Do you mean math classes/teaching? At school or university? Or just ‘mathematics’ as a concept? It’s pretty hard to be less abstract, when the basic idea of maths is abstraction.

Many years ago when I thought about this, I realised I wouldn’t be able to put much of my modern knowledge and skills to use. I decided I’d learn to make basic matches by distilling urine into phosphate, which wasn’t invented until the 19th century, but I’ve forgotten the process. Collect lots of urine and boil it? Also, if you make white phosphate it can cause horrific toothache and they have to remove your jaw… So, I’m hoping another commentor will suggest a safer skill I can brush up to be ready for travel.

“middle finger” is “the finger in the middle of the digits” not “the finger on the middle of the fingers”

I did. I don’t know anything abut them and Wikipedia seemed to suggest they were a type of alligatoridae. I originally googled “caymen crocodile”, so it could have been worse.

What’s with that weird ai bullshit ? There’s real videos of giant otters fighting alligstors if you want that sort of thing

I’m not criticising Linux gaming - I know basically nothing about it. Just my own experience over the last year, where I’ve tried buying and playing a couple of games and had difficulty getting them working, tried different Proton versions etc. But maybe I should be trying the window versions? My question was just innocent curiosity, but looking at my downvoters I’ve obviously touched a nerve!

I’m not very experienced with Linux gaming, and the last game I tried (xcom) crashed consistently, and reading forums people were suggesting using certain Proton versions and other stuff. I eventually gave up. I also got uncharted:LOT refunded because I couldn’t get it working in Linux. So if it’s “click install and click play” the great! It is straightfoward.

I married my partner, after being with them for over a decade, and a few years of living together full-time. It was mostly for admin reasons (we just bought our home, and being married made things easier if one of us died). If it wasn’t for that I don’t think we would have bothered. We know we love each other, and had decided a few years before that if we’d get married if we ever needed to, so it wasn’t like we ever ‘proposed’. Just a tiny ceremony with two friends as witness, and we went out to a restaurant for lunch afterwards. I don’t think it cost us anything beyond lunch? Maybe a tiny admin fee?

But… I’m so happy we did! It’s weird! I never really cared, and rationally, I still think it hasn’t changed anything. But somehow it feels… really nice? I still regularly think (and tell them) “I’m so glad I married you”. I’m sure there are lots of other things that you can do to symbolise your relationship or commitment. If I got a tattoo inspired by my partner I’d probably have the same feeling of looking at it and thinking of them that I do when I play with my wedding ring (2€ piece of silly junk from aliexpress. And we each bought a bunch of spares so that when we inevitably lose them it’s not a problem). But actually a marriage is one of the simplest and cheaper ways (if you don’t choose or feel pressured into turning it into a stupid moneysink).

Tldr: didn’t care about marriage, got married for tax, and weirdly found it deeply satisfying in a completely unexpected way.

It’s working on Linux? Was it straightforward to setup? I’ve given up buying games on steam because of their terrible Linux support, and I’d seen a lot of comments about the steam deck version sucking, so I’d assumed the Linux version wasn’t great. But maybe the deck hardware is the issue?

Thanks! Intresting read, and I like the style.

In the UK you are free to basically just change your name if you want. In fact, part of getting it “officially” changed (like for a passport) is proving that you’ve been using the new name in daily life for a while. There’s a restriction about not using the new name for fraudulent purpose", so you can’t pretend to be someone else or whatever, but really what you call yourself and what you want others to call you is your business. I was genuinely surprised that most of the rest of the world thinks it’s acceptable to dictate people’s names to them.

Woof. I dread to think that I would remember in such precise detail all the dozens of lemmy posts and comments I’ve read this morning. But it’s quite a thought!

Met my husband on grindr. Have no idea what the notification sound is.

What’s that?

Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we’d just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.

There’s already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote… Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don’t give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?

The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they’d “innocently mention” that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.

In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald’s expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.

I travel a lot, and spend time in a lot of random places, stay with friends and such like. My job means that I can set my own schedule most of the time, but sometimes I need to respond to something pretty urgently. So, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve been travelling light and suddenly been asked to pull a bunch of data from a spreadsheet and write some quick report on it, so usually I just ask whoever I’m with if I can use their pc for an hour and get it out the way.

It’s certainly possible do it all on a phone, but it’s much quicker and more pleasant to just use a proper keyboard and screen. And there have been times (like after a ill-advised encounter with a fountain in Rome) when my phone is temporarily out of action, so if I need to deal with travel arrangements on a public computer it might involve accessing my emails.

Yeah, I didn’t find it particularly bizarre. Both are very natural ways to process verbal information. Anyone who’s ever tried to do arithmetic in a new language knows that we don’t just abstractly do math, a big part is that we know that seven plus eight is fifteen. That’s why they used to teach multiplication tables by rote. It would be lot more bizarre if an llm had independently devised a reliable mathematical algorithm.

Using email clients is fine on my primary devices, but I often have to use email on other people’s computers. I don’t really want to go back to carrying a usb of portable apps again. And some public computers have usb drive access disabled, understandably.

Anyone got a any opinions (or a link to a review) of the different options? Proton and tuta come up, are there others worth considering?

I understand that I’ll probably need to pay (otherwise I’m the product) and encryption / security is good, but the thing that keeps with Gmail (apart from inertia) is that it feels quick and easy to use. My only real experience of non Gmail sites over the last two decades have been terrible but mandatory work webmail systems that are slow, clunky and look a decade out of date. Or Hotmail, which sucks for a variety of reasons.

Based on when I was young, I basically thought of anything from before I was born as “old”. Not consciously, just that everything from “my” decade seemed modern, and everything else was old.

Even now, movies from 20+ years ago look old, even though I remember them being super new when they came out. The Matrix had aged pretty well, but it defintely looks old. I thought LOTR was timeless, but I rewatched it recently and did start to feel it was showing it’s age (but none the worse for it!).