This is super cool, thanks for sharing. You’ve reminded me that I wanted to make or buy an hourglass — visual timers are useful if you have ADHD like me

That’s probably who I’m remembering; I recently discovered his work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m from the UK, and whilst things are less politically dire here than the US, it’s still pretty grim. Both the Conservatives and Labour seem reluctant to actually meaningfully tax the rich, even as the working class (and to a lesser extent, the middle class) are being squeezed by a cost of living crisis and general hopelessness. Parties like Reform are taking the racist “things are bad because we have too many immigrants” and I’ve recently realised that I need to stop resenting people for being taken in by that rhetoric; people are desperate and there aren’t people in the mainstream pushing for alternatives (besides Reform). These people have a lot in common with me, such as recognising that we’re being fucked but the system, but we just disagree on the solution. It’s hard, but ultimately necessary to be able to be in solidarity with people like Reform’ voters

I can’t remember the particular phrase that was used, but I heard an argument recently that we need to be more like politicians going on an interview and ensure that we’re more on message. For example, it’s fairly obvious by now that economically, the problem is wealth inequality, but I see fairly surprisingly few people discussing that.

I agree, it’s one of my favourite internet things.

You may already be aware of this, but on the off chance that you’re not, here’s a cool thing: https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

France have made this law, I think. More countries should follow their example

Yeah, respect to the dude

This feels like an apt microcosm of a lot of accessibility issues — how even when people do what they can to make things accessible (such as adding alt text), fragmentation and complexity leads to an unequal distribution of accessibility. Standardisation can help, but I’ve also seen projects that lose sight of ultimate aims (such as but not limited to greater accessibility) when they treat standardisation of protocols etc as a goal in and of itself. When it gets to that point, I feel like we’re more likely to see a proliferation of standards rather than a consolidation. It gets messy, is my point.

I find it super interesting as someone who has a few different (and sometimes competing) access needs, because some of the most upsetting times that I’ve faced inaccessible circumstances have been where there was no-one at fault.

My gosh, these are incredible. Thank you for sharing them. I cried at Select Star; that is legitimate art.

I think there’s never going to be a true consensus on things like this.

A friend who is a trans woman told me that sometimes when people say “hey guys” or similar, she often feels an instinctive rush of dysphoria (especially if it’s a context where she’s the only woman in the group), but that she realises it is often intended in a gender neutral manner, so it’s not reasonable for her to feel upset at this. She considers the upset that she feels at this to be “her problem” so to speak, and doesn’t expect people to change how they speak. Since this discussion though, I have tried to be more mindful of it when using words like “dude” or “guy” as collective terms.

I don’t remember it, because I am learning of this for the first time, which I am very glad to do. Thanks!

I know what you mean, but comments like yours always make me feel sad. Like, what is justice in this context? A just world would be one in which their son is still alive. Justice died with him.

My own experience of litigating an injustice sticks with me. No amount of compensation can ever undo a wrong that should’ve never been allowed to happen.

I do think you’re pissin in the wind, though.

You may be right, but hope has gotten me much farther than defeatism has. And I’ve never been clinging so desperately to hope as now, when the US is being governed by such abominable lickspittles. (I confess that my previous comment about creativity in insults caused me to be a bit extra here).

Besides, I’ve had plenty of times when I’ve been foolish and saying things that I didn’t realise were harmful. Humans are incredibly easily swayed by group norms, and this is often for the worse. However, I’ve found that there can be a huge impact from people saying “hey, not cool”. I don’t have to be someone who changes any minds, just someone who can feel like they tried, regardless of if the tides change in the direction I’m pushing.

Plus, you’d actually be surprised at how many times I’ve had productive conversations on Lemmy from engaging earnestly with someone being aggressive. One of the reasons I like hanging out here is that I feel much more like I’m talking to people, in part because of how much more I see people apologising or being mature in dicey conversations. I certainly wouldn’t say that I have good results every time, but it’s often enough that it’s a key part of what I enjoy on this platform. Especially because I have enjoyed this wee conversation that you and I have had, independent of the person I was originally speaking to — you also count as one of the 'surprisingly pleasant" interactions that spring forth from challenging someone (especially as your first comment made me expect you to be far more adversarial than you have been).

Small wins, but I’ll take them

No, no, I know what you mean. I can see how my phrasing was confusing though. I watched the shows you mentioned when they first came out, but I think that I would cringe far more today than I did back then. Ignorance is bliss (for those privileged enough to be ignorant)

Oh yeah, I can imagine; I feel like I would cringe if I rewatched those shows (especially as I was less visibly disabled back when I watched them the first time, and so hadn’t experienced random ableist slurs directed at me by strangers on the street).

