Sheep's recent activity

  1. Comment on Advice on avoiding the hedonic treadmill of endless content? in ~life

    Sheep
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    I struggled with this a lot, and will always to some extent, so you're not alone in this quandary. One key thing that helped me break the cycle to start with was to have a very basic understanding...

    I struggled with this a lot, and will always to some extent, so you're not alone in this quandary.

    One key thing that helped me break the cycle to start with was to have a very basic understanding of dopamine mechanisms and how they severely impact my phone usage and productivity throughout the day.

    To keep it very simple, your brain always adapts to how much dopamine it's receiving. If you overload it with dopamine early in the day (by phone scrolling or what have you), it will close off dopamine receptors to account for the extra stimulation, which makes you lethargic for the rest of the day because now you can't get a dopamine spike again until your dopamine receptors reset (which happens after you sleep).

    Thus the very broad solution for me is simple: leave the more stimulating activities for the end of the day.

    It sounds like torture if you're not used to it, but here's the thing, your brain adapts throughout the day like I mentioned earlier. Thus, if you start the day with the more boring tasks and then slowly reward yourself with the more dopamine-heavy tasks, not only do you legitimately feel better when you get your dopamine reward (the spikes always hit), you also feel more motivated to get your work done to get to said reward.

    This means that your internet browsing can actually turn into something fun again, not just something you mindlessly do because your brain is so overstimulated it can't give you a rush anymore.

    As a side benefit, as you leave your dopamine-heavy tasks for the end of the day, you start to realize that you don't even feel the need for all that dopamine anymore, which reduces your cravings for content and thus the time you spent on overstimulating your brain. You end up with a more normal dopamine base level, which ends up helping you even more throughout the day because now other tasks feel even less boring because your brain isn't so starved.

    Of course the crux of the issue next was how to achieve this? And here is where I'll get to your actual question at the end of the post.

    How have you set up an environment for your kids (or yourself!) to delay the hedonic content treadmill as long as is reasonably possible?

    First you need to identify the source of your overstimulation. In my case it was my phone, since my PC is basically just for work, but I know you can also do all this with a PC. Then you need to set guardrails around it to prevent you from accessing it earlier than you intend.

    Don't sleep next to your phone anymore. Set it somewhere else before you go to bed. Preferably another room. Go back to using a regular alarm clock if you need an alarm. This prevents you from picking up your phone first thing in the morning. This is a massive pitfall that people tend to fall into. If you start your day by looking at your phone, you have already made the day twice as hard on yourself. If I could only give one easy recommendation to anyone, it would absolutely be this one, because I it really does compound as you stick to it.

    Focus on doing all the early day tasks before you pick up your phone. Have a physical task list if that helps you. Just concentrate on not picking up your phone. Remind yourself that the longer you wait to pick up your phone, the better it will feel when you do actually pick it up. Also constantly remind yourself that no, you do not need to be online 24/7. Try to set things to do without your phone so you keep yourself busy.

    For when you actually do use your phone, set app timers. I can't stress enough how absolutely vital these are. You might think "oh I'll just circumvent the app timer" but in my experience, for example after setting reddit to 1 hour per day, I find that that extra friction is enough to stop me from using the app entirely once the timer runs out. I have had reddit limited to 1 hour per day for almost a year now and often don't even reach that hour anymore.

    Lastly, feed your mind, mind your feeds (Youtube video on the insidiousness of recommendation algorithms).

    One thing I realized after a year of attempting to distance myself from doom scrolling is that automated, algorithm-based feeds are terrible for you. Sure, they might present you with an endless stream of content that broadly fits your interests, but have you ever actually thought about how many videos you legitimately wanted to see? For example videos that expanded your knowledge or motivated you to do things? There might have been some, but wasn't there a lot of filler in between you don't even remember anymore?

    What about music? Do actually find yourself consistently happy with the recommendations streaming services like spotify and youtube give you? And movies? Is netflix or whatever other streaming app you use actually providing you with a fulfilling movie experience?

