Dude, I’d love to get a group going for this and make it happen; but honestly I don’t play Overwatch anymore and it’s difficult to make time for multiplayer games anymore with kids and busy work. I only get a chance to play a bit of Street fighter 6 and some quick single player games.

I don’t bother communicating. I just play silently and usually mute the chat if it is toxic. Even games like overwatch worked out ok playing without communicating.

The only time I had a decent experience playing with strangers was when I found specific gaming subs or Discord communities (e.g. casual gaming, gaming dads, etc) and played in a Discord voice channel. This was actually a really good experience in games like Street fighter or Apex legends. I could do dumb shit in game and they’d be completely chill and say “it happens” and carry on to the next game. Haven’t done this for the last couple of years though.

I’m not religious at all. But in responding to your question OP: we don’t have to understand why people believe. Religion just isn’t for us, and that’s fine. Other people find it has value, and that’s fine too. The fact that religion has lasted this long with this many people is proof in itself that there’s some value people get out of it. We don’t have to get it to understand that.

All the comments here that explain religion solely as dumb or irrational are just as closed minded as the people they’re criticising.

I haf a gaming laptop for over 2 years. Sold it this year to replace with a PC and I’m convinced I’m never going back to a laptop.

Laptops run noisy and hot. The hardware is tuned down for poorer performance compared to PCs. Using one is not ergonomic at all. It’s a pain working around power management (I.e. forcing it to stay on to use as a server, etc), features like wake on LAN are hit or miss. They’re overpriced compared to similar PC parts. They’re hardly repairable or upgradeable at all.

I’ve made a much faster PC for almost the same cost I sold a 3 year old laptop for. The laptop was always used with a monitor, KB, mouse anyway. If the portability is required then the Steam Deck makes for a much better portable gaming machine and an old secondhand workstation laptop will be dirt cheap and fast enough for all your office needs.

Don’t bother with the 24 rolling news updates. It is much better to watch a video news summary a few days later. A really really good YouTube channel called TLDR news (they have a number of subchannels) that I would highly recommend.

The other thing is to use RSS…never news websites. RSS presents news chronologically. Websites curate to put absolute shit on their front-page so avoid that. If you use an RSS app like Pluma, then it lets you set a blacklist (like I’ve excluded news about Biden, Trump, Covid, vaccines, Israel, Ukraine, Superbowl, football, etc)… It really let’s you exclude what you don’t want to see and improve what shows up in your list.

Why did porn subs start dying?

This is something commonly misunderstood as:

Logic = correct = good

Emotion = irrational = bad

In truth your emotions are trying to tell you something. You certainly shouldn’t be acting completely on emotion. But you do need to learn to interpret what your emotions are telling you and what that means, because there is critical information there that you would ignore at your peril.

I agree with the principle, but not in the same way.

It feels good to portray another person as an “idiot” or obviously wrong. Feels superior and legitimate.

The lesson for me has been: people are allowed to have their own thoughts and opinions, no matter how ill-informed I think they are. It is going to be just as difficult to force them to believe my opinion, as it would be for me to believe their position. So shouting “facts” and “logic” doesn’t work at all. If you can get over branding someone an idiot you might be able to listen to why they actually believe such misguided information, but this would take non-judgemental questioning.

So I agree: stop arguing with people.

You cannot make people change their minds in a single sitting. You should aim to be less closed minded than they are. Stop thinking of others as “idiots” to begin with.

If you’re really interested in diving into this, here’s the first of a 3 part series talking about how to have difficult conversations with people who see the world differently, how to have better debates about contentious issues, and how to ethically and scientifically persuade one another about things that matter – in short, this is a three-part series about How Minds Change.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2023/03/06/yanss-254-how-to-have-productive-conversations-in-a-polarized-political-environment/

(I’m not affiliated with the podcast or this guy’s books…I just listen to a lot of cognitive science podcasts)

I can calculate 0% of anything in my head quite quickly. Try me.

