I was thinking about how I missed having an indoor thermometer that measures humidity. It's such a small specific thing, one I'd never think of getting unless pushed to it (which I was by one particularly dry winter). But I like having one now....
As far as I know, everyone dreams every night...it's part of the sleeping process...but you usually forget it ASAP so it seems like you didn't dream.
As for dreams I remember...less often as I get older, I find. Although I do get a few vivid dreams when using magnesium supplements, but I also acclimate to those quickly. And if I'm woken prematurely, sometimes a dream sticks around a bit more than it otherwise would.
Because it's very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.
Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don't need a plumber. But when you do...you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber's skills. Plumber can't eat, leaves profession, there's now no plumber when the pipes do break.
Obviously, the next thought here might be, "Well, why doesn't the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they'll come and fix your toilet later if needed?" But that sort of re-invents credit, right? "I'll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now." If you have that, why not money?
So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn't be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a "universal" trade good, and it's also easy to store (you don't have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).
The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)--but that's a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It's a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too...see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.
The parameters for making a USEFUL plastic that ALSO degrades gives a narrow band. Too degradable, and the function of fulfilling all the areas plastic is currently used for can't happen. Not degradable, and we have the current situation.
Plastic being is in use not simply to fuck the planet over or something, but because compared to other materials it has physical qualities that things like glass, wood, fabric, etc. don't have, that's why it's ended up in so many things. It's lightweight, strong, and "plastic" (that is to say, more easily shaped and molded than other materials, and I suspect there's a labor component too where maybe it needs less labor to shape and form).
I'm eventually going to write a story about a sci-fi world that's under quarantine because they successfully made a plastic-eating bacteria that never stops eating and breaking down plastic. Go there and most of your technology/clothes/etc. are eaten away. I might throw in wood, too...a world with no wood or plastic because the local bacteria is like, "Yum, yum, food!" and gets into every nook and cranny. I anticipate I'll have to do a lot of thinking to figure out how drastically technology would change under these parameters...I imagine a lot of it would be very "brutalist" because you'd have to rely on heavy-as-balls metals and cement and stone and such. Unless there's an Aluminum Future or something, where everything that can be made out of aluminum, can. Of course, there's also the byproducts of intense metals mining to think about on a fictional world like that. Anyway, lots of details to pick apart for worldbuilding.
I've been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.
I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it's true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn't get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.
Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.
I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.
Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.
The typical American household would need to spend $445 more a month to purchase the same goods and services as a year ago, a report from Moody’s found.
I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.
They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!
But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.
I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.
Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.
Passkeys are an easy and secure alternative to traditional passwords that can help prevent phishing attacks and make your online experience smoother and safer....
Walt Disney Co on Friday said that remarks by activist investor Nelson Peltz criticizing the company for making movies dominated by female and Black actors is evidence that he shouldn’t be on Disney’s board....
I was out doing some outdoor work last week, and I’ve basically the skintone of a vampire so I cover up, so I had a big unstylish fishing hat with a neck protector on. And some kids from the local junior high mocked me in terrible Spanish as they walked home. (And by terrible, I mean I could identify how bad it was and I haven’t had Spanish classes in 20+ years and never was fluent in it and I could still tell it was bad.)
I’m not even Hispanic, but it made me mad enough with it happening just one time that it hurts inside to know similar stuff happens on a daily basis to other people. And some of it totally comes from young racist fucks.
Up to one-third of the 12,000 inmates in Los Angeles County jails can’t get to their court appearances because of a shortage of functioning buses, and county supervisors this week advanced a proposal to try and fix the problem....
This guy’s comment history suggests to me they’re trying to instill hopelessness so people don’t vote. And when people don’t vote… well, we get another shit show.
I’ve tried pretty hard to search for relevant examples of this online, but I can’t seem to find the right search terms for any of this. The closest I’ve seen is “object permanence” in the ADHD research, but I’m pretty cautious to start self-diagnosing as I’m not a professional.
So, there’s always going to be the “script kiddies” of the psychology world out there, who throw around words and jargon without actually understanding what they’re doing or playing with. Just like there’s know-nothings in tech who do the same with IT stuff.
But if you’re a measured and logical person, you’re not immediately going to become one of them if you start looking deeper into psychology and mental health stuff. You’ll start out as a newbie, sure, but your brains aren’t going to suddenly leak out your ears just because you’re wondering if you have this or that, and in your case you literally told us in your post that the issues you are having are affecting your work and mental health, which, to me, suggests you wouldn’t be researching to be trendy or to look cool, but because you’re hurting and in distress and want to figure out what’s going on.
That’s a very valid reason, IMO, to start researching this stuff. You’re hurt, you’re in distress–time to research, even if that might on a superficial level make you look like you’re chasing trends. (But I don’t think you would be, necessarily.)
Anyway, your whole post makes me think researching the mental health stuff is actually a good direction to go. What you’re doing with tech (not committing, searching for greener pastures) reminds me a lot of some of my mal-adaptive habits.