    After thinking on the subject I realized that mindlessly consuming all this content was kind of removing my very personality from my life. My video recommendations weren't things I found, they were things a machine decided for me. The music I was listening to was no longer music I looked for, it was music a machine selected for me. It made me look back on the past, when I would build my own mp3 collection with only the music I legitimately loved and I always had a blast listening to it, or when youtube was still very young and I religiously followed my subscriptions feed and was hyped for every new video. Why should I lose that?

    Like actually think about it. Your time on Earth is limited, do you really want to spend a big chunk of it on mindless entertainment? I'm not saying you can't indulge yourself ever, but to do that every moment your using your phone? It really frightened me how much time I had wasted essentially just escaping reality, which only made the the escape from that cycle worse because the more it went on the more I realized I had very little to do outside of my phone.

    So now, I try to limit how much I am exposed to algorithm-based home feeds. Youtube videos? I go directly to my subscriptions tab. I installed an extension that not only removes the home tab it also removes all recommendations (you can also accomplish this on mobile with Revanced or Newpipe, and on an android TV with Smart Tube.). I will only see the content I explicitly signed up to see. Music? I am back to listening only to my mp3 library. No more streaming services. Movies? I'll either ask friends for recommendations or search for something online, no mindlessly browsing streaming app catalogues.

    And there's more you can do with RSS feeds for stuff like news, reddit, etc.

    I can't stress enough how much happier this one change has made me. It feels like I'm once again in control of what I watch and has given me back some of that happiness I had when I was younger and loved to discover the internet. Heck, building an mp3 library, categorizing songs the way I want to, is in itself a new fun activitiy I now have in my life. And it's all tailor made for me by me!

    Yes, it is more friction, but why is that a bad thing? Why do we need everything to be 100% frictionless if it's only going to make us feel guilty with ourselves? It's okay to spend time curating what you consume! It's healthy!

    How do you share content with your kids without letting the algorithm worm its way inside their brain? How do you give them access to the collective wisdom of mankind in the internet without turning it into a slot machine?

    To answer your last question, everything I said above also applies, but for kids specifically I'll also add that you should make full use of a phone's parental controls. I truly believe that as a parent you should have full access to your kid's phone to make sure they are utilizing it the way you want them to. But I don't mean this in stalker-ish kind of way. I mean that you should 100% discuss parental controls openly with your kids and explain to them that you can see what they do on their phone and that that is for their own protection. If they're old enough, explain to them the dangers of doom scrolling, algorithms, and recommendation feeds, and how you wish for them to have a healthy relationship with the internet landscape of today, which is why you set up these guardrails.

    Then it's just a matter of actually parenting and keeping an eye out on the phone's activity and making sure the kids don't deviate too far from it. This might not be a perfect solution, and there will be blind spots when the kids are at school for example, but I promise using parental controls properly already puts you in the top 1% of parents who actually care for their children's digital well being.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on What are some stories of progressivism gone wrong in implementation? in ~society

    Sheep
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    See, when I read testimonials like this, all I can think of is that the person/people involved in the hiring process don't understand what DEI is. Diversity during the hiring process doesn't mean...

    See, when I read testimonials like this, all I can think of is that the person/people involved in the hiring process don't understand what DEI is.

    Diversity during the hiring process doesn't mean "just hire person of X race/disability" it means "when presented with multiple people capable for a given job, you should give priority to the more diverse hire." The rationale being that minorities struggle to get the same jobs as the majority due to systemic discrimination, so this can help level the playing field. But they are still supposed to be competent workers.

    I suspect whoever hired this person was just heavily misinformed about what DEI is, which isn't surprising, given how much money certain organizations spend on said misinformation.

    19 votes

  3. Comment on Leave the phone, take a camera in ~tech

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    I did this but for video because I was tired of my phone overheating after 10 mins. But man I still feel like the learning curve is high. It was only when I started using a dedicated mirrorless...

