Your comment reminded me about how I keep wondering if I should bite the bullet and throw away all the plastic cups, plates, bowls, and utensils in the house. Spend a little money on more metal and ceramic stuff, and potentially benefit my family’s health long term. Maybe.

Awesome to hear! It’s easier said than done (like always) because I think sometimes we don’t even realize when we’re doing it.

In the first year of COVID my position got eliminated at the company I’d worked at for 16 years. I’d had different positions within the company, but that place was basically my entire career until then.

That shock to the system, coupled with the fact that several months later I realized I was the same person with the same loved ones, finally flipped some switch in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there. Then the next job I got was fucking horrible and served to weld that switch in its new position, lol.

So now I have a good job with good coworkers, and I appreciate that fact every day, but that’s not going to erode the healthy boundaries and mental compartmentalization.

MacOS is literally certified UNIX though.

I’m not a Mac user at all, and I’m lucky enough to be able to run Linux full time at work, but it seems like macs should be alright in many cases.

What has been working for me is not trying to make software my life or my identity. I don’t get home from work just to work on my side project, or my app, or my Arch install, or even watch videos about coding and shit. I hang out at my pond, play with my pets, play with my son, chill with my wife, work on the yard, or just watch/play something that catches my interest.

It’s like we all have a unique user’s manual for our unique bodies and minds, but we don’t get a copy of it and have to do some reverse engineering to figure out what works. Then you have to have the compassion and empathy for yourself to do the things that increase your happiness instead of doing the things that you’re “supposed” to do.

I know teams is probably the most hated product in tech savvy corporate America, but I do at least give MS credit that I can let it live in a Firefox tab and my audio & video work fine for meetings.

But when anybody tries to use a Teams-equipped conference room? Whoo boy!

Yeah, jira is going alright for us at work, but there are a lot of supporting people maintaining it and prioritizing things in meetings that we engineers don’t have to attend.

Everybody gangs up on hating Teams instead!

"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.’’

As an American, this line short circuited my brain:

Police there still carry guns on the regular

I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.

And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.

Yeah I agree with that. Relying on individual compassion to fix real estate probably makes even less sense than relying on churches and charity to fix poverty and hunger.

I’m still in favor of making things better in one’s little corner of the world, because even just looking at it selfishly it tends to make your life and your mental health better too.

The finance people (and sadly, many many others) think making the number bigger is a more important and worthwhile goal than making your corner of the world a better place. So good on you for being a compassionate human!

I think “quiet quitting” is just the white collar equivalent to the more blue collar “nobody wants to work anymore!”

I typically stay at work until 5pm because I make no effort to come in early and I take long lunch breaks.

This place is an absolute ghost town by 5, and it makes me happy to see that. It seems people mostly have their heads on straight here.

Yeah yeah, YTA, and you went too hard writing this story.

Yeah, honestly it’s worked fine without any fiddling around. If it makes a difference, I tend to do things like let mint use non-free components if necessary, and I know I do have the “play drm stuff” option turned on I’m Firefox, even though the privacy and security stuff is all strict.

It’s just a Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia gpu in addition to the embedded Intel one. I think it works fine though with either the open drivers or the closed nvidia ones, but I don’t know if it touches that gpu.

I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.

I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!

Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.

What they are getting at is that gravity is not a force so much as your mass trying to travel in a straight line through curved spacetime. The weight you feel is because the surface of the earth is in your way.

Get into low earth orbit and that straight path has you going in apparent circles around the planet. You are very much within the earth’s gravity but you don’t feel “weight” because the surface of the earth is no longer blocking your path. You still have mass and inertia and all that, of course.

It doesn’t even need to be overnight! I’m currently sitting in a recliner in an infusion/cancer center because I am on a medication that’s given through IV every month. My insurance is going to pay a 5 figure sum for me to chill in this chair for about 90 minutes.

I’m a software engineer and the actual dollars paid monthly/yearly (not the fake high “retail” cost) are something like 2x my gross income.

Yeah, unfortunately a huge chunk of the population is so negative that complaining about the world is pretty much how they interact with it. That and they define themselves by the things they don’t like.

Oof, I’m not in IT thank goodness, but I still feel this in my bones. I’ve had to write plenty of instructions for in-house trained users though, and it seemed just as bad. I can’t imagine what it’s like with real randos.

I’ve definitely seen some of these “please let us help you” getting sent around. And even in completely different types of organizations I’ve seen time and time again how the obnoxious entitled complainers don’t even show up.

I’m probably in the minority, but I love that crisp sharp look with perfect geometry that you get on a modern display with no filters enabled.

I’ve always been a visually nitpicky person. When I was a kid I tweaked the hell out of the whole 3 setting knobs and switches on my crappy old CRT. In Nintendo Power, the screenshots were taken off nice computer monitors or something and looked so much better.

If kid me got a chance to play ActRaiser or Super Mario World or even NES stuff like Simon’s Quest, in perfect clarity on a big colorful OLED and using an Xbox elite controller, it would have blown my mind. So now I live it up!

I’m not against original hardware if people want to use it though, especially for speed running.