Quite a few:

• Suddenly I didn’t need to rely on last minute panic to get boring stuff done: I could just think “this needs to get done”…and do it. I could clear my whole chore list without taking a break every 10 minutes to hype myself up, then go play games for the rest of the day
• I could write a to-do list and actually remember where I put it, and I could even manage to read it!
• My reading speed tripled since I wouldn’t keep losing my place every 15 seconds.
• I wouldn’t fall asleep just from sitting still for too long.

Corny as it sounds, after taking a long hiatus from treatment and then starting up again, I felt like I turned into Superman.

Ah yes, I remember the equivalent moment for me: I was 8, and Mom asked me if I felt different after taking the pills. I told her “I don’t think so?” And then 3 months went by and I noticed I wasn’t getting yelled at by my teacher for not paying attention anymore, and I wasn’t getting in trouble at home for “ignoring” my parents (it took them a while to realize I was genuinely forgetting things they asked me to do 5 seconds ago).

Looking back, it’s wild that it took me so long to notice such a big difference. But I think that’s a real testament to how helpful those treatments are: when leveraged correctly, basic behaviors that you would normally struggle with just “click” naturally.

Full disclosure:

1. I am not a psychologist, psychology is merely a hobby.
2. I am from the US, but I will try to stick to my understanding of human emotions as a whole.

One thing I have observed about violence that seems random is that they are often performed by people who have been proverbially “beaten down” by life. When this is the cause, they may feel the need to lash out, but their “beating” was so severe that they become apathetic. They just need some outlet for their pain, rather than a specific individual or group.

Some people will take it out on themselves and it becomes self-harm or suicide. Others will take it out on those who are vulnerable in their immediate vicinity.

Basically, when a person is in a lot of pain, it becomes harder to think about others, because they are already struggling with their own issues. At least from where I stand, random acts of violence is what happens when that idea is taken to an extreme.

As for articles and videos: I’m not sure if you will be able to view the video on this page easily, but there is a transcription on the page: it was shared by a man who claimed he almost became a school shooter. He described what he was going through and feeling leading up to the moment where he almost did it. I think it provides a window into how suffering makes a person volatile:

https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_stark_i_was_almost_a_school_shooter?subtitle=en

In a similar vein, depression tends to cause a person to focus heavily on their own thoughts and emotions and less on their social connections, not because the person is selfish, but as a means of self-preservation, as described in these articles:

https://neurolaunch.com/is-depression-selfish/

https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/copingwithdepression/2020/12/when-depression-makes-you-appear-selfish

This is just one possible explanation, but it’s the one I am most familiar with personally. I hope this helps.

Ahhh yes childhood memories…

(I was a dumb child, I thought it would become a maple-flavored tea)

I’m genuinely curious what exactly is “wrong”?

It’s a theme website. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and even Cinnamon has one…why is this bad?

To hell with “political violence is always bad”, I want to use all these tar and feathers I’ve been hoarding!! /s

Fun fact: I recently learned life insurance can be used as a mechanism for really wealthy people to dodge taxes. Basically under the right circumstances you can pull money from life insurance policies with little to no penalty (and no, I’m not talking about when you die). High Deductible Health Plans and their corresponding Health Savings Accounts also work the same way, because they accumulate interest and have no tax penalty when used under the right circumstances.

See here: https://smartasset.com/insurance/how-to-use-life-insurance-to-build-wealth

In essence, insurance is a scam to rob those who don’t have much means, while simultaneously acting as a money laundering vehicle for those who do.

Wonder if this has anything to do with how the COSMIC tries to give more resources to whatever is in focus on the screen…

I wish I could up-vote more than once…

Looks awesome! I love witnessing all the progress the System76 team is making. It really makes it seem like anything is possible.

In a similar vein, Evelyn Wang from Everything Everywhere All At Once… She may not start out badass, but oh boy does that change

It’s funny you mention this, because a few days ago I went to my local market to grab milk, and the regular milk was more expensive that the plant-based milk…never thought I’d see this day in the US!

So something I just thought of, and I’m surprised nobody brought up (well, I guess some did indirectly, it just wasn’t obvious to me): A major benefit of basing off of Ubuntu is more up-to-date hardware support. While it’s true that Debian now supports non-free firmware by default, that doesn’t mean that it will be recent.

Debian support for hardware is truly impressive, but it ultimately lags behind because Debian prioritizes stability over new features. This is why routine Debian updates only cover severe bugs and security issues, and from what I can tell that also is the case for hardware support and the kernel.

Ubuntu tries to keep in step with new hardware releases, which makes much more sense for power users like engineers, developers and gamers, all of which seem to be key consumers of System76 hardware. Basing off of Ubuntu makes it easier to satisfy that clientele. I imagine it also makes submitting upstream fixes for hardware-related packages easier.

Interesting two cents! Your line of reasoning is pretty thorough, and I think your educated guesses are fairly sounds! Thanks for contributing! I agree, while switching to Debian as a base would certainly be a lot of work, System76 has definitely gone above and beyond in far more complex ways, particularly with their COSMIC DE effort.

Interesting, I didn’t realize that. Thanks for clarifying!

Oh, absolutely. Regardless of the underlying distro, COSMIC is set to be an epic DE experience.

See, this was my thought as well. Canonical seems to be going the way of RedHat, and I understand that they need to turn a profit, but my understanding is also that most of their money comes from server support. Not really sure how much they can squeeze out of Desktop users, but I guess that’s what snaps are for…

See, this is why I was curious if they would just set their own release schedules and run based off of Debian-testing. But I guess that would be a lot more work, and they’d effectively be duplicating Canonical’s effort, in a sense.

This is an interesting perspective! So then by that logic, is there a possibility that Canonical will try and pressure System76 to officially switch to snaps over flatpaks?

So I kind of get this, but from what I can understand it’s more tedious from a DevOps perspective to switch package management systems than to just switch to repositories that target older software versions. Hence why I’m curious as to whether simply basing off of Debian-testing like Ubuntu does is the most likely outcome.

As for NVIDIA support, I was playing around with the latest Debian release and almost immediately noticed that the NVIDIA proprietary packages were available by default. In other words, Debian seems to be just as inclined to support an NVIDIA setup as Ubuntu does out of the box now.