I grew up in a traumatic home, and I figured out (eventually, ha!) the reason I (for example) restart video games instead of playing to the end is because my stress response is messed up, and my solution to a fun game going sour is to “reboot” and seek a redo (just like how I left home, or quit some jobs to get away from stressful people!).
And I have other habits that were once useful for managing anxiety in fear in very high-stress environments, but which work poorly once one is in a more normal environment. It’s very easy to pick up an adaption to stress or to something else in your past that is useful initially, but then starts misfiring when you unconsciously apply it to a totally different part of your life.
Therefore, as others have suggested, I think it might be good to take a look at the rest of your life. Are things stressful with your parents? Any boyfriend/girlfriend issues? Is work or school being a dick to you? If you are getting stress from those areas, you might be immersing yourself in tech stuff (and vacillating back and forth) as an unconscious reaction to that outside stress.
I’m a writer and I often submerge myself in writing when I have other stressors going on. So I look super-productive and happy to people who like to read my stuff, but it’s usually masking everything else going to shit. When I was younger, I did something similar when making webpages and learning tech. Stuff was stressing me, and I found relief by throwing myself into learning something new. Set up entire websites and message forums just to get away from IRL stuff that sucked. The more going on at home, the more I was trying new things with my website.
One skill I found to be VERY useful to develop when trying to figure out my own psychology is learning how to kind of…stop and identify and name what I was feeling when I got out of sorts (anxious, fearful, upset, irritated, angry, hyper, manic, etc.). Try to name it and follow it back to its roots. WHAT am I feeling? Can I actually name it? And WHY might I be feeling it? What happened just before I suddenly felt this thing and switched tracks?
It’s not going to be easy at first, it’s a skill you have to develop like any other. But I found once I started being able to stop myself in moments when I was doing something impulsive/avoidant, I got a better handle on what I was feeling, and why, and that sort of gave me the opening I needed to control it, instead of letting it control me. Once you can touch and name something, it’s easier to make it work for you instead of being hauled along by it.
For you, I think it might be worthwhile to do a bit more reading on ADHD, but also look up OCD (it’s not about being a “neat freak” in practice, it’s more about people having fears and anxieties and coming up with rituals in an attempt to control the fears and anxieties), and also look up maladaptive perfectionism. Even if none of this actually applies to you, becoming more informed doesn’t hurt, and sometimes by following links from one topic to another you can stumble upon something that actually does help or apply to you.
You sound like you’re in tech, maybe a programmer, and I’ve noticed several of my friends in this realm struggle with maladpative perfectionism, btw. (I do sometimes too, but to a lesser extent).
Basically, due to having parents that expected much of them, or their own internal sense of competition, folks can end up kind of breaking their “learning mechanism” or their ability to complete projects because tiny humdrum “mistakes” trigger the same sense of failure as true disaster. Things turn black and white–either everything is absolutely 100% perfect, or you’ve failed and you’re going to burn in hell with all the other failures!
Like, for someone with maladaptive perfectionism, sometimes ANY mistake is a world-ending nightmare emotionally, and stress-wise. So one ends up being hugely stressed when small errors happen, stressed and anxious out of proportion to what’s going on. And when you have that shit going on inside, that can snowball into other behaviors. Some people stop learning and stop trying new things (if you don’t try, you can’t fail, basically). Some people avoid things (if I don’t engage maybe it’ll go away). Lots of different ways people can respond, but it’s often in order to get away from the pain or stress that happens when a “failure” happens.
It seems possible to me, from reading your post, that you might be switching back and forth because you’re scared of settling on something imperfect. But–I could be VERY off-base. Which is why you should dig a bit more on psychology topics yourself. See what YOU think, given that you know your brain and history much better than any of us do.
Anyway. I don’t know if this will help at all, but I hope it does.
If you take anything away from this, I’d say you have this random internet person’s “permission” to go look up articles on psychology and things like ADHD or anxiety or the like. You won’t magically turn into an idiot because you looked up a topic once or twice.
Well I thought about using them instead of buying a hdd, I looked for some comparisons and found a 50 pack of 25gb blu ray drives and a 2tb harddrive for 60, it can store 35 movies more (thinking the movie is 24 GB) than the pack of drives, and that isn’t accounting the disk drive to read the disks (Keep in mind these are just...
Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?
The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow, plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).
Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.
Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.
I wake up at 3am to 4am daily as a neighbor makes noise walking their dog. This cannot be helped. Once I am awake, my mind won’t stop going over details about everything from the mundane to the critical. Often, I am able to fall asleep again after three or more hours of wakefulness, but only minutes before I have to wake for...
Lots of software is designed so the delete button just flags an entry so it doesn’t show to low privilege users on the front end, while the data persists in the database where database admins and the like can still access it.
Online it’s wise to assume every website acts like this if you don’t actually run the site yourself with full admin access to the underlying web server and database . Once what you write gets on a site it is permanently out of your control in most cases.
Then science better get going on artificial, external wombs. A lot of people would be overjoyed to be able to have kids without the physical risk of pregnancy, and the technology seems like it’d be mandatory for true colonization efforts
This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.
But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.
So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I'm naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they're part of my family and dynasty--so I'm giving them names that have a lot of personal "worth" to me.
Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn't white, and I couldn't figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt "right" for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none "fit".
And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was "high worth" to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn't get the name of this other character I really liked.
Now, if I was doing that in a frickin' video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are "high worth" to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.
And it wasn't like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this "gut feeling" that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow "weren't right" for her, even though that frickin' inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.
So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.
Several men and a PUG in a Saloon, Illinois, USA, ~1910s ( media.kbin.social )
Mexico City Has Long Thirsted for Water. The Crisis Is Worsening. ( www.nytimes.com )
A collision of climate change, urban sprawl and poor infrastructure has pushed Mexico City to the brink of a profound water crisis....
NOTHING MORE ft David Draiman - ANGEL SONG (Official Music Video) ( youtu.be )
Black Summer - Red Hot Chili Peppers - (Bardcore | Medieval Style Cover) ft. Collin Vodicka ( youtu.be )
Are there any household gadgets you found unexpectedly useful after you'd gotten them?
I was thinking about how I missed having an indoor thermometer that measures humidity. It's such a small specific thing, one I'd never think of getting unless pushed to it (which I was by one particularly dry winter). But I like having one now....
Do you dream? How often?
I saw another thread talking about dreams, I've had less than a handful of dreams throughout my life....
Why is currency so essential?
Why do we focus solely on this one aspect of life?
Scientists have figured out way to make algae-based plastic that completely decomposes ( abcnews.go.com )
YouTube keeps serving this obnoxious ~5m ad
YouTube wants me to watch a 4m30s ad for middle-aged men who want to stay healthy. I won't watch it. Hence, it never goes away....
Best Linux Distro For Playing On Steam?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14762903...
Is there a "personality test" you've done you found helpful?
Most are made up and silly....
Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements. ( www.tomshardware.com )
Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds ( www.theguardian.com )
Swiss food firm’s infant formula and cereal sold in global south ignore WHO anti-obesity guidelines for Europe, says Public Eye...
So many peets! ( lemmy.world )
Eww, Copilot AI might auto-launch with Windows 11 soon ( www.pcworld.com )
Millennials and Gen Z's trendy new splurge: groceries ( www.businessinsider.com )
Why do people say "Catholics and Christians" in (USA) when Catholics are also Christians, as if they refer to it as a different religion.
Is this some sort of remnant of evangelical puritan protestant ideology?...
What a great idea.... ( yall.theatl.social )
Camo Easter eggs that you’ll NEVER find. 🤷🏻
Proton Pass now supports passkeys on all devices and plans: Beating Bitwarden to mobile devices ( proton.me )
Passkeys are an easy and secure alternative to traditional passwords that can help prevent phishing attacks and make your online experience smoother and safer....
Oregon city can't limit church's homeless meal services, federal judge rules ( apnews.com )
A federal judge has ruled that a southern Oregon city can’t limit a local church’s homeless meal services....
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]
Revealed: San Jose CA is training AI to spot homeless encampments ( www.theguardian.com )
Archived at web.archive.org/…/san-jose-homelessness-ai-detect…
'Why do I need an all-Black cast?' Disney criticizes Peltz remarks ( www.reuters.com )
Walt Disney Co on Friday said that remarks by activist investor Nelson Peltz criticizing the company for making movies dominated by female and Black actors is evidence that he shouldn’t be on Disney’s board....
Lack of buses keeps Los Angeles jail inmates from court appearances and contributes to overcrowding ( abcnews.go.com )
Up to one-third of the 12,000 inmates in Los Angeles County jails can’t get to their court appearances because of a shortage of functioning buses, and county supervisors this week advanced a proposal to try and fix the problem....
Does anyone else struggle with tech permanence?
Update...
What's your opinion on using rw Blu-ray disks for storing movies, ect?
Well I thought about using them instead of buying a hdd, I looked for some comparisons and found a 50 pack of 25gb blu ray drives and a 2tb harddrive for 60, it can store 35 movies more (thinking the movie is 24 GB) than the pack of drives, and that isn’t accounting the disk drive to read the disks (Keep in mind these are just...
Garden ornament turns out to be live bomb ( www.bbc.com )
Tips for falljng back to sleep
I wake up at 3am to 4am daily as a neighbor makes noise walking their dog. This cannot be helped. Once I am awake, my mind won’t stop going over details about everything from the mundane to the critical. Often, I am able to fall asleep again after three or more hours of wakefulness, but only minutes before I have to wake for...
Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google ( www.reuters.com )
I was just listening to eons in my car and specifically the episode about armored fish, and the thought occurred to me: isn't evolution ultimately selecting for adaptability? ( m.youtube.com )
It would seem the design that can survive the most extinctions would be the clear winner in the end.
Why does incest result in birth defects?
Just to be well and truly fuckin clear. I am not now nor have I ever been nor will I ever be contemplating shagging a family member.
What was a profound moment that a video game caused you to experience, and why?
The moment that inspired this question:...
What is an item below 100 bucks that everyone should own?
What are some good browser-based games you've liked?
To give an example of what I'm thinking of...Kingdom of Loathing, Lioden, Flight Rising....