    I did this but for video because I was tired of my phone overheating after 10 mins.

    But man I still feel like the learning curve is high. It was only when I started using a dedicated mirrorless camera (Sony ZVE 10 II) that I realized just how much computing work is going into a phone's photo/video processing to make it look good.

    I am always so tempted to just grab my phone because I lack so much confidence in my shooting ability. For example, I took my mirrorless camera to a trip to Japan and ended up using my phone for most of it regardless because I did not like the photos my camera took (yes I tried leaving it on automatic a lot to see if it'd help but still got many blurry shoots. In fact I liked my manual shots more often than not, but that required time to set up).

    So this tip really needs to come with a caveat that you need to be willing to learn how to take a proper photo/video. You can't offload that skill to your phone anymore.

  4. Comment on The iPhone 16e is good, actually in ~tech

    Sheep
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    One thing that helped me understand the US phone market a bit more, or at least how tech reviewers based in the US evaluate it (besides knowing that like 60% of users have an iPhone and thus tend...

    One thing that helped me understand the US phone market a bit more, or at least how tech reviewers based in the US evaluate it (besides knowing that like 60% of users have an iPhone and thus tend to just compare with iPhones), is that a very big chunk of people still get phones via contract with their carrier.

    This was something I remember happening here like 15 years ago but now nobody does this (because you're always paying more in the end), so it was hard to wrap my head around at first, but in the US paying for installments via carrier contract seems to be much more normalized.

    So the price of a phone has to be compared not just by its base value, but also as its value in installment payments. Suddenly you're not comparing 700 USD with 500 USD, you're comparing like 20 a month vs 25 a month (I didn't do the math, just pulled random numbers), which is certainly a more appealing proposition if you're used to and/or prefer that type of payment model.

    Trade-ins are also much more common in the US from what I hear. Or at least trade-ins with big value. Where I live I can trade-in my phone too but the discount is usually so small that it's almost meaningless. Trade-in offers in the US can get you a top-of-the-line phone for very little.

    Everything else I agree with, though. Most US tech reviewers don't really have a frame of reference for other countries and how price wars go on in other places. But then again, I never assume they're really trying to sell a phone to a non-US audience, so I always keep in the back of my mind that I'm not the primary audience. It's the same attitude I have with like the Oscars. Just have to accept that the US, even if it's facing a global audience, will always be US-centric.

    Brazil in particular is also a very unique case due to extremely high tariffs on foreign tech imports. I don't think most assume that it could cost you 60% more to buy a phone in another country because of taxes. 10% or 20% maybe, but 60%? That's a big markup.

    In most other places the iPhones follow a similar price scheme to the US. Prices in Europe are pretty close to the US for example, with only the different VAT making the biggest difference. Of course, the same price in the US being applied to countries with lower purchasing power makes those phones more expensive by default, but the raw value is usually around the same.

    Funnily enough, US customers got a taste of that same feeling, maybe for the first time, with the Fairphone, which cost almost double there compared to Europe. But of course something like the Fairphone won't really make a splash compared to an iPhone.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Other people might just not have your problems in ~life

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    As someone who constantly struggles with impostor syndrome (which made me fall behind for many years due to insecurity and lack of motivation, which then only exacerbated the problem) this was a...

    As someone who constantly struggles with impostor syndrome (which made me fall behind for many years due to insecurity and lack of motivation, which then only exacerbated the problem) this was a really simple and effective message that I needed.

    I am currently in the process of learning a new language for work purposes, and it's daunting to look at others that acquired it quickly and are doing much better than me, and to try and see what I can do to get there ASAP. It can get really painful.

    So it's been healthy for me to reframe my struggles as my own and to see my own achievements as valuable to me. To understand that being different from others isn't some inherent flaw, and that others also can't do things that I can do and might feel similarly insecure about it. There's some strange solace in that fact.

    Thanks for sharing this.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on How do you plan out your meals for the week/meal prep? in ~food

    Sheep
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    I struggled a lot with meal planning until I identified the root cause of the issue for me: unless you really love cooking and have lots of time, meal planning to spice up the week is just too...

