberal, atheist and intelligent linguist; a mediocre intrusionists psychologist who forgot how history works; and a stupid mysoginist and racist. All at the same time, and never stop being a single integral person. It doesn’t require an imaginary score of good to bad takes ratio. That’s a stupid premise. You don’t keep a broken clock around in the off chance it might be right twice a day. Use a more holistic sense.

Remember, what’s behind the user name is (still more often than not) a full person, not a black box (except if it is a bot, of course).

I understand and see why he didn’t touched the moral aspect of his own argument. It is because any moral analysis completely dismantles his premises. Morality is the most important thing separating humans from animals and machines. Of course if someone is an evil POS it you should block and cancel their ass. It’s Karl Popper all over again, if we don’t rule out bad takes in the off chance there will be a good take, we end up with a Nazi bar.

if you want to learn, you search discord.

Searching Discord is precisely the opposite of learning. You lose knowledge every second spent on Discord.

_{/ s}

No, you are harassing and bullying poor Stenzek.

Typical Linux user, using Linux and stuff.

/s

Not actively, they stopped trying to make money long ago. Since 2018 you can’t buy anything from them and artists are leaving. No new releases since then, of course.

Please don’t propagate the myth that all gays are ultra horny and promiscuous all the time. It is not true. Gay men deal with a shit ton of toxic standards as well.

if you were gay things would be easier.

If you don’t have standards, maybe …

Gays looking for a hookup are some of the most superficial and demanding dating pool members. Dudes looking like the Penguin on Batman Returns will demand Adonis or infant looking twinks and nothing else. It’s very hard and very rare to find people actually willing to give a chance to non-hegemonic looking guys.

Kind reminder that no streaming platform is very good on the ethical front. There are no ethical alternatives because the root of the problem is the legal strangle hold labels and record companies keep on artists and commercial music distribution.

Attrition and radical empathy.

That’s the only thing I’ve seen work. People that far deep need a consistent message that is always transparent and empathetic with their emotions. This will erode the core beliefs until the cognitive dissonance between what they are told the opposing message means and what the proponents of the message actually display cracks an opening for self-assessment and reevaluation.

This is why bigotry and fascism work on the premise of ultra-individualist isolationism. Same why cults first line of recruitment is to isolate the individual from society and their previous social network. You can’t get your beliefs eroded if you never have contact with people who think different than you.

Once they get in contact with the people they were told to hate and realize that said people aren’t the monsters they were told, and that their ideas are actually logical and consistent, they can find a socially approved permission to question their preconceived notions and admit fault. Unfortunately, achieving this conditions can be challenging, and it is also why algorithmically curated propaganda (social media) is so effective at spreading hate and misinformation.

I mean, for that matter, neither fish or bird technically exist (also, trees). So it doesn’t matter. Try feeding birdseed to a penguin and you’ll see.

Ok, so you say humans come from monkeys, right?

But then, who put the monkeys there in the first place, uh?

Have you ever thought of that?

/s

Distros don’t define the UI.

That’s the desktop environment’s work. Many distros will look and feel exactly alike, because they use the same DE.

These are:

• GNOME
• KDE
• Cinnamon
• a long list of etceteras.

GNOME is their own thing, with very opinionated and authoritarian devs. They are not very flexible in their design and development philosophy. That said, Gnome is a very good and quality DE that does have customization, but is also very different to everything else UX wise.

KDE Plasma is very Windows like, because their thing is to be extremely flexible and customizable. But, with sane defaults that look like Windows as closely as possible. So it is very familiar out of the box, though it can be made to look and work into very unique ways. It is also very good and quite polished, aiming to have virtually everything into a GUI or menu, minimizing the need for terminal commands.

Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s continuation of what Gnome used to be like. Which means that it is very similar to pre-Windows 10 but with modern quality of life upgrades and functionality.

Most distros will use one of the first two, and Mint champions it’s own Cinnamon. Other DE’s are for more specialty or niche distributions.

Very few DE’s capture the macOS experience. Mostly because there’s little interest on it from the crowds that use Linux, so they get abandoned quickly. The closest thing currently is Budgie, which had died for a while, but is now revived by a different group of developers.

Put Linux Mint on an USB thumbdrive and play with it until you are comfortable. Be wary it would be somewhat slower than a system installed on the laptop’s drive.

Then, if it is a spare laptop, go ahead and install it. Avoid dual booting, it is more hassle than worth at this stage in your journey. Disable secureboot before installing, or Windows will try to hijack the laptop. You can always re-enable it later if you really want to, but it’s such a bad implementation currently that it doesn’t actually provide much security.

Alternatively: if all you want is to use the computer, without having to worry about the technical details of managing an OS. Try something like Bazzite (for gaming) or Aurora (general productivity) instead. They just work and will (practically) never break.

This is what Steam will probably do in the future, and Itch.io is already looking into it. There’s a reason all this garbage hasn’t splashed GOG. GOG is based in Europe, where protection laws would slap silly any financial entity trying to pull this stunt on an European company (pressure groups have weaseled censorship and moral panics with other strategies though, just not this one), and they have so many more payment processors that PayPal, Visa and MC would just be dropped entirely and immediately for any of the other dozen or so alternatives. The issue is that in the US and Australia, the three headed shit dragon already lobbied governments to pull the ladder behind them, so no other payment processor could take their place or compete with them, establishing a legal oligopoly of the old money finance club. They won and have this power due to systemic and political failures decades in the making.

That was actually the most realistic part. Everything else was a bit less so. The fight is only possible with Hollywood unreal bravery, they grossly undermine the scariness of heat and smoke. I get that they were mostly murderous psychopaths, but fear of fire is very primal. Even in war flamethrowers were mostly to create area denial to flush troops out of entrenched positions. Fighting flame against flame is guaranteed mutual suicide.

Yes, but no one can help this one developer because they changed the license. So now the project is just source available, not open source. They chose to be alone.

I’ve seen this, some server Admins and mods actually encourage the behavior via modeling. They do it once and that gives permission to the other users to act similarly. Becoming a cultural problem with the whole server. Then they don’t ever correct or moderate the behavior, further encouraging it.

They’re not being bothered. They are a sensible asshole. Nothing wrong with that, and they are free to express their truth of how they feel. But there’s no evidence of harassment, if they think bug reports and feature requests is abuse then they are in for a rude experience if someone is stupid enough to actually harass them.

They should just take their project proprietary anyways. The license used is a joke. Duckstation is not open source, the license is so restrictive that it is barely source available. They are not ideologically, or in practice, part of the FOSS community. So they’re free to take their toy home with them. They weren’t playing nice with others anyway.