Not exactly what you’re asking, but it’s also worth checking your local library. Some of them grant their cardholders access to external sources that might overlap with what you’re after.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein is one the books I read during my formative years that I still think about a lot.

If you like graphic novels, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman is fantastic. Great writing and great artwork.

When Windows 95 was still sold on floppy, it came on 25 fucking floppies in the box.

So I say put Windows 38 on them.

Not a doctor, but I wouldn’t assume a cream and a tablet will function the same way for the same problem.

One thing you could try: instead of showering, take a bath. Soak in the water for a while, then dry off and apply the cream right away. Obviously doesn’t help for everything, but in my experience, having well hydrated skin makes a lot of things sting a lot less.

It looks like it gives birth to Cybertrucks.

The universal problem is that there’s no shared definition of what a downvote represents. Is it “this is spam and should be removed”? “I don’t like this”? “This doesn’t belong here”? “I want to see less of this”? “I disagree”?

That’s not even a Reddit problem - it’s innate to any social media voting apparatus. Extend it to Facebook, even. Does the laugh reaction mean I’m laughing with you or at you?

Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice. So those downvotes don’t even mean anything!

I think the right answer is to stop worrying about votes. Even if they all mean the same thing they’re still meaningless. It’s better to change your post and comment sorting setting than to try to social engineer a way out of it.

Especially if they died and taught everyone else to not eat that thing.

What about Mermaid? https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/gantt.html

It supports Gantt charts and has a pretty nice language for modifying chart content once you get used to it.

I use Obsidian with the Mermaid plugin for offline work, but there are tons of good web-based options out there, too.

The last few phones I had wouldn’t power on if they didn’t have a minimum battery charge, even when plugged in. That’s to ensure a minimal amount of available power to be able to boot the phone. I wonder if the phone would have the same restriction with a missing battery and not just a drained battery…

I assume you’re concerned about the battery eventually blowing up from being on the charger forever?

The most common thing I’ve seen are projects where it acts like a screen or control panel on the wall. Something that’s a fixture or art project.

You don’t need it for anything like music or games - your new phone will be more convenient and run those things better anyway.

A friend of mine stuck an old tablet on the wall and connected it via Bluetooth to his keg system. It gave him a permanent status readout on his beer temperature and how much was left in each keg. It just had a power cable plugged in all the time so it didn’t need to be charged.

Yes.

I gave up trying to maintain a principled list of companies because globalization and supply chains make it too hard to really find a single asshole.

Your chocolate was picked by slaves. Your clothes were almost certainly made by exploited workers. Does that toy have a lithium ion battery? You’re not going to like how many of the raw materials were extracted. The name of the company on the sticker of the shit you bought is just a small piece of the rot.

Yes, but not for a good reason.

I’ve asked chat bots for some services (telcos, etc) for very basic questions that you’d think would have been easy to find from a search engine or their main FAQs, but they were not. The bot was at least able to reference some obscure, super old help pages that had otherwise fallen off the radar.

The bot was a solution to a problem only caused because their website was shitty. I guess it’s cheaper to add an ai bot than it is to organize your documentation.

I think the big thing here is which colours you’re into. Tastes change over time, either because of style trends or just age.

My childhood home had disgusting orange shag carpets. A purple toilet. A turquoise toilet. Fucking hideous by today’s standards, but I guess someone in the 60s thought it was awesome.

I’d pole your kids and ask for more detail. If they’re rolling their eyes because of “colour”, tell em to shaddap. If you’re picking really, really loud colours that don’t fit any particular motif, you can of course do what you want, but they might have a point on style.

I think that technically the vape solution is nicotine, but not tobacco. They’re “better” in that they don’t have all the side products you get from burning leaves, but it’s still nicotine and there’s now the new mix of vape chemicals that weren’t present in cigarettes. Healthier? Doubtful, but it’s less studied.

As far as teens getting their hands on them, I think this just shows how hilariously ineffective age restrictions are in preventing access to children. If vapes weren’t available, those kids would be smoking cigarettes. If cigarettes weren’t available, they would vape. If both are available (which they are, because there’s no shortage of adults who will sell these things to minors), they’ll use whatever they prefer.

Vaping is winning the popularity war with cigarettes among teenagers. I think that’s all you’re seeing.

In Canada, it’s very illegal to sell cigarettes and vaping products to minors, but it’s not illegal for them to possess or use them. That kind of brain dead gap in legislation makes it easy for politicians to say they did everything they can, and lets police say there’s nothing they can do.

My angry knives can bitch all they want. They live in a tiny ass drawer all piled on top of each other. They rarely see the light of day and I personally pay very little mind to their plight.

The good knives live in an airy, sunlit space on a magnet knife block above my sink. They get lots of fresh air, have plants nearby, and get to be a part of the family. When they are used, they’re always honed and immediately washed and dried and put away. They never mingle with the angry knives.

An angry knife was once accidentally promoted to the magnet block. It was a mistake that was quickly remedied, and it could have gotten bad.

I still have my toddler books with the graphic Struwwelpeter running in with shears and cutting the thumbs off the boy who wouldn’t stop sucking them.

It’s a… “nostalgic” childhood trauma?

I don’t pirate software anymore. If I do the math on how much enjoyment I get even from a mediocre AAA game title, it is dwarfed by what I’d spend on a night out, so the value is there for me. On top of that the risk of malware (or the effort in mitigating it) isn’t really worth it.

Tv and movies? Pirate it. The streaming services are garbage and the content has too much crap for me to want to pay a corporation for it. If it became too hard to pirate I just wouldn’t watch it anymore.

Books kind of fall in the middle. Happy to pay for ebooks if the author makes it practical, but I’m not keen on buying through Amazon.

It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.

Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.

If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.

It really depends on the context. What was the first encounter? If it was a first date, then yeah, that’s brutal and you suck. If it was a quick intro at a busy event, it’s almost expected.

There’s a bit of a difference between names and faces. Forgetting a name is like forgetting a piece of trivia, but if you meet and speak to somebody and can’t recognize them in a different context (and they look basically the same), it can send a signal that you didn’t find them memorable (and you didn’t lol).

The only time in my life when I found it irritating was my best friend’s roommate who, after hanging out with them in small groups dozens of times for hours each time, still kept introducing herself to me on subsequent visits. I could never figure out if it was drugs, a method of humour or flirting I didn’t understand, or she was really that oblivious to other people.