I have one. It’s a fucking lie.

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.

The personal fix is to block that community, or set up such that you see subscribed communities by default.

The broader fix would be made to Lemmy itself, and I’m not sure anything like that exists. It would require the same concept as a “default subreddit”, which I’m pretty sure Reddit built as a checkbox their admins can control as to whether a community shows up if you’re not logged in.

Lemmy is still going through growing pains and doesn’t have a large user base yet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a feature like that doesn’t show up for a long time. We’re probably on our own until then.

I’m already holding a sandwich and a drink. Are you expecting me to put one down to hold my wang?

This tells me that Wells Fargo has middle management layers so useless, they can’t even understand if their employees are doing their jobs so they resort to monitoring.

They literally just want their employees to look busy because their corporate culture isn’t able to comprehend managers having close relationships with their direct reports and their work.

Companies should be looking at an employee’s output to determine if they’re worth keeping employed. If you can’t measure that, what the fuck are you doing? How do you justify having any employees when you don’t know what they contribute to the bottom line?

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 have to put that thin phone into a big fat protective case anyways, because some dunce decided to build everything out of glass.

I miss the Nokias from the 90s.

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.

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I left Apple when I got rid of my iPhone 3 and didn’t look back until last year. In the mean time, iOS has grown up nicely, the services are really well integrated, and it’s pretty low on bugs.

Contrast to Google where every OS update to Android makes the UI more and more similar to iOS, but a shittier version of it. Their home assistant has been losing features and the overall recognition has gotten demonstrably worse as time goes on. It annoys me to no end that Android doesn’t have any native ability to resize a photo before emailing it, so you either send a 7MB photo or go through too many ridiculous steps to resize it first. That’s not even counting the services that Google kills all the time, making any investment into their ecosystem unreliable in the long term.

I’m not using Apple now because I’m loyal and like them. It’s because Google has put so much effort into making their own phone a shitty knockoff. If I’m paying premium prices for a flagship phone, might as well go with the one that works better.

Any recommendations on shopping for an Android set top box? Every time I start down the rabbit hole I feel like I’m just getting AI-written SEO scam fake review sites.

It’s worth pointing out that this only works if your plan is sufficiently evil.

I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.

The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.

Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.

Glow in the dark filament is shit for glowing more than a minute. It’s like the cheapest toys you had as a kid.

But they illuminate constantly if you shine a UV (or IR?) LED on them, and you generally don’t see the LED light nearly as much.

So my vote is a bigger project with an LED in the base that keeps whatever you print lit up and looking spooky green for hours.

I’ve written long comments and regretted it. I’ve never once regretted deleting a long winded pile of shit before hitting Submit.

It must be exhausting to be an unpleasant asshole 100% of the time. This guy’s brain rotted.

It’s simple, but it ain’t easy.

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.