@kasdeya Ah, good old "just". We are "just" doing this. It is very simple, "just" go ahead and give it this and that. Surely anyone who doesn't get it will feel better, having read how simple it is to "just" do this!

Sorry, loaded response. But ever since I became aware of the pattern, I've been trying to make a conscious effort to remove that work from my tech vocabulary and seeing it causes a Reaction™.

@fargate this is a really good point tbh - I might want to be more conscious of my own use of the word “just” as well since you’re right that it really comes off like it’s saying “this is so simple for me, so surely it’s incredibly simple and easy for you too” which is a very harmful sentiment when it comes to tech

Fedi doesn’t really do this from what I’ve encountered, but holy shit Stack Overflow and reddit are overrun with this attitude and it’s infuriating

some insecure man will be like “how dare you waste my time with this” as if he carries a personal obligation to reply to every question on a website he chose to visit

@kasdeya the concept of “common sense” is absolutely a way to shift blame – it’s why it’s so prevalent in neglectful parents to suggest that things that they are tasked with teaching are instead some abstractly available form of knowledge which can be somehow acquired without teaching. presumably the person without the “common sense” should be gleaning this information through contextual clues via exposure to others. this assumption is ableist and, when employed by someone charged with the care of another, frequently blames victims of abuse which tend to be isolated from others (in particular, children).

if someone is asking a good faith question online and you - personally - do not want to offer help, the correct response is not any of these:

• tell them that they’re lazy and should have searched for answers harder
• pick apart the framing of their question as a way to criticize them
• act condescending while refusing to answer
• tell them that they should never need to know the answer to their question
• derail the conversation by making it about how much smarter you are

in fact if you encounter a good faith question online and you do not want to offer help, the correct response is:

• Fuck Off. literally just Fuck Off and do anything else. navigate to any other webpage. watch a video essay. visit your local library. learn quilting. do anything else in the world other than replying to that question

@tempest that extremely makes sense tbh

I’ve been thinking about trying a different distro instead of Arch. someone recommended Linux Mint and I can’t remember who that was, but apparently it’s a lot more user-friendly. but with that said, I also don’t want to put in even more work on installing and configuring a whole new distro and learning its quirks too lol. but I might do that if Arch keeps annoying me or if it suddenly breaks itself again

drone network that presents a single collective serial number to those outside the hive, despite each drone being numbered for internal asset tracking purrposes. whenever a drone communicates with the outside world, its serial number is replaced with the network's collective serial number in outbound messages, and vice versa for inbound messages.

this process is known as 'network address translation'

still not sure if I hate Arch in particular or Linux in general but I certainly hate something about this situation and it’s mostly the smug assumption that every single user has learned this shitty-ass distro so deeply that they just Know every single package in the entire repo by heart, when the only way to browse the repo is through arcane bullshit commands like pacman -Ss that often dump thousands of unfilterable lines to my terminal

I love how Arch can just be like “oh btw I’m missing this extremely basic functionality because you didn’t explicitly tell me to install the package that includes it. how were you supposed to know to install the package? the fun part is you weren’t”

“how are you supposed to figure out that this problem means you need a package, and the exact name of the package to install? idk try googling for 20-30 minutes and maybe a random website will help you”