“helping” seems like an odd word to use for “threatened at gunpoint”.

As we saw with the COVID pandemic, even in “1st world countries”, poorer people were disproportionately affected. Fewer humans won’t help when the majority of harm to the Earth is perpetuated by a small fraction who would be disproportionately represented in a world where the majority of people died.

I sympathise with your sentiment, because it often does feel like humans are the problem, but the reality is that we’re not. Although it can feel weirdly comforting to think of humans as inherently and innately destructive, thinking this way is a pipeline to eco-fascism, which doesn’t offer productive ways forward.

I would love to be a kid sitting in this with it packed up but my head poking out.

The lettuce.

It’s great because it started out as a sarcastic joke, but as her premiership progressed, there was a sense of dawning hilarity as we realised that she actually wasn’t going to outlast the lettuce.

Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know of any communities, perhaps because I’m a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn’t much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley’s https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I’ve discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng’s books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without “dumbing things down”. I recently finished “The Joy of Abstraction”.

Apologies that this isn’t what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren’t available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.

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The thing I’m concerned about is how little non-programmers know. I think that much of the world went “oh, GenZ are digital natives, that means they’ll know their way around computers naturally” when if anything, being “digital natives” is part of the problem. But like my original comment said, I attribute a lot of blame to Microsoft’s impact on IT education.

I can’t speak much on how much programmers tend to know, because I am a biochemist who started getting into programming when studying bioinformatics, and then I’ve continued dabbling as a hobbyist. I like to joke that I’m a better programmer than the vast majority of biochemists, and that’s concerning, because I’m a mediocre programmer (at best).

Verbaceous is a great word. I’m adding it onto my “favourite words” list ,(even if it isn’t technically a word "

Reflecting on my IT education in school, it feels like it was mostly learning to use Microsoft Office. Reflecting on it makes me horrified, because I feel like we’re heading for a period where only a select few have tech skills and the skills gap we already see is going to get way worse. That’s what intense lobbying from Microsoft will get you

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a patch for it that made it way more stable (and also added back in a bunch of cut content).

Way back, my partner played Watchdogs at launch and the stuttering was awful, and it was basically unplayable. Some random person made a patch that fixed most of the problems and made the game look closer to what it did at E3.

Random nerds on the internet are my favourite people

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

Once upon a time, a thing happened. And then there was a facsimile of narrative conflict, but everything worked out in the end, because that’s how all the short stories by LLMs seem to work.

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

I visited my friend the other day and my phone was low, so I took the playstation controller off charge and plugged in my Android phone instead. A while later, her iPhone was low battery, so we charged her phone instead, with the same wire. It’s not much, but it made me happy.

As a gamer, I was anxious about switching to Linux as my daily driver, but I needed to fully immerse myself to improve at Linux, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how few gaming related problems I’ve had.

I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I’ve just imported get a tag of “new”, which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don’t do it at time of import).

Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I’m wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I’d have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might’ve known which was which, but if there’s a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I’m quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I’ve been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I’m still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it’s easy to forget why I’m reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I’ve read also.

Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn’t make it one of my books, ‘taking it home’ and putting it away on my ‘bookshelf’ makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn’t really work and that pruning little and often helps more.

“vendored my library”

I’m unfamiliar with this phrase, are you able to explain what it means (or point me towards an explanation)? Is it relating to forking?

That’s really neat

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.