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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • That’s nice to hear :)

    I feel as if live what is stereotypically considered a “high stress life” (cPTSD + multi minority), but I’ve always worked hard for my health and thus have low blood pressure and am fairly fit. Because of that, it’s always kind of sucked to see clickbait articles claiming that not only did I suffer through the trauma, but I will also die 20 years earlier due to circumstances completely out of my control.

    I imagine these sorts of messages get attention because they can be very validating, but personally I’ve always found platitudes of “mitigate your stress!” annoying because it usually ends with the implication that I am automatically unhealthy because 1) I challenge myself, 2) am a minority, and/or 3) had some bad stuff happen to me a while ago.

    Being stressed in healthy doses every once in a while is not bad for your health.

    This reminds me of a good book I once read “The Upside of Stress” by Kelly McGonigal, about how if people viewed their stress positively, such as framing it as “excitement” instead of “distress,” they had better health outcomes and were more successful in their given fields. I may have to reread that book sometime :)



  • Not really a “hack,” but literally just prioritize the things you care about.

    I feel like there’s so much pressure when you’re young to be excelling in literally every field. You’re expected to be getting great grades while also having the time of your life at parties while also doing extracurriculars, and so on.

    If you only care about resume building, just focus on grades (and extracurriculars if you’re in high school). It’s okay to not have friends and get terrible sleep, school is only temporary anyways!

    If you only care about appreciating life, that’s valid too! Functionally there’s often no difference between a 70% and a 100% as long as you make “the cut” to get into college/a job/whatever.

    Objectively, the only thing you should not be neglecting is your health. To be perfectly honest, sometimes you will just need to pull all-nighters to get your priorities done. Don’t make a habit of it.

    Also, one last controversial opinion: Office hours are useless if you already know the material, you shouldn’t just be attending office hours by default.











  • As a linux noob, I can’t give some in depth explanation, but I can empathize over troubles troubleshooting 😭

    I mean, to first acknowledge the base difficulties of just getting used to a new operating system that doesn’t want to hold your hand, all the troubleshooting advice being splintered across multiple distros and updates, and most software just not being designed to be compatible with Linux, it’s impressive there are distros that manage to be beginner-friendly-ish in the first place.

    For instance, when I was setting up Ubuntu, the following didn’t work out of the box:

    • The general need to reinstall every program you use
    • The microphone
    • Switching between Windows and Ubuntu led to a weird time difference on Window’s part (it still does)
    • My fingerprint sensor stopped working (I don’t even think this is fixable)
    • My brightness hotkeys stopped working (they still don’t)
    • touchpad scrolling was really fast (I honestly just got used to this rather than fixing it)
    • Increased the icon size of a lot of things
    • Set up night light settings

    But more than that, I’d say one of the hardest things about Linux is that it is so customizable it inspires me to find a solution to issues I would’ve just ignored on Windows. For example:

    • I moved the time bar from the top of the screen to the bottom
    • Set up my own searx instance (though I hardly use it, if anyone knows how to run a set of code on computer startup please lmk)
    • Installed wine, Lutris, and software to support Linux gaming
    • Set my wallpaper to rotate between a bunch of landscape photos

    But ig that’s just my 2 cents. Really I wrote this to feel proud of myself for all the troubleshooting I’ve done 😭

    Edit: I frfr love all yall who responded to this with genuine advice, what a great community


  • Ubuntu because it’s Linux Easy-Mode

    I would only recommend it to Windows users looking to start using Linux. The average Linux user is a lot more tech-literate than me and can use the more difficult but more customizable and streamlined distros, and the average Windows user has no chance on Linux, not even Ubuntu which was already a lot of work for me to switch to