Brain going brrr (neutral)

Sutton Park, Birmingham, UK, October 2021

Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) 

I found swathes of these iconic mushrooms while walking across Sutton Park yesterday - so large and distinctive they can often be identified by even the most beginner mycologists from a couple dozen metres away.

Being delusional is a medical issue. If someone thinks that holding a coal against their skin won’t hurt them because they can generate a forcefield, and they believe this for reasons that are rooted in a medical cause, they are experiencing a delusion. Someone who is delusional does not have full rational control over what they believe. This generally is in no way their fault or anyone else’s. It can best be fixed by ensuring that the person has full access to a competent treatment team that listens to them.

Being ignorant is a personal manifestation of a social issue. Someone that doesn’t know that burning coal contributes to global warming is ignorant. This is often the fault of underfunded systems. It can best be fixed by helping them realize that they have something to learn. Sometimes they need to be taught how to learn things for themselves as well.

Being willfully misinformed is another personal manifestation of a social issue, but in a way where they hold more fault. Someone that believes that burning coal doesn’t do anything to the environment and refuses to look at information saying otherwise is willfully misinformed. This is often the fault of tribalism, personal prejudice, and general mistrust of people outside their group. It’s difficult to fix, because the person is making an active choice.

Being indoctrinated generally means that the BITE model is coming into play, and that we’re talking about more serious coercion around information and action. Someone that believes that burning coal doesn’t do anything for the environment and that anyone trying to tell them otherwise is an agent of evil that they cannot trust, or that if they believe otherwise that people they love will turn on them, is indoctrinated. An indoctrinated person may be an innocent, and they may indoctrinate others. This one’s also hard to solve. There are full organizations dedicated to helping people who have been indoctrinated.

Spreading harmful propaganda is most often done for personal gain, and can contribute to all of the above problems. It is when someone says that burning coal does not hurt the environment, generally for their own gain. The problem here is pure selfishness. As such, it’s only fixable if the person decides that they want to fix it.

But specifically... I just hate how Windows 10 tries to conflate and confuse web searches with things on one's own computer. The start menu should never do anything related to web-searching, especially if it purports to try to give examples of things that are on my hard drive!

This will make old, computer-illiterate people more malware-vulnerable. You have to maintain a strong distinction between "things that are on this computer (and maybe even included in Windows)" (safe, one hopes, or you already got pwned by it, probably), and "things on the web" (scary, dangerous, not to be trusted at all).

Eroding that barrier in the UI is awful. It just FEELS like a violation every time I start typing into the start bar, and it tries to show me ANYTHING web-related. My computer is NOT just an internet-portal! It has tons of stuff on it, and when I'm interacting with the OS, I ONLY want to see things that are already on here!

If I wanted to see something online, I would go to my browser! All the online stuff should be segregated into the browser!

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 

10AppsManager

With one click, this will remove ALL THE BLOATWARE Windows comes with. Seriously, you need NONE OF THESE apps, and if you do, you can just uninstall all the ones you don't need individually.

Winaero Tweaker

This program will give you almost complete control over Windows 10's behavior. Disabling the web search in the start menu, op rightfully complained about, is just one of the many things this thing can do

For example, with a single setting you can turn off any ads from microsoft, system-wide

It is a powerful tool, but it can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily every single setting comes with an explanation about what it actually does, and most settings can be easily reversed.

Source: Mushishi | 蟲師