    I struggled a lot with meal planning until I identified the root cause of the issue for me: unless you really love cooking and have lots of time, meal planning to spice up the week is just too cumbersome. Meal prepping is supposed to be boring, but reliable.

    What I mean is that meal planning, as a whole, is meant to turn your meals into sort of a factory assembly line. The goal is to simplify your planning, to make it easily replicable and efficient.

    Before that I was always trying to vary the dishes because I saw this or that meal prep dish online, but this just doesn't work in practice because meal planning really wants to lean on a systematic set of pieces, aka ingredients. So when I tried to use new recipes, even if I liked them a lot, I would often end up with lots of single use foods that were hard to incorporate into the system, which in turn made me frustrated with the process as a whole.

    Variance also added a lot of stress to me, personally. Now on top of having to cook several meals, I had to worry about whether or not they'd come out well and if my family would like them. This is just not what I need when I'm trying to plan meals for the week.

    Lastly, I was always doing a lot of the boring prepping every week, stuff like slicing onions, chopping garlic, etc. Which adds up when you have lots of meals to do and made me feel burnt out.

    So, in the end, because I really need structure to not be stressed out of my mind, I boiled my meal planning down such that:

    • The golden rule: all recipes must be tried and tested for battle. No adding new recipes or changing up existing recipes until you are sure you can easily make them and they don't stress you out. I remember reading this in a manga somewhere and it really resonated with me: the best recipes are the ones that you know you can cook when you're at your lowest. Sticking to this rule really changed my relationship with meal prepping because, as it turns out, I feel quite low a lot of the time.
    • Taking the above into account, I now only have a few recipes to choose from. I initially wrote 10 recipes in a Google doc I believe, but this number can change into whatever you feel comfortable with, even just 3 is fine. The goal is to have a small list always ready and so that I can easily point to 1 and go with it. It eliminates choice paralysis.
    • No more prepping most of the food on the same day I'm cooking it. I now always have a day for slicing and dicing all the stuff I need and a separate day to actually cook all of it. This reduces the time spent per day immensely, and in turn the exhaustion I feel. Ideally this applies to all ingredients, but if you're going to include an ingredient that needs to be prepped the day of, be sure to keep it to a minimum and know that you can easily prep it.
    • Related to the above: the freezer is now my best friend. I made a list of all the common prep ingredients I need and always keep a bunch of that in the freezer pre-pepared to save myself time. For example, I chopped up like 10 heads of garlic and stuffed them in a freezer bag. I have not worried about needing chopped garlic for months. And if this is too much work still, just buy it frozen already. I don't do that because it's more expensive, but it's absolutely the same end result in practice.
    • If the recipe needs a sauce, especially sauces that take long to make like a good tomato sauce, make more of the sauce and freeze the extra for later use. If I'm going to spend 2+ hours making a sauce, I'm going to make a ton of that sauce.
    • There are always shared ingredients between at least a few of the recipes. This is to avoid the problem of single use spices, sauces, vegetables, etc. Either that or whatever ingredients I know will be leftover I can use in some way.
    • Make soups. Soups are absolutely incredible to use up your vegetables, including your leftover ones. You don't even really need a specific soup recipe, just throwing the vegetables you have into a pan will more often than not yield good results and you always get a massive batch out of them. It's millenia old food that never misses and is very filling and healthy. Plus they're super hands off to make. Seriously I can not stress how amazing soups are, especially if you don't enjoy raw salads much like me.
    • Since you say you scroll tiktok for recipes a lot, something I did but on YouTube and went through the same struggles with, I will also add that you really need to stop that habit. Or at the very least reframe it so that you don't constantly feel the urge to try new recipes. You are not a tiktoker trying to make an eye-popping fancy meal. Experimentation is not for meal prepping. If you want a new recipe from a video, first make sure it actually fits into your meal prepping structure, then try to cook a small portion of it and see if you and/or the people you're cooking it for like it, and then, only when you're sure you can reliably make that meal (ie. When you're feeling like crap, can you cook that meal?), will it go on your rotation. If the recipe doesn't fit the criteria for meal prepping but you still like it a lot, just add it to a normal recipe book and cook a small portion of it occasionally instead. Not every recipe needs to be for meal prepping, and that's okay.
    • Remember that tiktokers make food and recipes for a living, they like what they do and they made it a hobby/job, so they can get away with more intricate dishes and more involvement, whether it is because they just really like it or they have the time to practice those dishes a lot. You are not a tiktoker with lots of free time and attention to do this, so you need to take a step back and build your own routine that fits your circumstances. That's the key to not stressing yourself out, focusing on yourself and what you can do.

