Geek Stuff category archive

I’ve moved the HTTPS notice to a page, as its beard was getting on the long site.

It can be accessed from the “Pages” item on the sidebar over there (———>) on the right.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Anthony Silard provides additional evidence that “social” media isn’t. He notes, among other things, that “social” media promotes envy and can erode users’ perception of their own quality of life. Here’s a couple of the points he makes:

• We’re not admiring others (a positive emotion) but envying them (a negative one).
• The envy people experience on social media decreases their life satisfaction.

Updating a VirtualBox virtual machine of Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment using the apt command in Magiea v. 8 under the Fluxbox window manager.

Aside:

If you are one of my two or three regular readers, you’ve probably figured out by now that I really like Fluxbox. It’s my preferred interface on all of my machines.

It’s light-weight, flexible, and highly configurable. And, out-of-the box, it doesn’t do desktop icons. (It can be made to do so if you really insist, but, really, menus exist for a reason.)

I like my pretty wallpaper pictures and don’t like having little pimples icons marring them.

But that’s just me.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Psychotherapist Nicholas Balaisis explores some of the ways in which “social” media isn’t.

Mark Cuban has had it with the arrogance of Silicon Valley’s “tech bros.”

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of either Mark Cuban or Bill Maher, but I rather think Cuban has a point.

Exhibit A, natch, would be Elon Musk.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Nancy Darling discusses why we click what we do. A snippet:

Think about these three headlines:

1. Dogs need daily exercise.
2. Feeding dogs too many treats can lead to vomiting.
3. Throwing balls to dogs causes obsessive behavior.

Which would you click on?

Headline 1 is something you probably know—it doesn’t make you curious and it isn’t worrying, so you’re unlikely to seek more information.

Headline 2 is worrying, but not really surprising. I might click to see what they mean by “too many.” (I was surprised to read that my dog’s favorite liver treats are only supposed to be given a few at a time, several times a day. Oops.). A post on common human foods poisonous to dogs—chocolate, grapes—is more likely to get clicks.

But 3? I would definitely click. Why?

Folloq rhw link for her answer.

And, remember, “social” media isn’t.

To borrow a term from Bob Cesca, more muskery. From Techdirt, via Above the Law:

That takes us to the new report from Platformer, which makes it clear that Elon’s Twitter is trying to figure out how to increase the amount of money they make per ad, and wants to do that with better targeting of those ads. Of course, right now, that’s… trickier than it might have been at any time in the past. Between EU data protection laws, California’s privacy laws, and other crackdowns on tracking (such as Apple completely kneecapping Meta’s access to private info for ad tracking) it seems that traditionally targeted ads are on the way out.

It appears that Musk’s solution to this is to force people to cough up their private info.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Bonnie Zucker offers more evidence that “social” media isn’t. A snippet;

A recent study found that people with symptoms of depression or anxiety tended to be high users of social media. In addition, the more they use social media, the worse their symptoms.