Is there anything the rest of us can do to cultivate such a mindset?
For cardio it’s basically “go slow”. The main source of discomfort is the exertion.
An easy long run with good music is quite meditative and enjoyable.
When your legs hurt and you’re wheezing your lungs out, not so much.
It depends. Running and lifting I enjoy the results but the activity is boring, I never got runners high.
Jazzercise was fun fun fun though, any sort of dance aerobics like that is perfect because have to pay just the right amount of attention to it - enough that I can’t think about other things, but not so much that I really have to think hard about the movements. I wish there were still classes by me.
Yoga is fun too, in a different way. It takes concentration, always adjustments to posture, and it’s very empowering to be able to do handstands or other arm balances, it’s challenging in a good way and the reminders to coordinate your breath with movement is helpful.
So for me it depends on what the workout is but sure, I like moving physically, enjoy it and don’t do it only for results.
I love GNOME for everything except FreeCAD, KiCAD, Inkscape, and to a lesser extent GIMP, when working on a 1080p 17" laptop, on Wayland. There is far too much space taken up by the window header bars and the font line spacing is useless for managing complex trees. I always feel claustrophobic with these applications. Everything else feels fantastic with GNOME. I usually use the flatpak versions of these other apps and force them to use the built in KDE version of each app with my desktop running GNOME.
Also, do not delete the Ninite installer exe from your computer. It comes handy in updating all the apps at once. Just double click the installer again.
Problem is, I’m currently wasting away due to severe anemia, and in the last 2 months, I’ve gone from deadlifting 500lbs to barely being able to carry in groceries.
Btw the topic is ads. There are other forms of sneaky marketing like altering search results or placement of goods on shelves in a store, but it’s not that hard to be wary of those too.
A very simple example: advertising makes you aware of brands. Just knowing that a brand exists might be enough to influence your decision in the future. Think about it: are you more likely to choose the brand you heard about, or the brand you don’t even know exists?
The only times I choose a brand is based on reviews or personal experience. And I may still go against that based on price or other need.
This week I bought a
spoilerSandisk
SD card and a
spoilerKingston
card reader. That’s because all cards except this one have always failed me in some way at some point. I might have been swayed by
spoiler"extreme pro"
branding to a degree, but again that’s just based on my experience with the brand, and the reviews. Also the price difference was negligible. As for the reader, well it was the cheapest one.
As for the store where I got it, also based on experience and convenience. It’s a major retailer now, but I used to buy from them when they were a tiny back alley store. And I still looked in 2 brick and mortar stores first.
On the same day I also went in the mall (the closest one) to look for a few things like swimming trunks and a belt pack. I was aware of brands but why would I care about them? Mostly they just make things too expensive.
As for other stuff like food or medicine, I mostly buy store brands, or look at ingredients, or occasionally randomly try new stuff. There’s usually no difference between a detergent from a big brand or the store brand.
I also teach other people that.
As such the only kind of marketing that may affect me are sales, and then I have to actively be in a store and need the thing anyway. So that’s not much of an ad, that’s just shopping with common sense.
I feel you and share your mindset. But most people don’t think about that stuff that way. And ads are not targeted at people like you to begin with, their goal is to reach amd influence the most people possible, but not all of them. Whatever works on the majority is a success.
I always buy the cheapest option on the shelf (in terms of food). Usually that’s the store brand for the store I am in. For electronics I usually just do a lot of research (Reddit, looking into age of the company, picture reviews and 1 star complaints) and ask friends. I’m sure that the “ads” shown in my research sway me sometimes though when I’m truly clueless about something and just have to take people’s word for it.
Sometimes, though, the people you’re trusting to be objective have been swayed by ads themselves! It’s honestly impossible IMO to be completely unaffected by ads because of that. Even if you never see an ad in your life – the people around you have.
I always buy the cheapest option on the shelf (in terms of food).
The question is not necessarily which option you pick, but that you feel the need for a particular product at all. Without advertising, for example, people would buy far fewer sodas. I’m pretty sure the same goes for tech gadgets.
That’s a question of consumerism in general, not necessarily of ads.
Why is it different? Because if we shrug and say that well, we buy unnecessarily shit anyway, then we are even more likely to buy based on ads and other marketing ploys.
Being aware and skeptical of actual advertisements, on the other hand, can make you more wary about buying too much.
I mean, if you watch TV ads, don’t use adblock etc, you’re just used to the whole ecosystem and are just going with the flow. But if you block ads everywhere and then suddenly get hit by one, you definitely realize how stupid and evil they are. Plus you have more time to look for other sneaky marketing tactics.
I have two that have stuck with me most my adult life-- and I find that they apply frequently.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
-- Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty Speech, 1944
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
It's funny because lately I have been applying that quote to people being terrified of "AI". (I hate that we use that word to describe stuff like LLMs, but that's another topic.)
There are countless points in history where a technological advance has rendered some human labor less or no longer needed. There's nothing to be done about it; that's how progress works-- it's why we're not mostly farmers anymore.
The solution to technology rendering human labor less or no longer needed is for society to divorce the need to work from living a comfortable life. It's certainly not to try and hold back or eliminate the technology solely to protect human labor.
But don’t you feel like this is the one that we’ve been warned about a lot? I’m not concerned about losing my job; I’m worried about being killed by M3gan.
An old boss of mine would find people who left their computer logged in and would send an email to the department from it saying “I love you all so much!”
I worked in a different office and didn’t realize that’s what was happening. I just thought the Russian guy was happy to be in America.
One day when I was visiting home office I ran into him in the elevator. My lead introduced me to him. I blurted out, “Oh the guy who sends the I love everyone!” emails.
He promptly started swearing and cursing our manager and saying what things he would do to him if he caught him in a dark alley and ranted for the duration of the elevator ride. Then shook my hand and said “Nice to meet you!” and went on with his day.
All of the above. Depends. Speakers for when I want to share with others, or no one else will be disturbed. Noise canceling headphones when I want to isolate myself from the surroundings. Ear buds when I want to be portable.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
I was turned the wrong way as a baby and the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck, choking me to death. Doctors had to perform an emergency c-section. In doing so they cut my face with the scalpel in two spots. Almost didn’t make it but have these cool scars.
EDIT: where were these experts during my birth? As the commenters pointed out, I wasn’t choking, but dying nonetheless.
You cannot choke when you are still connected with umbilical cord. You don’t have to breathe. EDIT: Ignore this comment, I was wrong. In my defense I have to say that this is what my biology teacher teached us, that babies cannot choke with their umbilical cord. But she is also antivax, so I shouldn’t have believed her.
Apparently this is common. It’s not a good thing and obviously an emergency as they wanted it not wrapped around my neck. Regardless I was not going to make it.
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