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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • We humans just do a bad job explaining evolution to the general public, be it at schools, by science communicators, etc. Most laypeople want to believe in evolution so in the end they just kinda think it works like magic or that it’s guided by some kind of intelligence (whatever that means for them: divinity, we live in a simulation, an invisible natural algorithm that governs everything, the Universe itself as a sleeping deity, etc).

    When I was explained evolution as a kid (granted, around the year 2000) they made it seem evolution was an intelligent mechanism that somehow chose the best traits for the survival of a species based on its environment, as if this invisible mechanism had somehow the ability to analyze its environment, reason creatively and predict future scenarios. It was only on my mid 20s when I happened to read an article out of curiosity that I got a bit of a more clear picture. There’s gotta be a better way to explain it to laypeople: maybe that it’s more of a massive, long, non-directed trial-and-error process where there’s not an actual intention or intelligence, it just happens. Individuals with critically bad traits die because of those traits and the ones with better or non-harmful traits live and get to have descendants. But there’s not an intelligence guiding this, it just looks like an intelligence to some of us because we humans tend to apply personification to everything.


  • People here are just gonna tell you to leave (I have done so myself) but if you can’t for whatever reason something that can help is an extension like Blue Blocker which automatically blocks (or you can set it to mute) blue check marks as you encounter them. That way you don’t give them money for their horrible baits. While I was at Twitter waiting until the people I followed shared their new socials (sadly most went to BlueSky instead of Mastodon so I lost them anyway) I used Blue Blocker in that manner. You can set exceptions for certain accounts tho I didn’t, it mercilessly muted all checkmarks from my feed and revealed the bare Twitter behind. The result was somewhat like old Twitter at first but eventually it does get kinda slow as most of the valuable accounts become inactive. On the bright side that made leaving so much easier, so if you want to leave but need a motivator there’s one that might help you.






  • These are all hunches. I’ll add my own: he was initially just posturing about buying it but when he was forced to do it he was motivated by many things (his personal dislike of Twitter’s userbase -which was only partly leftist though it was a very vocal and hip even if sometimes unhinged and somewhat puritanical brand of leftism-, what he perceives happened to his daughter, the Saudi interests, his “I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” personality, etc.). Motivated to do what? Well initially it seems to me he wanted to transform it into more of a right-wing Elon cult (and he somewhat succeeded with the right-wing part). But the mass reaction was a destruction of his reputation. Before this he was usually clowned just by leftists but now it’s by a good chunk of the general public. My hunch is that he has started to like more and more the idea that he is “sabotaging Twitter from the inside” as revenge for the aforementioned reasons or just “for the lulz” (it seems he likes to think he does grave things for the lulz, maybe it’s desperation to fit in or cope). Wether this intentional sabotage is something that crossed his mind from the very start or something he picked up from his fans (“he… he can’t be taking these kinds of decisions, right guys? He’s a genius! He must be doing it all on purpose! He wants to tank Twitter”) it does sound like something that mends his ego a bit and also the only move that could maybe help restore his old PR image of brilliant player, real life Tony Stark.







  • I used to do that but as I get older it’s harder to stay awake and just brute force it. I started using a sleep routine I found online that’s basically: 1 hour before the time I want to fall asleep at I’ll turn off all screens (computer, cellphone). Have a warm, relaxing bath. Optionally write in a paper whatever is in my head (like stuff to do tomorrow) so that I can take it out of my mind. Dim the lights if you can. Optionally meditate. Then read a book until it’s the time I want to fall asleep at. Go to bed, if I didn’t fall asleep in 20 mins then read for 30 min more and try again until eventually you fall asleep. Works pretty well and fixes my sleep schedule in a couple of nights (something unthinkable for me for most of my life).

    But having that fixed doesn’t magically help everything else. I find out that when I wake up at morning it’s still dreadfully difficult to do whatever I’m supposed to do. That’s why I’m looking for morning routines to help me just start doing it without getting distracted. And reset routines in case I do become unfocused so that I don’t just straight up lose the rest of the day if possible.




  • For me it’s just that

    1. I don’t have unlimited time to scroll through stuff I’m not interested in. In my previous post I mentioned the few things that kinda annoy me but there’s a lot more stuff that I feel neutral about but I’m just not into. Like sports. There was an unending amount of sports subs at Reddit for each team of every discipline and after a couple of years of browsing /r/all I realized I saved more time if I just hover+clicked them once to filter them instead of reading the title every time.

    2. I feel like clearing up my /r/all from many big subs I wasn’t into allowed me to find a lot of interesting, smaller communities.


  • The things that annoy me about some Lemmy users are the same things that annoyed me about some Reddit users (lots of frequently upvoted meme subs that don’t work for me, posting ragebait, political compass subs, etc) and I’m dealing with them the exact same way I dealt with them at Reddit throughout 10 years: block and move on. The best thing about this type of forum is that you can heavily personalize your feed by filtering/blocking/muting and you’ll still have some reasonably good quality content (which includes both your niches and the potential to discover either general or specific stuff you’ll like) thanks to the upvote system.