    After implementing these changes and making a Google doc with all the recipes that fit in them, I now just ask my family what they want from the list this week. If no one can decide I just roll a d20, since I have less than 20 recipes.

    I really thought when I started this that I would get bored of my food, but as it turns out, during stressful weeks I'm less so worried about how amazing my dishes will taste and more so whether or not I have a dish at all in the first place. Thus, having a systematic way to reliable put food on my plate is going to make me feel happy and satiated 99% of the time. Once that really clicked, I stopped fussing over how to improve my meal prepping and focused on just having a simple but always reliable system that doesn't need updates every other week.

    I hope this helps. I'm sure I'm not saying anything groundbreaking but to me it was groundbreaking because, up until then, I was constantly watching videos of meal peppers and other recipes and being annoyed that, while I tended to like them all, I never stuck to making them regularly. Now, I don't even think much about it because I know I can just look at my pre-made list and decide what my week will be like with a d20.

    5 votes

  7. Comment on Ireland among countries boycotting Eurovision after Israel allowed to compete in ~music

    Sheep
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    It's not childish at all when you consider Israel has been insturmentlaly using and abusing Eurovision to whitewash its reputation for years, though especially in the last couple of years with its...
    • Exemplary

    It's not childish at all when you consider Israel has been insturmentlaly using and abusing Eurovision to whitewash its reputation for years, though especially in the last couple of years with its rampant Eurovision ad campaigns.

    And let's not forget how the EBU constantly suppresses dissent from fans and spectators regarding this.

    Eurovision should not be a stage for genocidal countries to proudly parade themselves and pretend they're awesome, and any country (yes I know it's actually national broadcasters and not countries, but they still represent the country) that's okay with Israel's participation is openly stating that they either do not see the genocide for what it is or are okay with it.

    These messages are important because they move the discourse surrounding the subject, and I personally am not okay with the discourse being that genocidal countries can just waltz in unsactioned.

    34 votes

  8. Comment on r/art subreddit under new management after an artist was banned for mentioning their art prints in ~arts

    Sheep
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    I don't like the idea that just because something is flawed that means we can't replace it with something less flawed. In my opinion there are always areas of improvement we should we at least...

    I don't like the idea that just because something is flawed that means we can't replace it with something less flawed. In my opinion there are always areas of improvement we should we at least discuss.

    I understand why the system is what it is today and how it made sense at the time it was created. But it's just not working properly anymore and we see it more and more with cases like this.

    The real problem, I think, is that most real solutions require more involvement from Reddit Inc. itself, which means more funds, and that's something they don't typically want to do. It also would "rock the boat" which again is something they avoid.

    But beyond more direct oversight from admins, I also really think my comment on "one mod should not have all the power" is at least one guardrail that could be implemented. I really hate the idea of a single person being hierarchically above all others in a subreddit just because that's how the system was built in the old days. If a subreddit hits a large enough size, nobody, and I mean not even the subreddit's creator, should have sole discretion to destroy an entire subreddit (by destroy I mean drastic actions like remove every post or remove every mod).

