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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • This is spot on. I feel like it’s also important to not misunderstand meditation. Nobody is forcing you into a lotus position. Open the windows wide, get naked under 2 blankets, close your eyes as if you were going to sleep, listen to the wind, feel every single sensation on your body, try to focus on YOU and your body. You don’t have to try to force yourself to not think, just don’t try to solve problems. Try to let these thoughts go. This doesn’t mean the problem goes away, but this is not the time. Right now we let it go and try to think of how we’re actually on a beach and the wind rushing through the leaves of the trees outside is actually the sound of waves… Or, you know, whatever works for you to ground yourself and have absolutely pure “me time”.

    If you’re asking yourself how that does anything, the idea is that it should help you to detach yourself from coping mechanisms and behavioral patterns that are motivated by external factors, instead of what you truly feel you need. You might start to really crave these relaxation sessions that you designed for yourself. When you are in deep relaxation, you will easily be able to divide the thoughts that are forced onto you from those truly driven by your own internal desire for the happiness that exclusively you imagine to be right, just like the relaxation environment itself.


  • Absolutely spot on. If you’ve already delayed a lot, then reduce the pressure on yourself. You already made a huge leap by even accepting that you might need additional support. You don’t have to force yourself to now make up for potentially lost time or anything. Take your time to progress at your own pace. If you feel like you’re pressuring yourself towards a potential goal, you might set yourself up for failure. Be kind to yourself and don’t demand too much.

    When you hear people talking openly about emotional challenging situations in their daily life, which you can relate to, but most people in your regular surroundings can not, that can be extremely emotionally relieving to a degree that is impossible to anticipate. It’s really worth it. But you want to feel comfortable on your way there. Slow pace is fine as long as you are moving towards your own goals.

    Maybe it can also help you if you think differently about your goals. It’s not like a sprint in sports. Even if you might think you have to reach certain goals to function in society, and reaching them faster would obviously be better. This is not a competition. You set your own goals for yourself and nobody else sets the rules on how to get there. Your goals are more like a beacon. Even if there are strong headwinds every once in a while, or you take a break and just relax in the sun, you can still clearly see them and continue to steer in their direction, as long as you consider it to be right. You are in control



  • Lower the barrier. Ask if you can join briefly with a video call to get to know the group. Some people will delay reaching out for decades, making their life harder. You can bet that people in the group will even share exactly this feeling and situation with you. If you really believe it might help to reach out, but you’re standing in your way, try a smaller step in the direction




  • Explaining my job is trivial compared to the insanity I cook up in my spare time.

    Oh, so you like gaming? No, I’m actually not playing the game. I’m building a mod for it. Erm, okay, so this is for other players then? No, I’m mostly building it for myself. Ah, so you haven’t put a lot of time into it yet? Roughly 12 years. What? So what does the mod do then? It plays the game for me, and publishes in-game metrics to a monitoring application, so that I can see the progress of the game in an abstract form while I’m on the couch, thinking about how to optimize the automation further.

    Regular fun stuff.


  • Building houses is probably generally allowed, but not an easy solution.

    Someone who migrates to another country, to work there in a regular job, can get a regular apartment. But everyone wants to live where the living conditions are best. You can’t build infinite housing in those locations, and the increased demand drives prices.

    Someone who seeks asylum is in an entirely different situation, and housing them is a different challenge. Building a house in a nice place costs 10x what it costs in a remote country region. But now people have nobody to integrate with and less social options.

    Any house being built costs money. Building houses for people who are still in search of employment is a bad investment. Nobody wants to build those houses. They want to build the nice houses in the nice places that will gather lots of rent. If you want to have the houses anyway, because maybe the people are already here, you probably have to use taxes for it. Some citizens will never be able to accept that, creating conflict.




  • I actually agree. For the majority of sites and/or use cases, it probably is sufficient.

    Explaining properly why LE is generally problematic, takes considerable depth of information, that I’m just not able to relay easily right now. But consider this:

    LE is mostly a convenience. They save an operator $1 per month per certificate. For everyone with hosting costs beyond $1000, this is laughable savings. People who take TLS seriously often have more demands than “padlock in the browser UI”. If a free service decides they no longer want to use OCSP, that’s an annoying disruption that was entirely not worth the $1 https://www.abetterinternet.org/post/replacing-ocsp-with-crls/

    LE has no SLA. You have no guarantee to be able to ever renew your certificate again. A risk not anyone should take.

    Who is paying for LE? If you’re not paying, how can you rely on the service to exist tomorrow?

    It’s not too long ago that people said “only some sites need HTTPS, HTTP is fine for most”. It never was, and people should not build anything relevant on “free” security today either.


  • People who have actually relevant use cases with the need for a reliable partner would never use LE. It’s a gimmick for hobbyists and people who suck at their job.

    If you have never revoked a certificate, you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have never run into rate-limiting issues with LE that block a rollout, you don’t know what you’re doing.

    LE works until it doesn’t, and then it’s like every other free service on the internet: no guarantees If your setup relies on the goodwill of a single entity handing out shit for free, it’s not a robust setup. If you rely on that entity to keep an OCSP responder alive for free so all your consumers can verify the validity of your certificate, that’s not great. And people do this to save their company $1 a month for the real thing? Even running the shitty certbot in compute has a larger cost. People are so blindly in love with this “free” garbage. The fanboys will never die off



  • I get that, I really do, and I honestly believe you have exactly the right idea.

    But on the other hand, you have to realize that not all of the money purely goes to enabling knowledge sharing with Wikimedia. This is not an election, it’s a company, non-profit or for-profit doesn’t really matter. There are still people paying off business expenses from your donations.

    I fully understand the necessity of this, but you might just feel better if your $5 literally bought someone a meal or if it paid for a fraction of a business flight to promote Wikimedia.


  • I do give in small streams and I do large annual contributions. I’m entirely not opposed to sharing.

    I prefer to keep the small donations to individuals who also prefer a reliable stream of goodwill. Larger organizations also prefer reliable streams, but they also receive millions in donations overall, usually with significant large donors.

    If you look long enough, you’ll find enough material to not want to contribute to Wikimedia. If your contribution was only a drop in the pool to begin with, maybe this is one of the expenses that is not for you to carry.





  • Makes sense. If you’re contributing less than $1000 monthly to anything, you’re not making a difference. If you want dedicated people to be on the receiving end, who also do a great job, every single person will cost thousands each month. Wikimedia is literally spending millions each year.

    Honestly, don’t try to hunt for the “best” spot to contribute your exact amount of spare money to, with the hope of having the largest possible impact. It won’t happen. Treat a good friend to some food instead.

    If you really feel like you already got some value out of a service in the past, give what you can, without limiting yourself financially in the process. If you feel like you don’t have the $1 to spend for Wikipedia, don’t spend it. Don’t guilt trip yourself into donations ever. Your donation today will not prevent a service from turning into shit tomorrow. Pay for what you got


  • I’ve been a funding member of the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade. I have looked at their finances several times before and during financing them.

    As with a lot of similar non-profits, a considerable amount of donations does not go into “running the servers”. You have to judge this by yourself, but they don’t embezzle any money and there is a reasonable bottom line. Wikipedia continuously helps tons of people, and the people who run the operation enable that.

    You can download a full dump of Wikipedia any day. Compared to other lying companies, they have been true on their promises for some time.

    Of all the $1 I could spend in a year, the one I give to Wikipedia is probably the least wrong invested, and that $1 actually already makes a difference