Personally, I’m in the camp that believes he is buying accounts or paying individuals to play accounts for him 90% of the time.

Elon Musk’s Video Game Character Caught Leveling While He Was at Inauguration

This is exactly on the nose. It reminds of articles I’ve read about the oldest continuously operating businesses in the world. Here’s an example: https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/management-leadership/japan-oldest-businesses/

Note that one thing in common between many of these businesses, some of which have been around for nearly 1,500 years(!), is that they are family owned and operated. In other words, they prioritized stability over rapid growth. I feel that there’s a huge lesson in this.

Discredited may be an overstatement on my part, but it is a flawed measure of someone’s complete abilities and strengths.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity_as_a_measure_of_intelligence

While IQ tests are generally considered to measure some forms of intelligence, they may fail to serve as an accurate measure of broader definitions of human intelligence inclusive of, for example, creativity and social intelligence. For this reason, psychologist Wayne Weiten argues that their construct validity must be carefully qualified, and not be overstated. According to Weiten, “IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable.” [emphasis mine]

There are other criticisms in that section of the Wikipedia article too.

I think the first thing to recognize is that there is absolutely no single measure of intelligence. IQ scores are (a) seriously flawed and discredited (and narrowly focused measure of human abilities). Human intellectual powers have many dimensions. Someone may be weak in speech and articulation but on the other hand be an absolute genius mechanically, artistically, or in some other aspect of human intellectual pursuit.

There seem to be several theories/concepts that posit this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model

I hope so too.

Thanks for helping me understand.

If any other instance were to have such behaviour collectively, they would probably get defederated as well.

I suppose that’s reasonable.

That LW, SJW, lemmy.ca, feddit.org (https://feddit.org/post/41472) and smaller instances like startrek.website (https://startrek.website/post/15928569) all defederate them shows something.

Not necessarily when the topic is anti-western sentiment, since much of the West is pretty ignorant about why much of the rest of the world feels that way.

Another example I saw a few weeks ago, with things like “the French deserve a thousand charlie hebdos” (terrorist attack) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/24552489.

Ok, that’s the best example I’ve seen so far of what you have been talking about. Wishing terrorism on all French people is going too far. It would have been much more productive for them to take the opportunity to remind and educate people about France’s (and other Western powers’) terrible legacy in the middle east instead.

Nice for 0.19.5, let’s see how it goes!

For sure!

I had read that lemmy.world pre-emptive defederation with hexbear post a while back with interest, and shook my head. The only thing I’ve seen so far that seems like a legitimate complaint is the posting of the pig poop balls emoji and perhaps excessive emojis in general. Neither of those seem like grounds for blocking a whole instance instead of just banning individuals for posting pig poop balls.

Thanks, I hadn’t realized that 0.19.5 was very stable or that SDF was among the last to upgrade to that. I have posted a question to see what their plans are.

I was wondering the same thing about why they hadn’t upgraded, and after a little searching, I found out that there have been some bugs introduced that have not yet been completely resolved by 0.19.7. Supposedly 0.19.8 will fix them, so I’m hoping that that’s why they haven’t upgraded yet. If that’s why they haven’t upgraded yet, I appreciate the focus on stability.

Thanks for the links. Unfortunately, they did not answer my questions. The first link is a string of complaints without evidence. I didn’t read the entire thread but read many of the top posts. The second one is the same thing. A lot of complaints of nothing. I still have the impression that people complain about hexbear because it challenges their beliefs. What I’m really trying to understand is what’s so egregious about hexbear that would make it necessary to protect people new to Lemmy and entire major instances from them. If you could link me to specific comments with evidence and explanations of patterns, it might help me understand.

I still prefer lemmy.sdf.org. They also have an empty blocklist (from what I can tell - the version of Lemmy they’re on I don’t think splits it off into a separate tab), they’re also from Oregon from what I recall, have 2.5x more monthly active users than lemmy.today, and they’re a non-profit that’s larger than and longer than only their Lemmy instance.

Again, I don’t get the hexbear issue. I wish someone could explain to me what the problem actually is.

Thanks, I edited the post and noted that lemmy.zip was UK-based after I originally posted.

https://discuss.online/ is US based and just defederated hexbear

That’s a negative for me. I don’t want anyone blocking instances on my behalf unless those instances are doing blatantly illegal stuff.

Content accessibility can be an issue due to the way instances only fetch remote communities if a local user is subscribed. Also, having a larger userbase usually means that the instance has been around long enough to show some good track record for the instance

Yeah, that’s true. I did use some of the great Lemmy community directory sites to find some communities that weren’t already subscribed from my instance. I understand that better community discoverability is planned for upcoming Lemmy versions.

Look through this list and sort by monthly active users (MAU): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

The server location info doesn’t seem 100% accurate, but it should still help. I would suggest either the instance I use, lemmy.sdf.org (run by an American, technology-oriented non-profit org), or perhaps lemmy.zip, which also looks good - I started looking into it but haven’t fully vetted it yet.

