BlueFairyPainter

My partner is also allergic to mosquito bites and he got a HeatIt and it was life-changing. He previously had to stay home and permanently ice his bites to not get blood poisoning and was in huge pain, but now since it’s always with him on his keychain, he can treat the stings right away before they get too bad and can go out and do pretty much everything now. He still needs to treat the stings regularly, but it’s so much more portable and accessible than the ice packs he used before.
Compared to the larger devices like BiteAway, it performs a bit worse and it’s a bit pricey and the durability is kinda shit, but the fact that it’s always on him and ready to use (as long as you bring your keys and phone), he can treat the bites right away on the go, which makes a huge difference in effectiveness.

Maybe it’s for the same reason Moscow Mules are served in copper mugs. The container conducts heat well and therefore feels very cold to the touch when you put your lips on it, which enhances the feeling of it being refreshing.

Not every day, every living minute, but quite regularly and throughout the year, the first 4 beats of “Deck the Halls” on infinite loop in a 6/4 beat so after the 4 beats there’s 2 beats silence before it begins all over again. Weirdest thing is after all these years I don’t even know the text, just the melody.

Does ash count?

I have a friend who regularly shares the latest news that brings him mental anguish, followed by messages along the lines of “the world is doomed, society is trash, how can anyone sleep soundly at night knowing the terrors that are happening this very second”. I don’t know why he still follows them. It’s not like he takes action against these things, and most often he can’t do anything against them even if he wanted to, and this feeling of powerlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, is weighing him down so much.

Definitely dishwashers. When we were poor students moving out of the dorms into our first real apartment, we cheaped out on as much as we could but shelled out more than 1k on a proper good Miele one. Got one with less features but better energy and water efficiency and it just does its job and does it well. Every time I am at someone else’s place and they have to prewash their dishes I feel more validated in this choice.

Totally depends on the pet then. My cat is not a good predator, so breakage is not a problem, but she’s very picky with what she wants to play with and most new toys can’t keep her interest for longer than 2 weeks, so it’s absolutely a waste of money to spend more. The only toy that she consistently plays with is still a random piece of rope 😅

So the pet’s personality plays a part, but seeing the other comments, I also see a cat vs dog difference.

Also just ordered mine. Since I started working fulltime remote a year ago, I found myself not wanting to spend more time on my desk after work. That translated into me almost giving up gaming even though I used to love it. Moving to a place where I can have a second desk would cost me one Steam Deck per month so I just went with a Steam Deck lol

Not sure about white and male without people talking about it, but tech nerds for sure. Saying this as a non-white non-male tech nerd myself.

It does get a bit monotonous in here…

Privacy-respecting thought-controlled AR+VR smart contact lenses that correct my eyesight, block out UV, can somehow project sound into my brain, overlay people's names and basic info when I see them and don't remember (or make me remember thanks to the brain interface), and let me browse the internet and work on stuff without using my hands because RSI :(

I switched from Yt Music to Tidal because of audio quality and it's audible. But the difference between Spotify highest quality and Tidal is truly minimal. I did the tests and I couldn't hear it. I kinda prefer the UI and generally like supporting market alternatives if they're good and if they pay artists better, then that's even better. I don't listen to podcasts either, so those are my personal reasons for choosing Tidal over Spotify.

I have never really used Spotify, but my partner insists that the recommendations on Tidal are actually better. I also think the recommendations are great, but work best for genres that Tidal is strong at. Of the genres I listen to, I've had really good experiences with the genres hip hop, rap, lofi, misc. electronic music, western pop, and less good experiences with classical music, soundtracks and more niche genres like J-Pop, African Pop and random trash (on Spotify, our we used to like to prank our friends by adding stuff like gangster's paradise kids bop version or "female orgasm sounds" to their playlists. I haven't really found prank-worthy stuff on Tidal yet).

So it's really a personal decision and tbh, I think Spotify is the better choice for most people.

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I don’t doubt your textbook correctness or the historical correctness of this, and maybe I should stress that I am not trying to exclude anyone from the bi term, but at least in my anecdotal experience, these terms are mostly used “wrongly”, meaning that there is a lot of confusion. And the meanings of words change as people start using them with different intended meanings.

