canadaduane

The Family Institute at Northwestern University has a "tip of the month" newsletter for couples that I receive in my email inbox. I liked this one:

Trying to fix emotions, example 1:

• Partner One: “I feel really discouraged today…”
• Partner Two: “Come take a walk with me, it’s a really beautiful day out.”

Trying to fix emotions, example 2:

• Partner One: “I’m so frustrated with the people at work, they spend all day complaining.”
• Partner Two: “You should just quit, we can get by on my salary for a while.”

Trying to fix emotions, example 3:

• Partner One: “We never hear from the kids. It bothers me that they don’t call once in a while to see how we are.”
• Partner Two: “They’re busy with their own lives. You shouldn’t let it bother you, it’s not that big a deal.”

See the pattern? These are examples of the three most common ways we try to change — or fix — our partner’s negative emotions. In the first example, Partner Two suggests looking on the bright side as a way of lifting one’s spirits. In the second example, Partner Two becomes Mister or Miss Fixit, offering unsolicited advice that they hope will provide relief. In the third example, Partner Two admonishes his partner for feeling the way she does. Each response invalidates what Partners One are feeling; each fails, in its own way, to acknowledge through empathic listening the negative emotion that’s being expressed. That failure leaves Partners One feeling alone and without a sense of being seen and heard by the one person they most wish would understand them (see Empathy Advantage).

Why is emotion-fixing so common? In part, we never learned that empathic listening is the far superior way to respond to a partner’s distress. The skill of empathic listening doesn’t come to us naturally; it’s something that’s learned either through formal instruction (view the short videos below) or by watching it modeled by the people around us. On a deeper level, emotion-fixing is something we do because emotional pain tends to be contagious and we ourselves don’t want to feel badly. Our brains are wired, through mirror neurons, to feel what others are feeling, whether positive or negative. Without realizing it, we protect ourselves from slipping into a negative place by trying to help — to “fix”— our partner’s painful emotions.

The skill of empathic listening strengthens all our relationships, whether it’s with our primary partner, our children, or our friends. Few experiences promote a stronger bond between people than feeling seen and heard in our emotions. The skill applies across all age groups (although we may choose different words depending on whom we’re talking to). Watch how empathic listening is used by the parents in the short videos below and try it with your partner the next time you hear even the smallest expression of negative emotion.

Additional discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/listening/comments/11urtp8/i_say_dog_you_say_chicken_new_study_explores_why/

My father-in-law told us both when we were married: "Remember that sometimes you will be a friend to one another, and other times you will be a parent. Everyone needs to cry like a child sometimes."

Do you have any advice that you've been given that helped you be a better partner?

This short presentation by Paul Chappell changed me. He outlines how unmet human needs can translate into the social disorders that we face today--things like school shootings, and depression. His personal story is one of "nearly becoming the bad guy" in a school shooting, followed by years serving in the military, and then finding his calling as a peace advocate.

One of the most influential books in my life is Nonviolent Communication. I'd like to summarize why its concepts are so powerful to me.

At the core of it is a beautiful understanding of the human spirit and condition--and a reassuring observation that we as human beings are very similar on the inside, even if culturally or historically unique in our traumas.

Rosenberg identifies that our cross-cultural, shared humanity is linked through feelings. These basic feelings are universal and can be understood universally--feelings like embarrassment, joy, fear, anger, etc. He emphasizes that he is talking about the most basic of feelings, not the higher level judgment-laden feelings that may be difficult to hear or understand ("I feel like you lied to me" is not a basic feeling, but something like "I feel angry" probably is).

He also identifies that feelings arise when we have unmet needs. There are shared human needs--he offers many examples, such as the need for security, the need for stability, the need for dignity, etc. These shared human needs can also act as a kind of "translation map" to understand people different from ourselves.

This is the essence of nonviolent communication: If we are willing, we can offer to describe the reality of our feelings to others--and the needs we perceive--and others will often (but not always) respond by trying to fulfill our needs.

The practice of communicating nonviolently allows us to exist with dignity in the world and respond to each others needs. This offers an alternative to coercion & violence, and their cumulative ill effects on individuals and society at large.