By the way, I don’t think that being in a larger instance has much benefit, by the way. In fact, I tried one of the larger ones and found that it suffered performance-wise, so I went back. You can get pretty much everything from every other Lemmy instance, especially one that doesn’t block and is not blocked by other instances (lemmy.sdf.org also applies here).

Edit: lemmy.zip seems to be subject to the laws of the UK, according to their code of conduct.

Disclaimer: I’m not a social worker or other mental health professional or anything in any way related to those.

I’m a bit over twice your age though, so I’m speaking based on my experience in life.

There’s a lot of things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a nurse, I wanted to go to university/college, I wanted be a programmer ect ect but I just couldn’t.

All those occupations you listed require very specific types of intelligence. I fully agree with the poster above who said that there are many different types of intelligence. To expand on that a little, someone may be the best car mechanic or cook in town but be a terrible programmer or nurse. And vice-versa, a great programmer may be a terrible nurse, mechanic, cook, etc. The idea that IQ is anywhere near a full measure of someone’s abilities is truly, completely wrong.

Don’t let the fact that you “couldn’t” do those things stop you from trying a myriad of other occupations where you may be successful and find fulfillment. If you believe that you can only be successful or fulfilled by being good at one of the latest occupations trending in media, please don’t. Someone can be successful and fulfilled doing pretty much just about anything. Some examples: building trades, mechanic, driver, janitor, cashier, cook, bartender, hairdresser, anything. FYI, I’ve heard that in France, people in any occupation demand and get the respect they deserve for being experts in whatever occupation they chose for themselves. Just as an example, my hairdresser told me an amusing story of arriving in Paris and stopping at a fruit stall where she promptly started to squeeze the fruit like we do in the US. The fruit stall minder literally smacked the fruit out of her hand and selected the fruit for her. He was the expert in fruit and she had no business picking the fruit herself.

It sounds like your main issues probably stem from your father’s neglect and abuse and perhaps your ADHD and other learning disabilities, not from your IQ. You would do well to address your drug addiction first with whatever treatment options are available to you (this would also impact your IQ test scores, but do yourself a favor and forget about IQ). After that, or maybe at the same time, if you didn’t graduate high school, work towards getting your GED. After that, enroll in community college and take whatever variation of “succeeding in college” (study skills) and “career exploration” classes they offer as your very first classes. After that, many options should present themselves to you in community college. Focus on the careers that you can do with either only a high school / GED diploma, or that plus trade school or community college. Many community colleges also provide mental health counseling and assistance finding jobs. Take advantage of any opportunity you encounter.

I, like apparently many others here, believe in you! The answer to your question is yes, there is hope for you!

Ah, yes, I forgot about game jams! They sound like they would really help you spend some concentrated time on game dev and design and progress quickly. Thanks.

You’re welcome. Maybe you don’t have to make all 20, but I think the idea is just to get your feet wet with game development with simple stuff first (baby steps), rather than diving into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. Maybe you’ll feel you have the hang of it after making a handful of them.

It’s essentially the “how do you eat an elephant?” question, isn’t it? Hint, if you’re not familiar with the reference, the answer is “one bite at a time.”

I’m not a game developer (yet), but would like to try it, so I’ve done a little reading about the topic. There are a couple things I’ve seen advocated that have made a lot of sense to me:

1. Don’t start with your dream game. Start with either tiny games to test specific aspects of your bigger game, or first practice developing clones of many relatively simple classic games, like pac-man, etc. This is a good resource I’ve found to help guide the latter approach: https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/challenge/

2. Don’t spend a lot of time on either programming or creating art before you playtest the heck out of your game, preferably with many people. This is what I’ve seen advocated in a popular game design textbook: https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com/ - this makes sense since the same kind of advice applies to any kind of software development and design - verify that your potential audience is actually interested in what you are trying to make before spending a ton of effort making it. I’ve seen very similar advice given in the context of solo app development and even business startups.

Good luck and have fun!

I totally understand! After some people mentioned Sensodyne on this thread, I looked it up and indeed some Sensodyne “flavors” (but not all?) are SLS-free. From what I recall, there really is an ingredient in Sensodyne that reduces sensitivity. I don’t know about gum/cavity issues though. Maybe your dentist can confirm. Take care!

After JASON discontinued the toothpaste I had been using for quite a while, I found Burt’s Bees and liked it. However, I recently found out by scanning it with the Yuka app that the Burt’s Bees paste had some other bad ingredient. So now I’ve switched to Hello toothpaste which seems to be pretty clean. If you ever get interested in trying another paste I would suggest Hello.

Good idea, after having just spent quite a while setting mine and troubleshooting them (first time samba user).

I haven’t used the tool below, but I’ve seen it be recommended. Might it be kind of what you’re looking for?

https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-file-sharing

True story: I bought my current printer from a homeless man. I had actually found the printer in a box that someone had left on the curb across the street the night before, so I knew it wasn’t stolen. I was going to take it home but was walking away from home at the time and didn’t get a chance that night. The next day I saw it with the homeless man across the street and offered to buy it.