Go for it.

I got heavy into carpentry this year because another one of my hobbies involved a bunch of construction.

Working with wood is satisfying as hell. So is building the exact thing you need that isn’t a product sold anywhere.

I appreciate your concern for the quality of your contributions, and I think this place has a higher proportion of that type of user than just about any other platform.

This place is small and it’s generally friendly and inclusive. Most comments won’t get any replies, but the ones that do will generally be constructive. The users here are into the whole idea of the social contract and that we can have something nice if we are just excellent to one another.

I repeatedly say “generally” because this is an open platform and assholes are allowed to join. The assholes can even have their own instance dedicated to asshole topics! But fortunately the instances and communities are generally moderated by actual decent humans who are much like the users!

So let that knowledge help you comment more, not less! Even if you get no comments and like 5 upvotes, it actually feels like something of value even if it’s just a nod from a few decent people.

Edit: part of the conclusion was supposed to be that you can consider comments more like a discussion with people and not some strict message board.

Yeah there is a real trend in conservative culture (at least where I grew up) that fits right in with the rest of the anti-intellectualism. And it’s not taught explicitly but it permeates social interactions.

I’m trying to decide how to describe it… Basically, you look down on people who are trying to improve themselves.

Very much true in my specific limited experience.

I live in a nice little town here in the US, and I’m a well educated middle aged white guy. It’s safe to say that I get to see a pretty nice version of America even as horrible shit is happening all over the place.

I’ve gotten to spend a few weeks in Sweden of all places over the past few years. Plus I got to see the insides of some airports in other places luke Belgium and Germany.

There’s just something different in the air over there, in a good way. I thought of it as a kind of dignity that came from respect for others as well as oneself, but I like how you call it social cohesiveness.

I think some of the details around food and drink showed it best, and they make good examples because they apply to a mix of the general public.

The food itself is obviously much better over there. Even things like the hotel breakfast or the cafeteria at a workplace had a huge variety of fresh, real foods as opposed to ultraprocessed manufactured branded products.

But the dishes and utensils were some of the most interesting to me as an american. In places like an office cafe at work, or a local restaurant, or I think even an airport, they would have actual GLASSES, plates, and silverware. And on top of that, you would often return your dishes to the kitchen or even put them directly on to the dish washer rack waiting for you.

This breaks my american mind. Fragile non-disposable cups in a public place? Other than coffee mugs on people’s desks or restaurant glasses being dropped off and picked up with at your table, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that within these borders. If you could use glasses and silverware in public places here, I can’t decide what would happen first: somebody would get cut on one of the immediately broken glasses, or so much of the stuff would get stolen that they’d close it down.

I like to call out their bathrooms too. The way we do it over here is big men’s and women’s restrooms with next to no privacy (it’s one big room with flimsy floating dividers forming the toilet stalls) and stupid culture wars about who should and should not get their genitals inspected or whatever. Over there it’s just several individual doors, each with a small bathroom. Much better privacy, no fodder for the bigots, and much better utilization of the resources.

American here living in a car-only area.

I didn’t even raise an eyebrow at that previous comment. Sure most drivers are fine, but there are plenty of people who make me wonder what the hell combination of these issues (and others) is going on with them.

The most common example I get to see is the people speeding through the elementary school parking lot in their luxury SUVs. I especially love it when they start a phone call as they start driving, after they just finished standing around, collecting their kid, and walking back to the parking lot.

This is so stupid that it makes me think maybe the “great filter” (the reason we don’t see space-faring civilizations everywhere) is actually that life forms who evolved by fighting for survival and going through natural selection cannot psychologically handle a post-scarcity society. It’s like when the threats disappear everybody forgets they exist even if they are well documented historically.

Related: if you don’t know about how horrifying a disease is, go search for some articles and copypasta about it. Congrats on being one of today’s (un)lucky 10,000!

