AntY

Vim is a way more competent editor than nano. If you spend a lot of time editing files via ssh, vim is amazing. And when you get bitten by it, you’re infected. ;-)

An ethernet port is essential for any computer.

Hah! So true!

Kubuntu uses snaps as default and I’ve had some trouble with that. My dad is using Kubuntu and there are problems with how programs communicate. Mint is probably a better choice.

Pod save America talked about this in a recent episode. There’s always a balance in the timing of these things. If you drip feed the endorsements, people might become used to it and not care. If many very famous people do their endorsements close to Election Day, it might motivate voters to actually go and vote. That’s one of the ways that those running the campaign might reason.

Just start with Linux mint and cinnamon or kde desktop environment. You should be good to go with that. Kernels are not something that you usually need to worry about, the default should work fine. If you need to, it’s easy to switch to another kernel by just installing it through the package manager.

I get the feeling, but in my experience it has more to do with the windows UI actual getting worse. When I use Linux, I’m happy to try out different desktop environments and shells, but they have one thing in common: they have designs that are created more thoughtfully.

It’s not just us growing old, it’s the world of technology growing shittier too!

Maybe for now, but there’s fewer and fewer around. In ten-twenty years time it will be hard to find a 90s car with reasonable mileage.

And this is one reason why I hate modern cars. But then again, there’s no alternative, and that sucks.

I used the example to illustrate a point. The tests have a target population that they are constructed for. This is also the reason as to why modern people score really high on old tests, because they are not the target population. The thing is, people aren’t very different, neither across cultures nor across time. We should expect the average person of today to be just as intelligent as the average person of 1924, but they score differently in the test. It’s almost as if the test doesn’t measure intelligence at all! If the tests actually measured intelligence, they wouldn’t need to be specifically designed for a certain population.

When an IQ-test is designed, a number of assumptions are made, e.g., normal distribution, that an underlying factor is well described by the battery of questions and that this underlying factor is the best thing that can explain the variation seen. All these assumptions are debatable at best. I mean, it’s just factor analysis, and all the assumptions of that statistical method applies.

If you’re measuring heart rate, breathing and sweating, I guess you could use a polygraph. If you want to measure a potential cognitive decline in a single person, you can have them do several of these tests to see if there’s a trend. There is nothing pseudoscientific about using these methods in this way. The pseudoscience comes in when we’re trying to tie the results to truthfulness in the case of the polygraph or intelligence in the case of the IQ test. Or even worse, when trying to compare two individuals from their results.

No, studies on IQ have shown that the test design often assume something about the population taking the test. If you produce a test for British students in secondary school and give it to miners in Zimbabwe, then the miners will probably achieve way lower scores than is it expected. This is because the students are more used to taking tests. IQ tests have been used in this way to promote racist ideas, when the real problem is the methodology behind IQ tests.

There’s a whole book about this, “the mismeasure of man”, by Stephen Jay Gould.