PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. I mosty comment bricks of text with footnotes, so don’t be alarmed if you get one.

You posted something really worrying, are you okay?

No, but I’m not at risk of self-harm. I’m just waiting on the good times now.

Alt account of PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org. Also if you’re reading this, it means that you can totally get around the limitations for display names and bio length by editing the JSON of your exported profile directly. Lol.

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  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.

    Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn’t afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that’s wildly faster.










  • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlMath
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    14 days ago

    Sounds like fun! I’m going to bed soonish but I’m willing to answer questions about multivariable calculus probably when I wake up.

    When I took multivariable calculus, the two books that really helped me “get the picture” were Multivariable Calculus with Linear Algebra and Series by Trench and Kolman, and Calculus of Vector Functions by Williamson, Crowell, and Trotter. Both are on LibGen and both are cheap because they’re old books. But their real strength lies in the fact that both books start with basic matrix algebra, and the interplay between calculus and linear algebra is stressed throughout, unlike a lot of the books I looked at (and frankly the class I took) which tried to hide the underlying linear algebra.





  • LLMs are not necessarily evil. This project seems to be free and open source, and it allows you to run everything locally. Obviously this doesn’t solve everything (e.g., the environmental impact of training, systemic bias learned from datasets, usually the weights themselves are derived from questionably collected datasets), but it seems like it’s worth keeping an eye on.

    Google using ai, everyone hates it

    Because Google has a long history of doing the worst shit imaginable with technology immediately. Google (and other corporations) must be viewed with extra suspicion compared to any other group or individual because they are known to be the worst and most likely people to abuse technology.

    Literally if Google does literally anything, it sucks by default and it’s going to take a lot more proof to convince me otherwise for a given Google product. Same goes for Meta, Apple, and any other corporations.





  • Reddit --> Lemmy

    Facebook --> fucking nothing lmao

    YouTube --> FreeTube + Invidious [1]

    Windows --> Debian [2] with KDE Plasma

    Word --> LyX

    Microsoft Office --> LibreOffice

    Built-in phone music player --> Odyssey [3]

    Firefox --> LibreWolf [4]

    Adobe Reader --> Okular + Librera on Android

    Default phone launcher --> KISS Launcher

    [1] I prefer FreeTube on computers where I have it installed, but one of my family’s jank 10-year-old work PCs can’t handle it, so I’ll typically watch videos in Invidious in LibreWolf on that computer.

    [2] I can’t recommend Debian for absolutely everyone since it prioritizes stability and predictability over new features and ease of use, but it’s great for most of my use cases. I typically recommend Linux Mint for complete beginners.

    [3] It handles extremely large music libraries (>100 GB of .mp3 files) without constantly taking forever to reload when I add a single new album.

    [4] Firefox is pretty good and FOSS, but LibreWolf comes with better defaults and I’m a lazy fucker.



  • I’m an anarchist

    I somehow don’t believe that.

    Men commit almost all rape and murder, but no one seems to think this is a problem we need to do anything about.

    There’s a feminist movement. One of the major theses of the feminist movement is the rape and murder overwhelmingly committed by men. I’d like it if a lot more people were feminists, but it’s not correct to say that no one cares.

    If any other group committed 90% of serious crimes – let’s say immigrants – people would be calling for them to be rounded up and exiled.

    And that would still be an insane reaction to that fact even if it was true, which no self-identified anarchist should support. Rehabilitation must still be the goal of any justice system.

    But when it’s men, that’s just the way things are, nothing to be done about it.

    Okay, that’s reasonable. However, that doesn’t mean that we should accept absolutely any solution to eliminate misogyny no matter the cost. There are wildly more creative and practical ways to go about this.

    But we know exactly what to do about it when we’re talking about other species. We castrate male cattle because bulls are dangerous and steer aren’t.

    Spicy hot take: we shouldn’t be castrating bulls. Technically you would probably achieve your goal of taming a bull by castrating it, but at the disproportionate expense of the bull’s personality, health, and bodily autonomy. Now we’re not bulls or trained in bovine social cues so we don’t miss the minds of castrated bulls, hence why there’s no controversy; it’s not obvious. However, men are

    Violent criminals typically have elevated testosterone levels. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that putting men on testosterone-blockers is going to make them less dangerous.

    Correlation ≠ causation!

    What will be the other effects?

    The other effect is that men will have their bodily autonomy violated. Women have been suffering a related torment from patriarchal governments banning their access to abortion. Generally, women’s bodily autonomy has been systematically disregarded, and they have suffered through bizarre mutilations and “treatments” aimed at making them more palatable to men.


    I gotta be blunt with you: I typically let stuff like this slide. I understand that a lot of women and other vagina-owners have been put through a tremendous amount of pain by men, so I’m usually willing to give you space to vent. And if it’s worth anything to you, I’m sorry that this stuff still happens, and we need to take concrete action to prevent rape and femicide.

    But you wrote a really detailed paragraph defending sex-based eugenics. The thing about eugenics is that it never really went away. Seriously, go scroll through Reddit and see how long it takes before some “bleeding heart liberal” goes on a tirade about how people they don’t like need to be castrated. The world is absolutely flooded with eugenicists ready to torture and murder people, and there’s no telling what suffering they’ll impart on humanity if we don’t challenge them wherever they pop up.

    It is especially irritating to see someone who claims to be a comrade express views like this. It makes me less confident to call myself an anarchist when my views are associated with eugenics. We already have a tremendous amount of ill will generated by “anarcho”-capitalists and “anarcho”-primitivists; we really do not need more bad takes.

    Now I would prefer it if you dropped the eugenics, but if you really can’t drop the eugenics then at least stop dragging anarchists through the mud. I’m sorry if I’ve been harsh…but just know that I’ll be equally as harsh in your defense when the eugenicists come to neuter you.