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Joined 28 days ago
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Cake day: May 3rd, 2025

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  • I just started a novel project a few weeks ago and have been using scrivener because it’s just what I saw recommended the most. But now I’ve switched to linux and have been looking for FOSS linux-native alternatives so this is perfectly timed. I tried anytype briefly but it feels like it’s designed for programmers. By which I mean it’s extremely powerful and flexible, but just doing simple shit like creating a bunch of pages in a tree structure requires an hour of hunting and watching tutorial videos.

    I like the look of novelwriter that someone else linked, gonna give that a shot.







  • Replace ‘stop remembering things’ with ‘remember fewer things’ at your own leisure if it makes you happy, I’m exaggerating slightly to make a point.

    My argument is not that we will stop practising critical thinking altogether, but that we will not need to practise it as often.

    And mine is that as far as I know we have no evidence (or at least nothing more than anecdotal evidence at best) for that because society has only gotten more complex, not less, and requires more thought, memory, etc to navigate it. Now instead of remembering which cow was sick last week and which field I’m going to plant tomorrow I have to remember shit like how to navigate a city that’s larger than the range in which most people traveled their entire lives, I have to figure out what this weird error my PC just threw means, I have to calculate the risk-vs-reward of trying to buy a house now or renting for a year to save up for a better down payment and improve my credit, etc. These are just examples, pick your own if you don’t like them.

    Less practise always makes you worse at something. I do not need evidence for that as it is obvious.

    Now who’s being reductive? I’m not asking for evidence that less practice makes you worse at something, I’m asking for evidence that labor-saving devices result in people doing less labor (mental or otherwise), because I think that’s a lot less obvious.

    I have seen how today’s students are using it instead of using their brains

    This is a bad example because learning is a different matter. People using it instead of learning will not learn the subject matter as well as those who don’t, obviously. But it’s a lot less obvious in other fields/adult life. Will I be less good at code because I use an LLM to generate some now and then? Probably not, both because I’ve been coding off and on for 30 years, but also because my time instead is spent on tackling the thornier problems that AI can’t do or has difficulty with, managing large projects because AI has a limited memory window, etc.

    We teach critical thinking in schools for a reason, because it’s something that does not always come naturally, and these students are getting AI to do the work for them instead of learning how to think.

    That’s debatable, though I guess it depends on where you’re from and what the schools are like there. They certainly didn’t teach critical thinking when I was in (US public) school, I had to figure that shit out largely on my own. But that’s beside the point. Shortcutting learning is bad, I agree. Shortcutting work is a lot more nebulous and uncertain in the absence of that evidence I keep asking for.


  • Libra00@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWant switch to linux
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    3 days ago

    To be fair that was also my experience with PopOS which is designed to be user-friendly. The answer to questions like ‘how do I take a screenshot of a region and copy it to clipboard without spamming files’ or ‘how do I switch audio devices between speakers and headset’ just tends to be ‘run this long-ass command you would never have figured out on your own’ or ‘Write a shell script full of such commands to do it for you and call it with a shortcut key’. I think this is a linux problem, not a distro problem, because it was the same way when I was using redhat 15 years ago or slackware 30 years ago.








  • Libra00@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWant switch to linux
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    4 days ago

    I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it’s focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It’s been… I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can’t install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can’t log into epic games store, etc), but I’ve also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.


  • This seems like a capitalism problem, not a technology problem. That endless drive to greater productivity so that others can extract the bulk of the value thereof for their own benefit instead of the benefit of everyone is a big part of what’s eating up the purported leisure-time. But also that’s a choice you can make: I choose to spend my spare mental capacity learning about how the world works and engaging with ideas about how it ought to work. If people choose to spend that extra capacity doom-scrolling social media and keeping up with the virtual Joneses or whatever then that’s on them, but I’m not here to judge, I do that sometimes too. Life takes it out of you, sometimes you just need some low-effort destressing. But the point stands: offloading labor (mental or otherwise) to technology and then turning that time/energy/etc to stuff that’s more important is just how humans work.




  • The people who were used to the oral tradition were right. Memorising things is good for your memory.

    Except people didn’t stop memorizing things. I went to school in the 1970s - unarguably a long-ass time after we stopped using the oral tradition as the primary method to transmit culture) and I was memorizing shit left and right. I still remember those multiplication tables, ‘in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue’, etc 40-odd years later.

    No, I don’t think people will stop thinking altogether (please don’t be reductive like this lmao)

    Sorry, I thought it was pretty clear that I was expressing skepticism at the idea that anyone actually thinks this.

    But people did get worse at remembering things.

    If you have evidence that suggests that people got worse at remembering things between, say, ancient Greece and the Industrial Revolution I’d love to see it.

    We know that using tools makes us worse at whatever the tool automates, because without practice you become worse at things.

    Likewise if you have evidence that people stopped thinking with the invention of books, the calculator, computers, the internet, etc, don’t be shy about it.

    because without practice you become worse at things.

    You assume that offloading some mental processes to AI means we will stop practicing them. I argue that we’ll just use the capabilities we have for other things. I use ChatGPT to help me worldbuild, structure my writing projects, come up with thematically-consistent names, etc, for example, but it’s not writing for me and I still come up with names and such all the time.