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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2025

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  • For new Linux users it’s best to stick with well established and supported distributions. Then it’s easier to find solutions for common problems.

    It’s good practice to look up what the commands do, you enter when you find a solution. Read the man page or other documentation of the command you’re entering. It doesn’t need to be everything, just enough to get an idea what it does.

    Also: take notes when you find a problem and how you fixed it. You can go back to them later.

    sound and screen dimming

    You can’t give a general answer to this. There are several different software stacks for sound on Linux. A typical one goes like this, but can look different.

    Kernel - driver - ALSA - PipeWire - desktop environment - application - user

    There might be an error at each of these levels.

    In the simplest case, it’s a bad configuration, where the volume is set to 0 or mute somewhere in this stack. So try different applications first to play sound, also try playing sound from the terminal. Change volume sliders in different places.

    Then go down the stack. Try playing sound with ALSA directly using aplay and speaker-test.

    Finally go down to the driver and see if the hardware is detected. Depending if the soundcard is connected via USB or PCI use lsusb or lspci.

    Find out the type snd chipset of your soundcard and then search if there’s a driver for Linux already. If you have new or unpopular hardware, it can take a while (a year or two) for a driver to be written, tested, and accepted into the kernel. Then it has to go downstream to the distributions until you get it. So for new hardware you might have to do some additional steps like finding a driver and compiling a kernel yourself.

    It’s also worth checking the log files of the audio stack (ALSA, pipewire, or whatever your distro uses).

    screen dimming

    The stack looks like this:

    Kernel - driver - X11/XOrg or Wayland - compositor - Desktop Environment (KDE, Gnome, etc.)

    The error might be the keystroke not registering, the desktop not sending the right command, the display driver not supporting dimming, a bad or missing configuration. Again work through the stack. Find out what your distro uses.

    Try setting the brightness through the terminal for example.











  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2147/AHMT.S135432

    Evidence from the 10 available

    prospective follow-up studies from childhood to adolescence

    (reviewed in the study by Ristori and Steensma28) indicates

    that for ~80% of children who meet the criteria for GDC,

    the GD recedes with puberty

    Puberty blockers are a strong change in your life and a severe intrusion into the natural development of a body. Instead of going through puberty like most other kids, the child will be behind in their physical development by years. That can lead to social and psychological problems of course.

    There’s generally not much quality research into the long term effects, as you can read repeatedly in [the Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty_blocker#Research).

    As for transitioning not resolving the psychological issues, those choosing to detransition are the best proof. https://segm.org/first_large_study_of_detransitioners

    The participants’ decision to detransition was most often tied to the realization that their gender dysphoria was related to other issues (70%), health concerns (62%), and the fact that transition did not alleviate their dysphoria (50%). Interestingly, over 4 in 10 (43%) participants endorsed a change in political views as a reason for detransition.

    Most participants reported significant difficulties finding the help that they needed during their detransition process from medical, mental health, or LGBT communities. Only 13% of the respondents received help from LGBT organizations when detransitioning, compared to 51% when transitioning. A number of participants reported negative reactions from LGBT and medical communities, and 51% of the sample expressed that they did not feel supported during their detransition.

    Most detransitioners reported ongoing needs related to managing comorbid mental health conditions (65%), finding alternatives to medical transition (65%), and coping with regret (60%). Half of the sample reported the need for medical information on stopping or changing hormone regimens. A great majority of participants also expressed the need to hear about others’ detransition experiences (87%) and getting in contact with other detransitioners (76%). The study highlights the urgency of providing appropriate medical, psychological, legal, and social support to detransitioners.

    I haven’t bothered to look for data concerning the long term mental health of those who transition. I only have lots of anecdotes from conversations with trans folk over the years. That’s of course not representative.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36151828/

    Our findings coincide with existing research, which indicates TG individuals do experience a higher prevalence of mental health disorders than that of the general population or cisgender individuals





  • Most children and teenagers with gender dysphoria grow out of it on their own. Giving children and teens easy access to strong drugs that will affect their whole future life, is something that should be questioned. Children know little, struggle to find their identity, are easily influenced, and often make stupid decisions. Societal roles help children orient and find their way around the world. How can we expect a child to understand something as complex as gender fully to make an informed decision?

    Gender dysphoria rarely comes alone, usually it’s comorbid with a bunch of other psychological issues. Then transition is often presented as the one treatment that will fix everything. It often fails to do that.

    Trans issues are mental health issues. They have been politicized by making it about identity and attaching it to the political struggle of gay and bi people. No other mental health issue has that kind of political clout and rigid ideology attached to it. The political activism has glued itself to radical ideas.

    Scientific research into trans issues has become difficult to conduct, because if you have the „wrong“ results, you might not have a career and be labeled transphobic. In the end it’s trans people themselves who suffer the most from this.

    Helping people live a healthy and fulfilling life should be the goal. If someone transitioning is the only thing that helps someone, then by all means go for it.




  • A civil war, mass riots, general strike, etc. only happens when people are really suffering. For the most part Americans are still doing pretty okay.

    American society is also atomized. Mass political movements are rare and often fizzle out like occupy wallstreet or BLM. There’s widespread dissatisfaction with politics in general. So far nobody has found a way or even wanted to tap that besides MAGA

    You’re overlooking that MAGA is an actually revolutionary movement in many ways. MAGA has already managed to storm a government building. The revolution is already happening with Trump at the helm. It’s not going the way you want.