I think you need a new keyboard lol. Did you mean ataraxia?

Another word I haven’t heard until now, but yes, I do support this attitude to life. I think I’ve learnt it from my ex. Sometimes bad things happen that are beyond your control and lamenting them is a waste of time, which can be much better spent on trying to figure if there is anything that can be done about the loss or adversity. And if nothing can be done, move on to enjoying other things in life.

I was interested to read that in ancient times, ataraxia was the ideal state for soldiers heading for battle. You can be sure as hell that if I was about to face the prospect of killing others or being killed, ataraxia would be the last mental state I’d be in!

No. I came up with this myself as I was pondering the world, the universe, how there is no evidence of any god existing, and how the best science we have tells us that we are just matter and energy inhabiting spacetime. But matter arranged in such fantastically improbable way that we can feel happiness. Why waste the precious moments we’ve been given on doing anything other than striving to feel happiness? Which of course can come in different forms for every one of us.

I’ve just had a quick search, I guess your message has a typo and you meant Epicureanism? It is similar to how I feel about life, but it seems to say that lack of pain and fear is enough to consider oneself happy. I’d go a bit further and postulate active pursuit of things that positively make you or fellow sentient beings feel pleasure.

Spend your life enjoying it and helping others enjoy theirs. As the universe unfolds, we’ve only got this one brief moment of consciousness before we disappear, we have to make our life filled with as much happiness as we can. And help others fill theirs.

I think it’s a modern word, as for example it doesn’t figure in Merriam-Webster. But it was created in a classical way, i.e. from Greek words meaning “stumble” and “talking”.

Something I learnt recently and which is rampant on gay social apps: sphallolalia - flirting that doesn’t lead to meeting irl.

If you travel a lot, Toilet finder.

Edit: and not an app, but a website: Pairdrop - really useful for cross-platform file sharing, especially when you just need to email to colleagues something you snapped with your personal phone, but yoe have overly tight IT systems in place at work that stop you from connecting your personal phone to your email or OneDrive.

2009? It will expire in 5 years and we’ll be inundated with devices that require you to get up from your seat and yell out the name of the brand to end an ad ☹️

I’ve just asked Gemini about cheese that slides off pizza, it didn’t recommend glue.

What does ‘rolling encryption’ mean (if it’s possible to ELI15).

I still think your promoting the view of “this is obvious to me so it should be obvious to everyone”. Even your explanation would be confusing for someone who’s not an IT guy - what does it mean “end my user session?” People rarely go to the start menu to deal with their computers’ “on-ness”, they just press the hardware button that has an incomplete circle with a line on top or often no marking or label at all. Or they close the lid and that makes them think of their laptop as “off”.

Honestly, even though I use computers for work all the time, I don’t think I ever talk about logging in or out or switching it off or restarting, other than when I’m getting some help from IT.

Chances are you were clothes with aglets a lot, and aglets keep the integrity of your clothes, but there is also a good chance that you don’t know what aglets are because the average person doesn’t talk about them until they lodge somewhere in their washing machine.

I can’t really sympathise with you here. You’re clearly an IT guy, so the difference between log out, restart and shut down is as natural to you as breathing. For the average person is not that intuitive. For many people the computer is “on” when they press the power button and enter their username and password. And the blurring of the distinction is increased by most people having a smartphone where just lifting it up to your face wakes it up and logs you in (technically) at the same time.

I know you’re explaining it to them, but if that’s not something that they live and breathe, they’re just going to forget the explanation. I’m a molecular biologist, so to me the differences between genome, transcriptome and proteome are bleeding obvious, but I have a colleague who’s not a scientist but needs to become familiar with these terms. I explained them to her last week in an meeting that lasted an hour, but this week I had to do that again. She’s not stupid, it’s just all very abstract to her.

If you Google Steven Pinker, it should show you links to his websites, articles, and books.

I see you never got a reply to your question. I am obviously biased in favour of Pinker, but my perception is that “liberal hack” (and other epithets) is a mindless insult that people throw at him when they don’t like to uplifting message that he’s communicating, but can’t find anything logically or factually wrong with his arguments or his presentation of data.

The closest I saw someone trying to have a legitimate case of showing Pinker misrepresenting reality, was the criticism of this passage (also from “Enlightenment Now”):

What proportion of pairs of ethnic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer is, most of them: 95 percent of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99 percent of those in Africa.

(i.e. only 1% is at war)

Critics pointed out that, at the time of Pinker’s writing, the number of countries in Africa at war was X, and X divided by the number of all countries in Africa is much greater than the 1%, so clearly Pinker is lying. But firstly, the passage talks about ethnic neighbours, not countries, of which there is much more in Africa and the former Soviet Union, and secondly, there is almost always more neighbours than there is countries in any region. For example in Australia, there are 5 states, but 6 borders (pairs of neighbouring states), so if Queensland went to war with New South Wales, 60% of the states would be at peace, but 83% of pairs of neighbours would be at peace.

Edit: grammar

Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about good things happening), and the media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

Edit: typo and grammar

What is your 6 year old laptop’s make?

I actually can’t complain. It’s not perfect, but I’m far from being as outraged as the OP. I used to love SwiftKey, it was amazing with text prediction, even when you had two languages on at the same time (I’m bilingual, so it was really handy). Since Microsoft bought it, it started going downhill and when I found that I can’t just transfer my settings when I get a new phone, I switched to Gboard. Again, not perfect, but not terrible either. I will try out some of the recommendation from this thread though.

Could someone ELI5 (if possible) what passkeys actually are?

I’m a molecular biologist, but I’m into so many branches of science! I love maths (arguably not science) - the elegance, the consistency, and pi that pops up everywhere. Physics - the laws that actually govern the universe and it’s most basic level. Chemistry - the science of change where so much emergence happens. Biology - the science trying to solve the actual mysteries of life. Psychology, especially evolutionary psychology - understanding what makes us tick and how it came about. And linguistics - the science of the original sharing app.

Edit: typo.

Yes!