⚜︎ arscyni.cc: a sentient stack of stardust pondering nothing and everything.

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: December 3rd, 2025

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  • it explains so much of these people’s behavior

    Indeed. For me, realizing the cause of problems continues to be instrumental to keep things in perspective when solutions are often too complex to contemplate. However, in this case the conclusion is clear: a wealth/power cap has to become normalized. The inverse of vaccinations, you take money away so the indefinite growth mind virus doesn’t grab hold to infect or impact society.


    Thank you for having invested time and thought into my essay, it makes it all worthwhile, truly.


  • arsCynic@piefed.socialtoFuck AI@lemmy.worldthis is some sad shit
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    2 months ago

    It actually does cause brain damage. I mentioned it in an essay (What if I paid for all my free software?):

    For one, power causes brain damage which renders rich people literally incapable of knowing what is best for others:

    “Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.”

    “And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy.” ―Power Causes Brain Damage, by Jerry Useem for The Atlantic.‍[16]



  • So far I’ve encountered the smoothest OS experience with Arch-based EndeavourOS. Perhaps twice a year something breaks for which the forum or Arch Wiki usually provided the fix within a day. The other 363 days I simply update in the morning/evening and all is well—sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm and yay --noconfirm.

    Conversely, on Debian, it drives me nuts that one is prevented from updating even if one public key from one unimportant repository is missing or something. This troubleshooting is way harder for beginners than most things I’ve needed to do to fix my EndeavourOS install.

    I’ve got a complete Linux beginner to start off with EndeavourOS without problems. She’s even troubleshooting and fixing suddenly non-working Steam games by herself.

    In any case, any Linux is better than Windoze. Try different distributions if you’ve got a spare PC to test with and see what fits you. For the greatest peace of mind, always have two or more hard drives or have a directory that instantly syncs to a cloud to separate the OS from crucial data one cannot lose in case something goes awry. As for desktop environments (DE), I started off with Xfce about ten years ago, used that most of the time. Then fell for the KDE Plasma hype for about year—they’re doing great stuff, but a bit too bloated and buggy for my liking, as well as trying to have a KDE app for everything instead of acknowledging some other software is simply better. One can’t be the best at everything. Anyway, then I tested multiple DEs because all of them have exclusively useful features, and the perfect mix between the most prominent ones (Xfce, Plasma, Gnome) I’ve found to be Cinnamon, the default on Linux Mint. For me that’s the perfect beginner friendly DE that also remains highly configurable/extensible to suit experienced users, without being overwhelming/bloated to anyone.

    Have fun and build whatever you want in your new awesome sandbox. Screw M$ without restraint nor compassion.