Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know of any communities, perhaps because I’m a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn’t much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley’s https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I’ve discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng’s books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without “dumbing things down”. I recently finished “The Joy of Abstraction”.

Apologies that this isn’t what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren’t available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.

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I’m still a relative noob with Linux and I find stuff “breaks” more on Linux (‘breaks’ as in does something I don’t want it to), nursing and it can take me a while to fix those things because I’m still learning. It takes a while in part because I want to actually understand what’s going wrong (and how to fix it), rather than just doing the thing.

With Windows, when it’s doing something I don’t want it to, it’s usually a much more straightforward troubleshooting process because often, it’s a problem I can’t solve. The stuff I can change is quicker because I have more experience with Windows, but overall, the experience is much more frustrating because of all the stuff I need to tolerate. It makes it feel like my computer isn’t my own.

The thing I’m concerned about is how little non-programmers know. I think that much of the world went “oh, GenZ are digital natives, that means they’ll know their way around computers naturally” when if anything, being “digital natives” is part of the problem. But like my original comment said, I attribute a lot of blame to Microsoft’s impact on IT education.

I can’t speak much on how much programmers tend to know, because I am a biochemist who started getting into programming when studying bioinformatics, and then I’ve continued dabbling as a hobbyist. I like to joke that I’m a better programmer than the vast majority of biochemists, and that’s concerning, because I’m a mediocre programmer (at best).

Verbaceous is a great word. I’m adding it onto my “favourite words” list ,(even if it isn’t technically a word "

Reflecting on my IT education in school, it feels like it was mostly learning to use Microsoft Office. Reflecting on it makes me horrified, because I feel like we’re heading for a period where only a select few have tech skills and the skills gap we already see is going to get way worse. That’s what intense lobbying from Microsoft will get you

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a patch for it that made it way more stable (and also added back in a bunch of cut content).

Way back, my partner played Watchdogs at launch and the stuttering was awful, and it was basically unplayable. Some random person made a patch that fixed most of the problems and made the game look closer to what it did at E3.

Random nerds on the internet are my favourite people

It reminds me of the recent Crowdstrike fiasco: apparently kernel level access was needed for their anti-malware to be able to properly work (because that way their net can cover the entire OS basically), but that high level of access meant that when CrowdStrike fucked up with an update, people’s computers were useless. (Disclaimer, I am not a cybersecurity person and am not offering judgement either way on whether Crowdstrike’s claim about kernel level access was bullshit or not)

In a similar way, in order for identity theft monitoring services to work, they surely will need to hold a heckton of data about you. This is fine if they can be trusted to hold that data securely, but otherwise… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I share your unease, though I don’t feel able to comment on the correctness of your mindset. Though I will say that on an individual level, keeping an eye on your credit reports in general (from the major credit agencies) will go a long way to helping there (rather than paying for serviced that give you a score and other fancy “features”, you can request either free or v. low cost report which just has the important stuff you need to know.)

I also know that if you want to be extra cautious, you can manually freeze your credit so basically no new lines of credit can be opened in your name. This is most useful for people who have already been a victim of fraud, or they expect to be at risk (such as by shitty family, or a data breach). I don’t know how one sets this up, but I know that if you did want to set up a new line of credit, you can call to unfreeze your credit, and then freeze it again when your application for the new credit is all done. I have a friend who has had this as their default for years now because of shitty family.

I agree that there’s a strong incentive for even entirely self-interested people to cooperate. I was listing altruism as one of many pro-social behaviours, not as a subset or requirement for cooperation

I’m getting real tired of invoking Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” , but if the shoe fits… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Enshittification is actually a really useful lens to apply here because late stage enshittification involves the company fucking over its business users, and I’m increasingly seeing that with Amazon. I read a great example recently: apparently a small independent reusable diaper business almost went out of business because of relying on Amazon for fulfillment and logistics: a customer had received a used diaper and was (justifiably) horrified and posted this on social media. It seems that someone else purchased a diaper, used it, and then returned it via Amazon, who then sent it out as new without checking it. Besides just not using Amazon for order fulfillment, there’s nothing the business could’ve done to prevent this, so it sucks that their reputation suffered so much for Amazon’s fuck-up.

Then there’s also the way that Amazon used data from sellers on its platform to create their Amazon Basics range, and then outcompeted those same sellers using its platform advantage.

I genuinely wonder how much longer it can go on for. The only remaining stage of enshittification that Amazon is yet to do is dying, but that feels long overdue. I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon Web Services is propping up the rest of their business.

I’d argue that capitalism is unnatural because even if we work from the assumption that resource hoarding is natural, it’s also necessary to take into account the fact that evolutionarily, humans got to where we are via traits like altruism, cooperation and forming communities. Capitalism is far from natural — it’s an insidious subversion of human nature

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

For me it’s a texture problem. I didn’t notice until I was prescribed some high fluoride stuff that’s a mildly minty blue gel which is infinitely preferable to most toothpastes I’ve tried (for those curious, it’s a Colgate 5000ppm fluoride toothpaste, prescribed by my dentist because of temperature sensitivity)

At my current university, I am firstname.lastname-4@university. My previous university, a much smaller one, I was fortunately firstname.lastname@otheruniversity, but the email client informed me there were two other people with my name there. It’s wild because I didn’t think I had a super common name.

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I never thought of this before, the parody song practically writes itself

I know, right? I bloody love this site and its weirdos

(I realise you may not find such weirdness endearing as I do. This comment is partly a self directed joke because whilst I don’t have Opinions on soil like the person you replied to, I live for that niche nerd internet shit (which is one of the things that makes me weird too)

Yeah, I agree with you. I should have elaborated in my comment. I’m not too opposed to Cloudflare (I even use them myself), but I sympathise with people who are concerned about how widely used Cloudflare is and that this risks making them a gatekeeper to the internet. My beef is more of an “all eggs in one basket” one, which feels especially relevant given that the recent (and in many cases, ongoing) Crowdstrike debacle was able to affect so many because of how the way enterprise level software often involves many eggs across not many baskets.

"Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari’s operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used. […>

“We’ll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action,” an RIAJ spokesperson said."

Obligatory “Fuck Cloudflare”.

It genuinely makes my skin crawl — reminds me of being nagged for sex from someone who hears “not now” when you mean “no.”