• AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    There is no problem with having read the book, there’s no problem with liking it. I did both, the first time i read it I thought it was cool. I’m more taking about people who made the nude sex cult book part of their personality enough to use the word grok unironically.

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      It’s a useful word with no direct equivalent in English. You don’t need to integrate the cult aspect of the book into your identity to understand that.

      • AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Sure, I might even give those people some grace over the people who use it cause they want to be Jared Leto, or one of Jared Leto’s sex cult friends in the book.

        It’s actually still a red flag, unfortunately. The only people who use Grok have a terrible understanding of other people, like the dude in this article. That’s part of the problem. Either you’re jumping off the same bridge as your weirdo colleagues, you identify with the nudist-cult Martian, or you have such trouble being understood, or understanding neurotypical people, you think you need a new word.

        It’s like people who use Na’vi, you can make up anything and say it’s anything and people who have trouble with reality will identify themselves by using that nonsense in normal conversation. You’re never gonna make fetch happen, it’s just tedious.

        • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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          10 hours ago

          or you have such trouble being understood, or understanding neurotypical people, you think you need a new word.

          My background pretty heavily leans toward comp-sci and hacker culture, and “grok” in those circles is almost never used in the context of people, so I find it a bit odd that this is what you seem to be focusing on. It had very little to do with the difficulty of understanding other people, and much more to do with the understanding of a language, or nuanced hardware interactions, or programming techniques.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok#In_computer_programmer_culture

          For what it’s worth, I agree on your specifics, and if someone is frequently making statements about being unable to grok others, or others not being able to grok them, than it’s at the very least off-putting.

            • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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              8 hours ago

              Eh, no skin off my back. Pretty sure if you search my comment history for the word “grok” this comment chain is the only time I’ve ever used it. It’s not a regular part of my speech, I just never interpreted it in the way you were saying.

              • AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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                8 hours ago

                You’ve moved my opinion on this definitely, I have never been inside that world, but I engage with it all the time because of my work.

                Rather than being something strange and wrong, it’s just a thing that works, and that’s why you guys adopt it. Like rubber duck programming.