I haven’t experienced what you’re describing. Previous experience suggests exposure is the next step for you. If a cooking class isn’t feasible right now then start with watching some videos online (best if they’re home cooks - you want to watch common cooking of foods you like to eat).

You’re not trying to memorize anything or learn hard skills during this time. You’re only trying to become more familiar with people working in a kitchen so it doesn’t feel as alien and maybe not quite as scary.

Do that regularly for a while. If it’s too much for you: dial it back. You do want to push your boundaries but only when you’re feeling ok about it. Small wins will turn into more small wins and eventually you might be interested in trying to cook something.

If that happens, and I suspect it will, know that it is OK to start cautiously and take your time learning how to use the oven and stove top. Try turning a burner on with no pan or pot on top. Let it get hot. Turn it off. Let it cool down. Repeat that across a few days if the first one helps you.

Once you’re comfortable you should do that practice again and add water to a pan until its half full. Once the burner is hot: place your pan of water on top of the stove burner. Let the water come to a boil. Remove the pan from the stove top. Let the pan and water cool down. Note how much water is missing (some of it will have steamed away while boiling). Add that much water back to the pan and practice this again.

You can build your experiences, step by step, with safe extensions and new footholds, until you’re feeling confident about cooking something with the boiling water. You’re going to boil an egg!

Complete your practice again but instead of taking the water off right after it boils: leave it on the burner for 6 minutes. Then remove it and let it cool. Success? Do that again using a pot instead of a pan. Pot half full of water. Grab a serving spoon or similar item. Once the water comes to a boil:

1. Lower the burner temperature to half / medium. The water should be moving and steamy but the bubbles should be very gentle or cease. Dropping the egg into actively boiling water may cause the egg to crack prematurely.
2. Use the serving spoon to gently place the egg in the center of the boiling water.
3. Wait six minutes.
4. Remove the pot of water from the burner.
5. Turn the burner off.
6. Use the serving spoon to lift the egg out of the hot water.
7. Run the egg under cold water (this helps it from over cooking and helps make peeling easier).
8. Enjoy your egg.

You can absolutely boil any kind of pasta, lots of vegetables, and almost all starchy foods. Boiling is very safe because the water regulates the temperature for us. So long as there is water in the pot the pot is unable to meaningfully exceed 100 degrees Celsius (the boiling point of water / ~212F). It is very difficult to burn anything or start a fire while boiling water.

Best of luck my friend.

laughs in home lab

Not that I’d buy it but, if I did, that power button might get used twice a year. Likely less since I wouldn’t be able to upgrade or maintenance its hardware.

That’s a problem. Absolutely. It’s not the problem though. I’m not sure the problem can be summarized so succinctly. This is the way I’ve been putting it:

These are the top reasons humanity needs successful, decentralized, open social media platforms:

1. Collecting and selling user’s private data is dangerous and unethical.
2. Using that data to intentionally and directly manipulate user’s thinking is even worse.
3. All of the major centralized social media companies have been proven to either allow these illicit information campaigns or coordinate them directly. TikTok is the focus right now but Sophie Zhang exposed Facebook for doing exactly what TikTok has been exposed for recently. Can you recall any meaningful consequences for Facebook? Do you think Facebook is now safe to use?
4. It’s clear that most political leaders are either too ignorant, too corrupt, or too inept to meaningfully legislate against these problems.
5. The concerned public can’t shut Pandora’s box. No one is coming to save us from big tech or the monied interests and nation-states that wield it.
6. The concerned public can’t easily and legally audit the platforms big tech builds because they are closed and proprietary.
7. Personal choice is not enough. Not using centralized social media increases personal safety but does little to curb its influence otherwise.

These are listed by order of intuitive acceptance rather than importance. I find it aids the conversation.

The best reasonable answer to these problems I’ve seen proposed is for the public to create an open and decentralized alternative that’s easier to use and provides a better user experience.