Therefore, given the premise that we want to simplify things by cleaning up some redundant terms, I would prefer to keep the one whose meaning is intuitively clear to everyone. I just don’t see why - given bi, pan and omni all mean the same thing - one should choose the most misunderstood/misused term.

Personally, I would just keep the terms and let people choose whichever they like, I’m just trying to entertain this discussion of choosing to keep only one of them and the pros/cons for each choice.

Actually didn’t know that, even though I identify as bi lol. Pretty sure my other bi and pan friends didn’t know either from the kinds of discussions we’ve had. But then that’s just a bad choice linguistically, no? It’s very misleading because you literally have the terms bi and non-bi and you need to read some manifesto to understand that they’re not a contradiction. Meanwhile aside from the stupid overdone cookware joke, I think nobody ever questioned the meanings of terms like pan or omni, because they make sense linguistically.

Thanks for writing all this. I really like that you named actual tangible negative effects of loss of privacy. Most of the usual reasons I hear are too abstract/paranoid to me and this wasn’t. Suffice it to say, this is not a direction I have given much thought to so far, so feel free to tear me apart here.

The insurance and apartment scenarios are both discrimination. Why is people’s first instinct here to hide instead of work to fight discrimination? We already have openly visible “attack vectors” for discrimination, like being a foreigner, disabled, or simply a woman. And while I wouldn’t say the systems work perfectly, I believe we’ve come a long way, and only because people’s weaknesses were laid out in the open and they fought to be able to live the way they are. For the insurance thing, couldn’t it simply be forbidden that rates are adjusted to people’s medical records? As for financial stuff, isn’t it already as you said? For renting and for loans, you need to prove your credibility. And unlike with the insurance, people on both sides realize that it makes sense in this case because it is in both parties’ interest that nobody commits to a financial commitment they cannot afford. And for those who cannot afford essentials, and who would be getting nothing under the harsh conditions of capitalism, there is social help. And I do believe in more/better social help systems.

As for the AfD scenario: what good does having privacy now have, if their first move can be to just forbid privacy?

In short, I think a lack of privacy is only bad in combination with the evil intent of people wanting to abuse others’ weaknesses. We should try to fight the evil instead of clinging to privacy in the digital era (which I believe will be impossible within the next decade or so anyway) so we can have the advantages of more data-driven tech advancements while minimizing the negative consequences of a loss of privacy. I think we can have our cake and eat it too.

I don’t care about data privacy. I care about consent and freedom of choice, so I care if someone else cares about privacy for whatever reason and cannot get it, but me personally, I care very little if at all. I personally do not feel a sense of “creepiness” or whatever from knowing that companies or the state know stuff about me. So I don’t see much value in my personal privacy. On the other hand, we’re barring ourselves from great technical advancements. I’m saying this because it feels like Germany is 10y behind other countries in digitization solely because regulators think I’m too stupid to give me the agency to opt in to sell my soul to our digital overlords.

Out of interest, why? Shouldn’t it be the other way around, that bi is a subset of pan?

10y ago. Was hobby artist. Looked at personal gallery. Painted many fairies at time. Many fairy blue.

Fair ^^" In my defense, I can be at least as preachy about Linux, but I think we’ve all heard this one before.

Affinity suite over any of their open-source competitors. I love Krita for painting, but for image editing, Affinity Photo is just so much better-suited and unlike Gimp, it’s modern, actively maintained and has a much more thought-out workflow. I heard that Inkscape was fine, but I personally didn’t like it either (but then, I also didn’t really like Illustrator all that much, it’s really a fully subjective opinion). But even if you did like Inkscape, you don’t have the seemless integration between the products as Affinity does. You can create pixel graphics in Photo, import them in your vector graphics in Designer, and can seemlessly embed any of the two into your documents in Publisher. And each program has a special mode (“persona”) that gives you the basic functionality of the others, and the UIs and workflows generally feel very similar and unified between them. For the hobbyist who doesn’t want to pay for an Adobe subscription, it’s truly unbeatable and the only reason I still need Windows every now and then.