    2 votes

  9. Comment on r/art subreddit under new management after an artist was banned for mentioning their art prints in ~arts

    Sheep
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    I've been following this fiasco from the beginning and it's a very good reminder that Reddit's moderation structure is inherently very flawed and communities can just get destroyed overnight with...

    I've been following this fiasco from the beginning and it's a very good reminder that Reddit's moderation structure is inherently very flawed and communities can just get destroyed overnight with little to no recourse.

    There is another large subreddit that I follow with over a million users that only has 1 moderator who refuses to engage with the community and removes any posts discussing the state of the sub or bans users calling him out. As a result, the community is basically dying and has fewer and fewer active users every year, with tens of sub communities popping up as a result and fragmenting discussion. It's such a shame.

    There really should be a built-in streamlined way to depose moderators that are actively harming communities, especially larger communities. Or at the very least there should be guardrails to a moderator going ballistic like this.

    Large subreddits (I'm talking a million or more users) should never have only one moderator with all the decision power.

    I also hope r/art really does let artists promote themselves to an extent because it is ridiculous that you couldn't even have a link to your social media in your bio. While it's going to require more work from the mods to vet, artists making a living is not spam and shouldn't be treated as such by default.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on EU countries must mutually recognise same-sex marriages, European Court of Justice rules in ~lgbt

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    So the same ECJ 2018 ruling that literally said the exact same thing yet Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania still completely ignore with no repercussion? I want to remain positive, I really do, but the...

    So the same ECJ 2018 ruling that literally said the exact same thing yet Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania still completely ignore with no repercussion?

    I want to remain positive, I really do, but the lack of enforcement or penalties for failing to adhere to ECJ rulings keeps proving that they do very little to actually change things, at least when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights.

    5 votes

  11. Comment on Reselling tickets for profit to be outlawed in UK government crackdown in ~music

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    I live in Portugal where this is already the law. You are not allowed to resell a ticket for more than the price printed on the ticket (all tickets must have their price on them). It has helped...

    I live in Portugal where this is already the law. You are not allowed to resell a ticket for more than the price printed on the ticket (all tickets must have their price on them).

    It has helped dramatically when it comes to online platforms. You can always report tickets being sold for more than their face value and it gets taken down. And most people are aware of the law and won't buy your resold ticket if you ask for more than it's worth.

    It's not flawless. Tickets still aren't tied to ID so you could resell them on the streets for a higher price and so long as the police doesn't see you nobody will do anything, but at least it curbed the rampant scalping going on online, as it's much harder to run big scalping operations in person.

    16 votes

  12. Comment on A Cloudflare outage is taking down large parts of the internet - X, ChatGPT and more affected in ~tech

    Sheep
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    I have. At least 3 people I know had no job today because the service their businesses use to place orders was down due to cloudflare. Similar things happened when AWS went down a while back. When...

    but so far I haven’t really seen any examples of that.

    I have. At least 3 people I know had no job today because the service their businesses use to place orders was down due to cloudflare. Similar things happened when AWS went down a while back.

    When everything runs on these services, one outage is enough to bring all businesses down. The only saving grace is that they are usually not that long, but it is ridiculous to me that we live in a world where we put all eggs in one basket for such critical infrastructure.

    I'm not saying businesses should make financial decisions that hurt them, that's precisely why I said I wish there was political interest in changing this, because obviously capitalism only cares about profit maximization and a small outage has already been determined to not meaningfully impact profits.

    9 votes

  13. Comment on A Cloudflare outage is taking down large parts of the internet - X, ChatGPT and more affected in ~tech

    Sheep
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    I'm not saying we should aim for 100% uptime in any service, nor do I think that's possible. That's not my issue at all. The problem I have is with pretty much every single website relying on one...

    I'm not saying we should aim for 100% uptime in any service, nor do I think that's possible. That's not my issue at all.

    The problem I have is with pretty much every single website relying on one of 4 big corporations to be operable (Cloudflare, AWS, Google, Azure).

    This means that, when one of those goes down, one single company's downtime affects everyone, and I really don't think that's a good trajectory for the internet.