"Hi, I am currently creating a gtk theme. Honestly I'm new to this, and I really don't know where to find information about this kind of thing, I want to post it once I finish it on github, I don't know whether to make this a project. or not, so I want to give something quality and finished when I get to post it. I must say that it is based on colloid and therefore on catppuccine. That's it, and yes. I still owe you the pop!_os I made."

Original: https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/1643bob/my_theme/

Incredibly, running a local LLM (large language model) on just the CPU is possible with Llama.cpp!— however, it can be pretty slow. I get about 1 token every 2 seconds with a 34 billion parameter model on an 11th gen Intel framework laptop with 64GB of RAM.

I have an external Nvidia GPU connected to my Pop!_OS laptop, and I’ve used the following technique to successfully compile Llama.cpp to use clblast (a BLAS adapter library) to speed up various LLMs (such as codellama-34b.Q4_K_M.gguf). As a rough estimate, the speed-up I get is about 5x on my Nvidia 3080 TI.

Here's how to compile Llama.cpp inside a docker container on Pop!_OS.

Hi all!

What fediverse social media accounts do you recommend for accurate and timely information about the war in Ukraine (i.e. mastodon, not lemmy)?

I've been very grateful to find this federated community since moving away from Reddit.

I've also deleted my 13-year-old Twitter account. Now, I'm looking for alternative, reliable sources for information about the war that are open and not dependent on Twitter/X.

Some examples I've found (note: I have not followed all of these accounts for a long time, so use your judgment when evaluating them wrt reliability/accuracy):

• https://mas.to/@ukrinform
• https://osintua.eu/@benb
• https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki

Do you have others to recommend? Thanks!

A summary from Reddit user Gorperly:

The goings on in Dagestan are mostly below the radar but I think they're extremely notable. Dagestan is in the midst of a full-on services and utilities collapse.

Dagestan, one of the most corrupt regions in Russia, is just the first domino to fall due to systemic failures that affect the rest of Putin's crumbling empire. The root cause of a lot of recent disasters is wide-scale construction without investing into infrastructure. Typical for Putin, his officials double-dip: they profit off of illegal construction, and they flat-out steal from utilities. Secondly, Dagestan is a majorly non-ethnically Russian region that has been one of the hardest-hit by war casualties and conscription. There aren't enough qualified specialists left to smoothly run the already skeletal infrastructure.

In the latest chapter, a giant explosion took place in the capital Makhachkala a few hours ago. The explosion was right next to a newly constructed mall. There are scant details:

A building caught fire near the Globus shopping center, the city administration reports. Eyewitnesses talk about a loud explosion in a car service. The fire later spread to a gas station.

According to the Dagestan Center for Disaster Medicine, five people were killed in the explosion and another ten were injured. At the same time, the telegram channel Baza reported that more than 50 people were injured as a result of the incident. According to Shot there are at least 70 victims.

https://t.me/rtvimain/81881

Other telegram videos show post-apocalyptic scenes in a hospital as more and more victims are brought in.

https://t.me/ostorozhno_novosti/18689

This is happening in the background of a major heatwave. Large swaths of population have been without electricity and water on and off, sparking spontaneous protests.

Dagestan’s ongoing utilities crisis saw another major protest on Sunday night. The residents of Karaman-2, a settlement outside of the region’s capital Makhachkala, blocked the federal Makhachkala–Astrakhan highway, trying to draw attention to the dire water-supply situation in the area.

According to some participants, their homes had been without running water for the whole summer.

On August 9, Makhachkala residents resorted to similar tactics to protest power supply disruptions that left many Dagestani homes without electricity for three days in a row,

Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country on Earth and its army is suffering from a critical shortage of men and equipment able to clear the frontlines, the country’s defence minister has said, as soldiers spoke of heavy casualties in the engineering brigades.

In an urgent appeal to allies, Oleksii Reznikov told the Guardian his soldiers were unearthing five mines for every square metre in places, laid by Russian troops to try to thwart Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

He said the vast minefields could be traversed, but that it was critically important that allies “expand and expedite” the training already being provided by some nations, including Britain.

The counteroffensive actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are forcing Russian occupiers to redeploy their defending forces in the western part of the Zaporizhzhia region, where Ukrainian soldiers have weakened their defenses. This degradation of Russian military strength presents an opportunity for a breakthrough by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which could prove decisive.

Such conclusions have been drawn by analysts at the Institute for the Study of War.