The first step is normalising the idea of privacy so people can even see the point of paying for something they can easily get for free.

The next step would be to make products people can easily use without being tech savvy. A synology NAS has been great for me and I praise the setup to anyone who will listen, but even with something like Synology people will need some basic knowledge.

My main concern was it doesn’t provide enough sun cover. I wanted more. I had her buy me this instead: https://cdn.ezcosplay.com/media/catalog/product/p/o/power_rangers_white_ninjetti_ranger_cosplay_costume_1_2.jpg

My mother wanted to get me a wide brim sun hat with a neck flap: https://imgs.search.brave.com/fVuBnMVVBRH1g28fcDzOX0uUoC4Si8j5_V0yd65cJL4/rs:fit:860:0:0/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly9tLm1l/ZGlhLWFtYXpvbi5j/b20vaW1hZ2VzL0kv/NzEzZDRjWUhZNUwu/anBn

She thought it would be good to save me from the sun while mowing the lawn. I asked her to return it. There was no way I was going to wear that.

Awesome, thanks. Here are some of the ones I would recommend:

The Reith Lectures - Lecture series from an expert on a topic. Tend to release episodes close to the end of the year only (episodes are releasing now talking about the state of democracy). The backlog is worth listening to.

The Dream- investigative podcast looked at pyramid schemes and the world of wellness.

The Jordan Harbinger Show - In-depth conversations with people at the top of their game.

Playing God - Medical ethics. Life-and-death dilemmas. New medical technologies. Controversial treatments.

Hot Money: The New Narcos - The backlog has excellent episodes about investigating the financing structures in the porn industry. They’re just preparing to launch a new series now but I don’t know what they’re going to look at now.

You Are Not So Smart - about reasoning, biases, judgments, and decision-making.

The Happiness Lab - the science of happiness

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas

CrowdScience - Listener questions about a science issue that the presenters then try to find experts to answer

The Real Story - examination of some current event issue.

The Inquiry - gets beyond the headlines to explore the trends, forces and ideas shaping the world.

The Infinite Monkey Cage - a witty, irreverent look at the world through scientists

Darknet Diaries - true stories of the dark side of the Internet

Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwelllooks at things overlooked and the misunderstood

Owls at Dawn - Two dudes from SoCal who studied philosophy, politics, and religion around the globe who decided to start a podcast where we could bullshit with impunity.

If Books Could Kill - Two guys talk about books that are popular and tear apart how bad they are. I mostly find you don’t need to have read the book and the books tend to be pretty popular.

The Forum - The programme that explains the present by exploring the past. Expert panel discussion about any subject area.

Law in Action - legal magazine programme, featuring reports and discussion on matters relating to law (UK based)

All Consuming - explore our culture of consumption through products that have changed the world.

Sound of Gaming - video game soundtracks and an interview with a sound designer from a popular video game.

Bad People - true crime with a criminologist and a comedian. This show has ended but the backlog is great.

Oh wow. You really are me. This is surreal. Care to share your whole podcast list? I’d be interested in discovering new shows from someone with similar interests.

Oh shit. Can’t believe you got my exact top 3. Especially since Cautionary Tales isn’t even BBC and likely much more of a niche show.

It’s pretty good at writing limericks and poems.

It’s great to use for troubleshooting Linux. It usually gives you the commands to paste into command line. It saves you from going to forums where people expect you to have advanced baseline knowledge already.

I was looking for something kinda cool, that was completely nondescript and anonymous.

What’s the benefit of that? I thought the point of the Federated nature of it all was so it all links together no matter what your local instance is.

a really good substitute for the inner city housing problem

https://lemm.ee/c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

Some companies still make these but they’re not well known since it’s such an incredibly niche product:

https://nexdock.com/

https://www.uperfectmonitor.com/collections/lapdock

There isn’t much point in having such a low power and utility limited device when a cheap low powered Windows laptop can cost a similar amount and run any Windows app you want.