We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team

Spurious reports, anyone?

It’s a little bit like Satan telling someone he’s a big fan of their work.

Challenge accepted.

If this is a sensitive topic, definitely feel free not to answer, but what was the youngest age at which one of your father’s official partners gave birth?

Are all 27 full siblings, or were there any half siblings in there?

Was your family fundamentalist Christian? If so, what denomination/sect?

Like someone else in this thread mentioned, Elon. I hated him well before he started doing really assholeish stuff publicly. I had plenty of liberal friends who thought he was cool and edgy and bought not-a-flamethrowers and Tesla cars. When the soccer team got trapped in a cave in Thailand and Elon called the rescue team pedophiles, I was like “I knew that guy had to be a total asshole”. Of course, now I know that was not even the tip of the iceberg.

I think I was ahead of the curve hating on “generative AI”.

Bill Gates. I hated him for being a big part of the rise of proprietary software as an institution long before the right wing conspiracy theorists started making up bullshit about him. Which is annoying because now I have to tell people I hate Gates but not because I think he’s putting 5G microchips in vaccines or whatever bullshit.

Facebook is probably a pretty good example. I quit Facebook in like 2008. Not that nobody was talking about how evil Facebook was at the time, but their evil wasn’t really as well known at the time, I don’t think.

I’m realizing a lot of these are technology-related.

Would it be a proper shitpost if nobody shat on it?

stifled distressed noises

If you want to watch it

Pass, thanks.

They don’t make a Clozapine big enough.

zen meditation… trying to illicit vivid imagery in the mind… it sounded like a whole lot of junk mind flailing.

See, but, this is exactly the kind of attitude I’m trying to address in my comment. People judging other people’s meditation practices. You didn’t specifically go so far (at least not explicitly) as to call it “not meditation”, but you’re still judging the practice without really understanding it. (Not that I think you should be judging it even if you did understand it.)

The practice you’re describing might have been something called “kasiṇa”. And it’s known to “illicit vivid imagery.” There are multiple kinds of kasina practices, but they originate from the Pali Canon itself in works such as the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga^[1][2].

That’s as meditation as meditation gets. If you’re going to call that “junk mind flailing”, the Buddha would like a word.

Now, I don’t know for sure kasina was what you’re describing. But it’s also beside the point. I don’t think meditators really have a leg to stand on to claim that even something like sitting quietly, eyes closed, and playing the whole original Star Wars trilogy in their head from memory is “bad meditation” or “not meditation” just because they judgmentally can’t imagine it “exercising” a “muscle”/“mental skill”/etc. (Daniel Ingram, one of the co-authors of the fire kasina site I cited earlier and a huge advocate for fire kasina as a practice, talks about using fire kasina to conjure vivid images of dragons from Lord of the Rings, kinda just because he’s a geek (and I mean that endearingly) and it’s fun. Though he’s also strongly of the opinion that kasina can lead to insight.) “Meditation” is not the sort of term that a lot of people tend to try to gatekeep, and I think that’s basically never a good thing.

No, meditation is not like drugs.

You’ve been doing the wrong meditation. ;)

Seriously, though, I kindof bristle any time I hear anyone say that “meditation is” some particular thing. What meditation is is extremely broad and varied to the point that it nearly defies definition.

Sure many buddhist jhana practitioners will say that the purpose of jhanas is insight, but what if I develop my jhana skills and never seek insight? Is that really not meditation?

Or, if I sit quietly and learn to contact my subconscious and/or Jungian archetypes. Or if I make up my own idiosyncratic form of practice specifically in order to try to become a hungry ghost in the next life, is that really not meditation?

(Mind you, it’s valid to accept a particular strict definition of meditation within a specific context. If I was at a vipassana retreat doing white skeleton meditation, that’d probably be kindof assholeish. And if the teacher was like “no, correct meditation is such-and-such,” I wouldn’t be like “nuh-uh my ass is meditation, man”. This situation is pretty different. If OP has found a way to “meditate” that’s “better than drugs” rather than “training the mind to be calm, patient, observant and focused”, that hardly makes it invalid or “not meditation.” Any more so than if they say “nice to meet you” rather than “hey, what’s up”, that makes it “not a greeting.”)

Whew. My 586 is safe.

The internet has reached its peak with this meme.

Birds.

The god damned fucking birds outside my window scream their god-damned beaks off at 6:00 fucking AM just to get some tail-feather.

This shit always starts in the spring, every year. Where I am, it’s been going on for a bit more than “a week ago”, but that’s what’s been waking me up in the mornings.

I keep earplugs next to my bed. I don’t want to wear them all night because my superpower is overproducing earwax and I’d have to imagine wearing plugs all night would exacerbate that. So I put in the plugs when the birds wake me, roll over, and then sleep another couple of hours until my alarm goes off. (And, yes, my alarm reliably wakes me even with the ear plugs.)

Last time I was tempted to use suid, it was in order to allow an application I’d written to listen on 80 and 443. Fortunately I found the capabilities way of doing that (setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' executable) and that was the first I ever heard of capabilities. I consider myself pretty Linux-savvy, but it was pretty recently that I learned about capabilities.

“Soft?”

If the cure to existential dread is turning 40, it can’t come soon enough.

A few ideas:

• If it’s a hard drive, listen to see if you keep getting hard drive noises after the freeze.
• Try SSH’ing in to that box (or otherwise try making a network connection to it.) Just to make sure the system is actually freezing and it’s not just the graphics screwing up and not updating the display while continuing to boot.
• Delete/uninstall your AMD firmware. Or if you don’t have it installed, install it.
• If you’re currently booting in EFI mode, try BIOS mode. Or vice versa.
• Try booting with an incorrect “root” kernel parameter. My thought is maybe if it’s loading a module that’s causing issues, if it can’t get the root FS, it can’t load modules. If it doesn’t have the same issue, that will tell you something. (And if it does, that’ll tell you something too.)
• Try other distros’s live ISOs to see if you you can isolate anything that makes a difference.

Completely unrealistic art. The hands are too big.