I dont care if the person field strips it in front of me, the first thing im doing after they hand it to me is clearing it myself.

This kind of attitude is the exact right way to do it when safety is involved. You make it automatic, not a decision. It’s like wearing your seatbelt. It saves you time and energy while producing the best results.

Put another way: Crazy shit happens every day. You make it automatic not because you distrust the person unloading it in front of you. You do it because you shouldn’t trust yourself to be perfectly flawless in life and death situations. You do it 100% of the times that you rationally know for certain that it’s empty, so that you skip the check 0.00000% of the time that some crazy sequence of events quietly creates a dangerous situation.

That usb-c connector with side screw locks looks like a future I want to live in.

It’s futuristic, but it’s open and not corporate. It’s miniaturized and sleek, yet still mechanically rugged.

I’m human and I enjoy these stories of pettiness just like anybody else.

But if I may please speak in my “old man who has seen things” capacity for a moment, this is not the way to live. You should endeavor to do positive things every day to make life better for people around you as well as yourself. And you don’t do this because it gets you praise or rewards, you do it because of the internal rewards. It’s good for your mind.

That is the easiest image to hear that I’ve seen in a while.

I don’t keep up on the appliance world very much, but for many years I have been under the impression that when replacing one it’s always a good call to NOT get the Samsung.

I have literally never seen reason to doubt that rule.

I’m actually pretty happy with my current appliances, but I don’t stick all to one brand and I stick with the simpler cheaper designs. If paying for the next higher tier brings higher build quality or upgrades the core function’s power/capacity, then I’ll probably go for it.

From Wikipedia, here is the article snippet that originated the term.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Well, the Snaps are one of the things they took out. Flatpaks are enabled in the software manager by default though.

I believe everything that comes preinstalled, including Firefox and LibreOffice and such, is installed the traditional way as if you did “apt install firefox.”

I installed LibreWolf and like it. It’s just firefox with telemetry removed and some privacy hardening out of the box.

Check out Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu but has Canonical’s controversial stuff removed, plus an added layer of polish.

Alright fine, I can tolerate the little ✨AI ✨ sparkles in my M365 webpages a while longer if it means more kaboom at the end.

I wonder if it’s a white balance thing, as in the setting you’d see on a camera or in a post processing tool.

For instance, consider that “soft” or “warm” light bulbs (say 3000K and below) are common in cozy indoor areas. They cast a much more yellow color of light compared with a daylight bulb or actual daylight, which will look very blue in comparison.

It’s like the model detected that the image was people in a living room and it applied a warm white balance to the whole picture because most images of a family in the living room have warm lighting globally.

But since it is a machine and apparently has not yet been explicitly taught that comics generally have bright colors and no strange tints, then it does not adjust accordingly.

I wonder if that is even giving it too much credit. Maybe it’s just the deterioration from all the iterations of garbage in, garbage out.

I didn’t exactly say I was innocent. 👌😎 👍

I do read what they say though.

Wow, this is really impressive y’all!

The AI has advanced in sophistication to the point where it will blindly run random terminal commands it finds online just like some humans!

I wonder if it knows how to remove the french language package.

You just aren’t thinking like a billionaire, man. What you do is get the two people anyway, and still force the 70 hour work week.

Your job is not to find a reasonable steady state of operation. Your job is to exploit the resources before you (even the ones with emotions and families) to extract value for the shareholders in the most efficient way possible, before somebody even more evil and clever than you figures out a better way and we direct future fresh meat to his meat grinder instead of yours.

Turtles are kind of in between with their wedge-shaped heads. They need the awareness to hide from predators, but some of them are also predators themselves or they at least snap at fruits and veggies to eat them.

Here’s my tortoise doing his best disappointed-in-you baby yoda:

And here’s the yellow belly slider locking target on to some shrimp.

But it sounds like the rules aren’t as consistent in the water, judging from other comments. Even something like an alligator snapping turtle’s eyes are no further forward than these pics.