Will that kind of alternative be a force for pure good? I’m not sure. To your point: I’m not convinced social media of any kind can be more than self-medication to cope with modernity. Then again I’ve had incredible and meaningful conversations with close friends after passing the bong around and spent time on Facebook/Reddit, and now Mastodon/Lemmy/etc, doing the same. Those interactions were uplifting and humanizing in ways that unified and encouraged all involved.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. We need to take care of each other, refuse pure hedonism, and protect the vulnerable (and we’re all varying degrees of vulnerable). At the same time: humans aren’t happy in sterile viceless productivity prisons. Creating spaces for leisure which do no harm in the course of their use isn’t just a nice idea… It’s necessary for a functional and happy society.

That’s a fair take. Silver Blue is great and, in the spirit of the thread, if I were helping an interested but hesitant lifelong Windows/Intel/Nvidia user migrate to Linux today I would:

1. Buy them a new SSD or m.2 (a decent 1tb is ~$50 & a good one only ~$100).
2. Have them write down what applications, tools, games, sites, etc they use most often.
3. Swap their current Windows OS drive with the new drive and, if needed, show them how and why that works or provide an illustrated how-to (so this choice is not a one-way street paved with anxiety. If they want to swap back, or transfer files, or whatever else; they can. Easily). Storage drives are just diaries for computers. The user should know there’s nothing scary or mystical about them.
4. Install Fedora Kinoite on that new drive.
5. Swap them from Fedora’s custom Flatpak repository to Flathub proper. A decision that should be given to the user on install IMO but I digress.
6. Install their catalogue of goodies from step 2 so they’re not starting from scratch.
7. Install pika and configure a sane home directory backup cadence.
8. Ask them to kick the tires and test drive that Linux install for at least a month.

Kinoite is going to feel the most like Windows and, once configured, stay out of the way while being a safe, familiar, transparent gateway to the things the user wants to use.

My personal OS choices are driven by ideals, familiarity, design preferences, and a bank of good will / public trust.

I disagree with some of Red Hat’s business model. I fully support the approach SUSE takes. I’m also used to the OpenSUSE ecosystem, agree with most of their project’s design philosophies, and trust their intentions. I’m not a “fan” though and will happily recommend and install Silver Blue or any other FOSS system on someone’s computer if that’s what they want and it makes sense for them! Opinionated discussion can be productive and healthy. Zealotry facilitates neither.

That said: Aeon has been out of beta for a while. The latest release is Release Candidate 3 and they’re closing in on the first full release. Nvidia drivers work after a bit of fiddling. 🙂

I’m going to edit my previous post to add the Kinoite suggestion for posterity’s sake.

Check out Aeon and Fedora Silverblue. I’m installing Aeon on Desktops and MicroOS on Servers. My computer needs to be a reliable tool. Immutable distros make it exactly that.

The last thing I want to do in my free time or during my work day is be forced to fiddle with some poorly documented and/or implemented idiocy on my personal computer because I forgot to cast the correct incantation prior to updating something. I’m not a masochist.

EDIT To the hesitant but hopeful Windows+Nvidia user: give Fedora Kinoite a try. Check my reply to @independantiste@sh.itjust.works below for details.

I was taught something different growing up and had to check myself with a quick read. Holy shit. You’re right. Thanks for sharing.

I have a deep appreciate for this level of discernment. Moderating posts and their discussions in good-faith and abiding by the spirit/intention of the rules instead of strict enforcement by letter fosters community trust and makes it more difficult to argue against removals/bans when they do happen.

Thanks for volunteering and keeping the lights on.

Honey badger shadow beings.

edit 0: words

edit 1: that is an incredible band name

That’s not true for all sites. If the page is static then it’ll have no clue. If it’s dynamic and running a client-side script to report this info back, and if that information is collected, then I can see how that might be a useful supplement for fingerprinting if the server owner is so inclined. At that point though I’m wondering why a security-conscious user is raw dogging the internet and allowing scripts to run in their browser without consent (NoScript saves browsers).

Even then it’s unclear when/how altering the page to render it differently is commonly communicated back to the server, how much identifying information that talk-back is capable of conveying, and how we might mitigate those collections (wholesale abstinence and/or script control aside). What are the specific mechanisms of action we’re concerned about? This isn’t a faux challenge for the sake of hollow rhetoric. I’m ignorant, find the dialogue interesting, and am asking for help being less dumb. :)

I found some brief and useful discussion in this Privacy Guides thread. Seems like the concern is valid but minimal for all but the most strict/defensive postures.

