Short answer to your precise question, for while you’re transitioning to a new treatment:

What triggers for you a strong, negative emotion, every time you’re exposed to it? I knew I was recovering when they stopped hitting the same way. In my case, I was extremely sensitive to my friendships and was ultra-tuned towards any suggestion they were growing distant from me. A late reply to a text (bad), or two friends hanging out without me (devastating) really hurt. I knew something was up once those stopped bothering me so much.

Longer ‘answer’ detailing my whole experience:

Since I was a young child I was always unhappy, worried, etc. Suicidal ideation started in my early teens. In my late 20s, at the start of the pandemic when I was unemployed, living alone, and friends I had made in grad school were all ditching town to quarantine with their families, I was in an emotional crisis and I had real doubts I’d survive. I sought out treatment again (attempts years earlier failed for BS non-medical reasons, not worth getting into). I was initially prescribed with bupropion, which while it tends to be a good first choice for many people, in my case it enhanced my negative emotions. That was very, very bad. I was quickly switched to venlafaxine (FYI while it has terrible side-effects when getting onto it they usually resolve after a couple of months).

Anyway, after a few months of being on it / some dose increases every few weeks from the initial low dose, I started to feel better. I stopped craving the endorphins I’d feel from the extreme emotions of suicidal ideation, and I stopped overreacting to negative events / perceived slights from friends (say friends A & B played golf together and didn’t invite me, even though they know I hate golf and maybe just wanted their own 1:1 hang). This is sounding like “he stopped feeling anything”, but once the stress & anxiety & rehashing of the bad parts of my childhood disappeared, there was finally room for me to become the person I had always wanted to be (goofy, care-free, smiling, relaxed). The depression & anxiety didn’t fade into numbness, it got replaced with happiness. I can honestly say I feel happy a majority of the time and I’m one of the happiest people I know; I recognize bad events but they just don’t affect my baseline all that much. It’s like - if depression is always feeling bad, and while good events momentarily help they don’t last, then I have “anti-depression”. This whole process probably took about a year.

With the supervision of my doctor I am in the process of getting off venlafaxine. There’s nothing wrong with staying on it forever if need be, but some of the newer theories of how these drugs work suggest that your brain grows new neural circuitry as it adapts to the drug, and it’s the new circuitry that actually helps. If that’s true, then once the new circuitry is grown the drug isn’t actually needed anymore. We’ve been slowly decreasing my dose, monitoring my mood, and so far I’m still feeling great. I’m now on the lowest dose, and if things continue as they have then I won’t need a refill in 2 months.

Every time I share my experience I want to clarify a few things:

• For those who may get onto venlafaxine - it’s terrible side effects should fade over time. I almost quit taking it at first but I’m glad I continued.
• Some medications work for some people and not for others, while others work for them but not for the first group. Probably depression & anxiety are just symptoms of different afflictions. We can see the common symptoms but we don’t know which affliction causes it, but each affliction needs its own treatment. As a result the best you can do is keep trying treatments until you find one that works for your affliction; there are so many out there that there’s probably one for you.
• Related to the above, but therapy may help. It wasn’t super effective for me but it didn’t hurt either, but depending on the underlying cause you may have better luck with it.
• I’m going off venlafaxine because whatever underlying cause of my symptoms appears to have been permanently cured. That won’t be true for everyone - some diseases require ongoing medication to treat. Don’t go off your medication without your doctor’s supervision & approval; you’ll need your mood monitored to ensure it doesn’t worsen and some of these medications should never be abruptly stopped.
• One of my biggest regrets was not pushing harder earlier in my life for treatment. While my baseline is happy, I do get pissed thinking about how much I unnecessarily suffered and that I didn’t get to enjoy most of my 20s. If a reader (yes, you) are chronically unhappy and unsure whether to get treatment, just go for it.

they can be fined.

Sounds like no? How are they going to make a company with no assets or staff in the UK pay the fine? American courts likely won’t enforce it.

I feel like which network depends on what you’re advocating for and to which type of person. For example, Mastadon, Lemmy, and Bluesky are fairly left-leaning, so advocating for a well-known liberal idea there could be “preaching to the choir”.

Probably legal (for the buying company) but customers should sue the original company and get paid out of the money used to buy it.

Ditto. I use unique passwords for services I care about / someone could exfiltrate sensitive data, and a cheap reused password for services I don’t care about and could easily regain access to with a password reset email.

When I worked for a startup we’d sometimes go out for lunch and everyone would have a drink or two. We also kept beer in the office fridge but that was reserved for more Friday afternoons.

Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).

Early 90s, male, North America

No. They have a trial of 100 one-time searches, but that’s it.

That’s hard for me to answer because I’m usually at home plugged in, and I set the max charge in the bios to only 65% so the battery will physically degrade slower (I don’t need the charge). A few hours is really all I can say with any accuracy. Worth noting a few things -

1. Since I bought my laptop they came out with an improved battery I could upgrade to, so you’d get a better experience.
2. I believe(?) battery life is improved a fair bit at least with the AMD ones; less sure on the newer Intel ones.

I will say that if long battery life is your #1 concern this may not be the laptop for you.

I have a 12th gen Intel Framework running Arch. I love it, although as others have pointed out the battery life could be better. Early kernels shortly after release had some incompatibility issues that required specific kernel arguments to fix. Also I had to blacklist the light sensor as it conflicted with the brightness function keys.

The Arch wiki has a page with details on Framework laptops you may appreciate looking at.

Out of curiosity - what laptop maker is installing Sway by default?

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

Nobody else here has mentioned this but they stripped out all the web plugin support and tooling with no way to install it, even for paying customers. So if you’re working on some kind of web application (perhaps compiling Rust to webassembly, like me) RustRover won’t support your use case.

I too use Kagi but it’s worth noting that Kagi gets most of its results by paying and using other search engines including Google and Bing, so it’s not 100% independent or immune from say Bing’s outage. Still the best option by far though.

Both i3 and sway are very lightweight so you do get good performance, but it’s the easy tiling / no-nonsense looks that appeal to me.

I greatly despise all facial hair.