*years? Yes. It used to be the bleeding edge of search and now it’s just profit driven enshittification like the rest of ai-ridden garbage tech wallstreet bullshit.

Along the same line of pain management did you know that pretty much all the poppy seed (for ornamental flowers) you can buy at any garden store are opium poppies? You can grow them easily, then macerate the whole plant and extract in off the shelf alcohol and strain it for essentially laudanum which is great for a sleep aide or pain in low to moderate doses. Quite safe as well, obviously if you don’t abuse it.

I’m a lefty but I didn’t know which instances leaned which way when I got here. I chose lemm.ee because their defed policy itself was neutral and that appealed to me because I can do my own damn blocking thank you.

Yeah I joined this instance not knowing much about any of them and lucked into a very good crew! I did read their defederation policy (not inclined to unless extreme situations) and that is why I signed up here and they’ve been true to that. I think it’s healthy.

Yeah it was, but it was only a few individuals. It wasn’t the entire population of the instance. I do sort by All quite a bit and honestly I don’t see much of note from any one instance other than weird porn or niche meme communities that I block individually as needed. I just nuke communities and individuals that annoy me.

idk, I’ve seen all the hype around hexbear users being obnoxious around Lemmy (including our own instance debating blocking the instance, followed by several of their members brigading the thread true to form)… but I’ve explored the communities on the instance itself and even subscribed to some of them like mutual aid, gaming etc, and those that I’m watching are actually just normal people doing normal things if more left than some other similar groups. In my experience it isn’t “all” hexbear users, because that would be a dumb generalization.

There are some assholes on that instance to be sure. Show me one that this isn’t true of. I’m glad our instance didn’t block them because I now get to decide for myself. I block communities and/or users if they’re a problem for me. I think that’s a good way.

Do your research. Birth rate declines as cultural stability and wealth increase. Period.

Well, you did use a question mark so technically this is fair play.

The person said they’d pray for you because they thought you were a dumpster diver i.e. that you were gonna eat out of the trash so that’s what happened there. And so… It was also probably just a bag of food waste going gnarly.

It’s actually really funny to me that a cop has to go look in the funky bag. That’s a better use of their time than a lot of things they get up to of a day. Nice one!

I’m a little late in my reply but I believe they stopped SMS support because it’s pretty expensive in the long run. Signal took off over lockdowns like a lot of platforms, and SMS texts cost quite a bit (at scale) to route and process. My anecdotal evidence (take it or leave it) is that I worked at a fairly major ecomm tech company around that same time who discontinued 2FA verification via SMS in regions like India (etc) because collectively it was costing the company millions to use that route for that purpose.

They actually offloaded the 2FA flows to free (for the user anyhow) services such as Google Authenticator and Authy etc etc (which those companies now have to spend the money on each SMS interaction and/or server costs, not the one I was working for.

Ultimately I think Signal did it because it was costing them a lot of money with not a lot of benefit as more people adopted the platform.

Basically. If I remember it right I just had my smoke and went inside and later when it had waddled back to whence it came, I hung the feeder in a different place. The squirrel was well fattened for winter. The birds not so much.

Not a boomer and I don’t hate squirrels but one day I walked out onto the porch to have my morning coffee and a smoke and the fattest fuckin squirrel I’ve ever seen in my life was sitting there at eye level in the bird feeder staring back at me too satiated (or smug, I couldn’t tell) to move after having eaten all the feed for several days straight. I was refilling it daily which is unusual but I never thought I’d meet the culprit in this way.

It’s a thing.

Had never heard of Silence thanks for that. Gonna check it out.

I miss when Signal still handled SMS. It was so effing convenient.

Not many great memories from that era (I was a late teen when payphones largely started disappearing because cell phones) but when as a pre-teen I learned that you could take a standard issue tack from any bulletin board and hold it in contact with the mouthpiece and any other metal object to make free calls, it opened doors in my world forever.

Fact that any major series of companies released tech this easily circumvented gave younger me an intuitive understanding that capitalism is and always will be completely fucked up. Long before I could express how.

Thanks Telus!!!

I’m in testing and almost ever fucking week I’m trying to QA a release cycle while they’re pushing three last minute features and fucking with the backend, meaning all the frontend stuff I’ve already tested needs done again.

Yep.

You’re absolutely right on all counts. And that’s why I quit (without waiting around to be laid off which frankly the severance package would’ve been nice). I got hired into the first (private) company I applied to, I’m thriving, and I don’t miss that stink of wall street/silicon valley money at all.

I’m not speaking in absolutes here obviously. But it’s pretty well established that a very small fraction of people who take drugs (prescription or otherwise) become what we term addicts. There are lots of affluent addicts and alcoholics (I know plenty personally) but just because they have access to medical and mental health care doesn’t mean every one of them will go there.

You don’t see a lot of upper middle class people end up on the streets with heavy addictions because they can usually get into rehab, get help processing whatever it is keeping them down, and move on with their lives. Lots of poorer people can do so as well (the poverty and “success” porn content out there is easy to find) but for every one of those success stories there are thousands who never make it. I don’t think it’s hard to parse that poorer people have less culturally acceptable means of getting help (if they don’t outright end up in prison for simple possession to begin with, which I’m guessing those peers you’re referring to seldom have to worry about).

The thing a lot of people get backwards (fuck the war on drugs actually) is that hardcore addiction is virtually always predated by some type of undiagnosed and untreated mental health issue. To say that another way, mental health issues are not caused by taking drugs. When someone is very unwell and often poor (i.e. low or no access to medical and mental health professionals) they often find a way to self-treat the affliction(s) with street drugs. Those same underlying causes for a more affluent person will be dealt with alongside medical supervision (and often with the same class of drugs) without falling into the trap of addiction (because supervised, and supported).

Nothing cool about being a drug user by choice, nor an addict trying to cope. It’s just reality.

I don’t have any personal experiences with any of these crew finder sites but I know lots of people who’ve used them. The catamaran designer I *apprenticed under met his wife through one. She had no prior sailing experience but was willing to learn, and he needed crew to do a Caribbean crossing, and that’s how the story began for them like 25+ years ago. They still sail together all over the world.

The other advice is good too. Just walk the docks and ask around. People love talking about their boats.