Trying to validate this myself for Dark Reader without breaking out Wireshark and monitoring some big tech site while I toggle color modes (which I might do later if I think of it and find the time) I see Dark Reader is open source, an Open Collective member, and seems to engender little hand-wringing. The only public gripe I can find is this misguided Orion Browser feedback thread.

Thanks for the interesting diversion!

How so?

Your closing sentence hints at the root of the misunderstanding here. It also fails to strengthen your initial claim at all. This study’s Lay summary sets it out perfectly.

Many autistic individuals report feelings of excessive empathy, yet their experience is not reflected by most of the current literature, typically suggesting that autism is characterized by intact emotional and reduced cognitive empathy. To fill this gap, we looked at both ends of the imbalance between these components, termed empathic disequilibrium. We show that, like empathy, empathic disequilibrium is related to autism diagnosis and traits, and thus may provide a more nuanced understanding of empathy and its link with autism.

Autistic folks don’t always exhibit the socially defined traits of autism. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, right? So while your [claim] [double-down] [pre-emptive concession] [claim] ends with a claim that’s reasonable it is also fundamentally disconnected from the initial claim (which is, at best, half-true). Social and non-social traits are additional dimensions on a complex spectrum. Defining autism only by it’s more visible / stigmatized traits perpetuates the false equivocations of abnormal with disordered and disordered with diseased.

Sent with love ❤️

This is admittedly a bit pedantic but it’s not that the risk doesn’t exist (there may be quite a lot to gain from having your info). It’s because the risk is quite low and the benefit is worth the favorable gamble. Not dissimilar to discussing deeply personal health details with medical professionals. Help begins with trust.

There’s an implicit trust (and often an explicit and enforceable legal agreement in professional contexts (trust, but verify)) between sys admins and troubleshooters. Good admins want quiet happy systems and good devs want to squash bugs. If the dev also dons a black hat occasionally they’d be idiotic to shit where they eat. Not many idiots are part of teams that build things lots of people use.

edit: ope replied to the wrong comment

deleted by creator

A speaker’s public record provides context for their current commentary. Trump’s tells us he is a bigot. Specifically a white supremacist. His recent rhetoric leans in to this. When pressed to clarify, justify, or recant these statements he either deflects or doubles down.

There is no reason to think he is suddenly well intentioned, operating in good faith, or otherwise deserving of some deference of judgement.

That used to be true. Speaking strictly constitutionally “invisible” is still a bit of an overstatement but not unfair. Regardless modern US VPs have some standardized additional roles (National Security Council member being the biggest one) and others assigned per administration which can and reportedly have impacted the administrations they’re party to.

I’m not sure I take your point about Harris’ invisibility in particular. She’s set a new record in her capacity as President of the Senate by casting the most tie-breaker votes in US history. On the flip side she’s drawn a lot of flak while working on the Central America Forward initiative (justified or not is a separate discussion). Her perceived invisibility isn’t because she hasn’t been getting publicly visible work done.

1. Her father is Jamaican.
2. Ultimately we all descend from African-born people. That doesn’t mean all humans are Black.
3. Charlize Theron is African. She’s not Black.
4. Black, as a label, is as much a shared cultural and countercultural identity as it is a familial heritage and racial identity.
5. Your position is misinformed at best, reads worse, and is a weird hill to die on either way.

How?

Because the only things the other side of the aisle wants to deliver are stillborn.

Crazy? No. The timing and optics would be wrong since Sanders wouldn’t help Harris’ campaign play to its advantages. Finding younger candidates with consistent and (hopefully) progressive records, who aren’t currently targets for the Right, and who hold little political baggage, is a better play.

By the same reasoning I think Newsom and Buttigieg aren’t good picks even though they’d do well in the role. The new Dem Pres campaign should make sure the Right’s propagandists have to work hard at effective attack ads. Running any Left-Wing Face misses this initiative.

For context: I’m still bitter about Bernie being pushed out of previous Presidential campaign runs, still think he was the best choice both times, and know he’d make a great VP.

I’m excited to see they’re going fully open source. Looks like the last steps to making the sync server self-hostable are in the works. Do you use their paid service? If so: any complaints or caveats?