Not sure this is true … But mainly due to nuance.

I think everyone who has reached adulthood has done bad things worthy of atonement (not because minors can’t be bad, just to set a line), regardless of whether that’s because they’re a bad person or because they made poor decisions. I think of myself as a good person - because I try to better the lives of those around me - but I can think of plenty of bad things I’ve done (primarily out of ignorance or foolishness - I don’t think I’ve ever acted with the intent of hurting someone).

I’m not trying to atone for those things; once I realized they were bad things, I did my best to fix them and once I did everything I could, I moved on (and hoped the other participants did as well). In some cases, continuing to try to atone for bad acts would have exacerbated the consequences if the other party just wanted to move on.

My mom, who was a big fan of aphorisms, used to say “if you mess up, apologize if you should, fix it if you can, and move on.” I try to live by this.

So, to reiterate the nuance: I try to fix bad things I’ve done if I can; I try to learn from them so I don’t do them again; but I don’t live my life trying to atone for them.

I do like the sentiment behind your post, in case you think us philosophically opposed.

I added more context to my original response. Hope you enjoy it!

Apparently, “The Rain in Spain.” (To be clear, I would not have known that before looking it up to verify the quote.)

The original lyric I was parodying was “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” (Which, again, I would have gotten wrong if I hadn’t researched it.)

edit: After a few minutes reviewing YouTube videos, apparently it was prose recited by the protagonist of “My Fair Lady,” the movie from which that song came. Eventually she gained confidence via that song.

I don’t know, I previously lacked context for the quote, but after watching a relevant video I realize I’ve seen a parody of it in Family Guy.

Spanish pronouns are used mainly in the plain.

(Side note: I thought the original quote was something like “the rain in Spain falls mostly on the Spaniards,” but I can’t find anything to support that. Only today did I even learn that it was from a song.)

Well, fair enough that you were exposed to them. I didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not those even remotely into any kind of tech, as a kid; I think I first heard of trackballs from a programming teacher in about 1996 and bought one to try out of curiosity. Ever since then I’ve used one whenever it was an option.

I’ve even mostly used the same model. If you look in my comment history, you can see I recently mentioned that most of what I use is Kensington Orbits. I’ve tried other models, but they don’t work for me.

The one PC gaming exception for me is Minecraft. In that game you have to right-click a lot (as I’m sure you know) and I guess I haven’t developed the muscles for that because it makes my wrist very tired very quickly. Still, I play a lot of FPS games and have no problem holding the right click for zoom and such; only quick, repetitive right-clicking causes problems for me.

edit: To address your original comment, I have one friend who uses a trackball at work but a regular mouse for anything else. Other than that, I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of them, let alone used them, let alone consistently done so.

On PC, I game exclusively with trackballs and have since the nineties. I’ve never not been given the side eye when someone found out that’s how I play.

When was this magical time during which they were popular?

It’s been a year or two, but I had no issues with Star Citizen in Linux. IIRC, I ran it through Lutris.

I like the dichotomy between the two currently existing responses to this post.

The person perhaps (eventually) most qualified to answer this might be Graeldon, who is on a quest to play every Steam game in alphabetical order.

Ancient video time!

https://youtu.be/yWYvl_AIIbU

My pleasure! Glad it helped. Also, I like your username.

I’m still not sure how much to fear AI, as I’m not knowledgeable on the subject (never even intentionally interacted with one yet) and have seen conflicting reports on how worryingly capable it is. Today I did see this video, which isn’t explicitly about AI but did offer an interesting perspective that could be compared to the paradigm: https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

(Warning, the video was interesting, but I got invested about halfway through when I started comparing it to AI, then was disappointed in the ending)

I saw an interesting video about this. It’s outdated (from ten months ago, apparently) but added some context that I, at least, was missing - and that also largely aligns with what you said. Also, though it’s not super evident in this video, I think the presenter is fairly funny.

https://youtu.be/L6mmzBDfRS4

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Austin Evans tried this.

He deemed it unnecessary, IIRC.

I did - I’m from the US and have been confused by this before.

Also I saw Technology Connections’ rant video about this! As always, in case you’re not familiar, I highly recommend his channel.

I thought that was a legal safety requirement in the US.

It wouldn’t be King Triton?

I used to have the title “system administrator” in my resume. I guess recruiters were just going off of single keyword searches because I’d get all kinds of emails about unrelated administrative positions like “social security administrator.”

My favorite example was when I got invited to apply for the position of “ocean administrator.” I looked it up at the time and it seemed to be about directing shipping traffic, but it’s more fun to imagine that I would have been in some way directing the ocean itself.

California, I think.

I don’t know if it is, but you can always just use yt-dlp or something similar.