Whenever someone mentions that the 70s and 80s were 40-50 years ago, I usually feel uncomfortable at the inexorable passage of time and my place within it; however when I consider how far we’ve come since then though, across many different domains, I feel slightly heartened — when the reality is that progress happens a trickle at a time, I feel less small and overwhelmed at my own capacity to make change happen.

In the context of talking about people, that word has everything to do with the people who it has been used as a slur against, including, but not limited to “mentally handicapped”.

OP was clearly using the phrase as a derogatory term for people, and the only dictionary sense that fits there is the one that has ableist allusions. If the context of use were different, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. For example, I wouldn’t have a problem with the phrase “The PCM responds by retarding ignition timing—either until the knock disappears, or until maximum spark retard is reached.” or “The Friar’s alibi finds him at the right place but always a moment in retard”.

That you’re taking such a literal reading here makes me wonder whether your comment was made in bad faith such that I shouldn’t bother wasting my time, but I’m hoping that there could actually be some meaningful dialogue here (after all, there’s a reason why I didn’t just report OP and move on). It might not affect your opinion, but I have direct experience of the r-slur that has been directed at me (not infrequently) when I am people read visibly disabled. I’m not “mentally handicapped”, but as a word, it has grown far beyond it’s original context of use. I say this to give context on my original comment — I’m not just going about tone policing people for fun: I commented what I did because it hurts to see that word thrown at people when part of what makes it effective as an insult is its attachment to people like me.

Once upon a time, the r-slur was actually considered one of the more appropriate words to describe people who are intellectually disabled. If I were alive in that era, I’d have likely been left to rot in an institution, and allowed only a fraction of the independence I’m able to have nowadays. But times change, and so does our understanding of the baggage that words pick up.

To draw an analogy, it wouldn’t be appropriate to call a black person the n-word, on the basis that it derives from the Spanish word for “black”. That etymology isn’t wrong, but it’s still missing the forest for the trees.

Take your pick — There’s a whole world of insults that don’t involve punching down at marginalised groups. I realise that may sound hyperbolic, but I say it because I’m someone who is sometimes the recipient of that slur, and it’s jarring to see it in spaces like this. I know that in this case, it wasn’t at me, but a key part of why insults like this carry weight is because of the comparison it makes to people like me (even if only implicitly).

My hope is that we might be more creative with our insults when solidarity is our best weapon against these assholes

I can’t actually access the full paper (either via university access, or Anna’s Archive/sciDB), so I can’t comment on specifics, but their extended abstract mentions that that they used “Cox proportional hazards models, general linear regression, and Poisson regression models were applied to assess the associations between red meat intake and different cognitive outcomes.”

Speaking as a biochemist (i.e. someone well versed in reading scientific papers from the life sciences, but who does not have particular training or experience with the quite different context of clinical medicine research), it looks fairly legit, in that those statistical methods are typical of what I’d expect for something like this. That’s vague, but it passes the sniff test, I suppose.

I was initially dubious of the journal/research on the basis of being unable to access the paper (and not knowing anything of this journal), but I feel comfortable in dismissing those concerns after have a wee gander at the journal itself (it seems fairly prominent and well respected). Having not read the paper (nor being familiar with this specific area of research), I am far less able to judge the paper itself, but at least it’s not a case of dismissing the research outright because of the journal being sus.

Without knowing your background, it’s hard to gauge whether this explainer on some of the stats methods mentioned above would be appreciated, but here you go, just in case.

It would be great if you could avoid using ableist slurs to refer to people you don’t like

The main reason I like vi/vim is that if you’re having to use multiple different computers (such as if one is a sysadmin, or in my case, does scientific computing), because if you’re running on Linux, you can be confident that vi/vim will be on it.

For personal use, I’ve been using emacs, but I can’t recommend that without feeling like I’m suggesting you try some heroin. I enjoy emacs because of it’s complexity and how much power it gives me to modify it. It’s very easy to fall into feature creep and over complexity though. That’s why I can’t recommend it — it’s good for me because I am a chronic tinkerer, and having something to fuck around with is an outlet for that.

I would recommend learning the basics of vim though. As you highlight, getting back to your current level of productivity would take a while, even if you loved vim and committed to it wholeheartedly. It is possible to try it out with little commitment though, for the perspective. If you’re on a machine that has vim installed already, try the vimtutor command, which will start the ~30 min long inbuilt tutorial for vim. I liked it for giving me perspective on what on earth vim even was.

I know you don’t use it anymore, but I just want to fistbump you re: sublime text. I really loved that as a basic text editor that was, for me, just a slightly nicer notepad.