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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • Yes, exactly! For all the noxious effects of greed, it drives competition which drives evolution.

    Even if a utopian communist/anarchist society were able to stabilize on its own, it would inevitably be overcome at some point in the future by a more competitive society that had martially evolved beyond the utopia’s understanding.

    Whether its right or wrong has no bearing on the entropy of it.


  • What a goofy take. “Having trouble with self control? Have you tried having self control?” Obviously there’s something more going on or life would be a whole lot simpler. Sometimes externalizing a decision through a tool like a timer is part of how a person indirectly exerts self control.





  • Exposure therapy can be quite powerful. Let yourself feel upset: don’t be ashamed that your emotions lash out. Let yourself feel, then remind yourself how things aren’t as bad as they feel. Feeling and introspecting rather than suppressing in the face of pain is emotional weight lifting.

    There will be times when you lack the emotional strength to exercise, and that’s ok too. Everything in life ebbs and flows, and you can slowly make meaningful progress toward deeper happiness by taking advantage of the flows while showing yourself grace for your human imperfections when things ebb.

    A major pillar of self improvement it seems we share is letting go of the expectation that everyone will like you. It’s just as likely to be someone else’s problems that lead them to not gel with you as it is to be your own problems. You have just as much a right to be imperfect as they do, but no amount of self-improvement can change other people’s problems. At any given moment, the world simply is as it is and you can only make choices to navigate the future as best as you are able.

    Finding controlled ways to put yourself in a bit of emotional peril can be helpful, like creating a throwaway to try and ernestly engage in a new online community. Put that mask out there as your avatar, knowing that you can always discard it when it ceases to be useful.

    At a more advanced level you might go try participating in some public in-person activity, knowing you can exit that community at any time and return to your solitude. Even if in the worst case scenario they did come to ‘hate’ you, that ceases to matter once you leave them behind. They’ll forget you long before you forget them.

    Let yourself feel the despair of failure, and then let yourself see how those feelings do nothing to stop you from living and growing. In fact, growing is ultimately impossible without failure. Focus on your successes, and let your past failures be signposts of your improvement.

    Of course none of this is easy, but this is a journey that spans your whole life whether you want it to or not. Every time you gather the strength to engage thoughtfully with it (as you have here!), you plant seeds that you will someday get to enjoy the fruits of.

    Support structures are key; DM me if you’d ever like to engage more directly in a dialog.







  • Binary speed is really the least reason to do it. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to the individual, but there are a lot of little reasons Gentoo is uniquely powerful.

    Benefits specific to compiling:

    • fine-grained control of features and dependencies with USE flags
    • very easy package maintenance (writing ebuilds)
      • much simpler to add your own custom local packages when you need them
      • less workload on the gentoo team which is good for repository health and breadth
    • control of compile flags (yes speed, but more practically hardening for secure systems)
    • the same gentoo is available on way more platforms and architectures than any binary distro