    I am particularly concerned with digital sovereignty as well because all these big corporations are American and the US has proved time and time again to not be a reliable ally. I don't think my entire country's digital infrastructure should be at risk if Microsoft, at the behest of the US government, decides to pull the plug, for example.

    14 votes

  14. Comment on A Cloudflare outage is taking down large parts of the internet - X, ChatGPT and more affected in ~tech

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    Right in the middle of editing my mtg deck on moxfield! /s What saddens me is that nothing will be done about it once they come back because the cost of a temporary outage once every blue moon is...

    Right in the middle of editing my mtg deck on moxfield! /s

    What saddens me is that nothing will be done about it once they come back because the cost of a temporary outage once every blue moon is worth the long term savings for most businesses.

    I wish there was political interest in decentralizing sectors like this to avoid monopolies. As an EU citizen it hurts that almost everything I and other people do on a computer must at some point go through giant for-profit American corporations.

    20 votes

  15. Comment on PSP: The rise and fall of Sony's first portable in ~games

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    I will die on the hill that the PSP (and its sequels) was peak portable console when it came out, and it hurts so much that Sony gave up on iterating it after the Vita (which is still an awesome...

    I will die on the hill that the PSP (and its sequels) was peak portable console when it came out, and it hurts so much that Sony gave up on iterating it after the Vita (which is still an awesome console btw).

    It really felt like it came out too early for its own good. The lack of consistent support form 3rd party devs and even Sony ultimately killed its lengevity. But boy is it a blast if you jailbreak it.

    With the tech we have today, Sony could absolutely release a killer portable console if they wanted to, but I'm guessing they've given up on the idea with the Switch's overwhelming dominance of that marker sector.

    19 votes

  16. Comment on Request for info: Is "Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro" respectful of it's child characters? in ~anime

    Sheep
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    Some background: I have followed the author, Nanashi, for over a decade now (I checked my bookmarks and my oldest of his works dates back to 2013), way before he ever published any commercial...

    Some background: I have followed the author, Nanashi, for over a decade now (I checked my bookmarks and my oldest of his works dates back to 2013), way before he ever published any commercial manga. So I am, probably more than most, very intimate with his style, fetishes, and inclinations (in case you're unaware, he earned his fame/reputation as an independent hentai author).

    My views on Nagatoro as a long-time follower are pretty simple: It's softcore femdom disguised as a romcom that slowly sheds off its femdom skin as it goes on.

    First of all, it's adapted from a now defunct webcomic where Nagatoro, the main heroine, way more viciously bullied the protagonist. Lots of direct insults, kicking down, and only a very, very occasional blush/fluster from the heroine. It wasn't explicitly sexual even back then, but the presentation (it's basically a POV manga) was all about putting the reader in the shoes of the protagonist to kinda arouse them via the verbal and physical abuse. This web comic version has been almost entirely purged from the author's social media pages after he made the commercial version, likely to avoid "tainting" the Nagatoro character so to speak (Nagotoro herself is a veeeery old Nanashi OC, dating back to the early 2010s)

    This is not surprising since one of Nanashi's most famous works before going mainstream, his 2nd ever doujinshi, is a lolicon femdom hentai that features a main character who makes the exact same eye expression Nagatoro would later make, which became the author's signature stare that everyone now knows him from. Nagatoro the character is older than this doujinshi, but I remember she only started making this very specific eye expression after it became kind of the author's hallmark thanks to this one doujinshi.

    So right out of the gate, the formula was always to have this bully character entice the reader. In fact you can see traces of this more mean-spirited origin in the first few chapters of Nagatoro, before it's toned way, way down to just light teasing that's appropriate for a romcom. There was speculation earlier on that this came about due to editorial intervention and I'm inclined to agree because if that intense teasing from the first few chapters had stayed the same the manga probably wouldn't have lasted as long as it did.

    So as far as sexualization goes, yes it's sexualized to an extent, because it quite literally puts the characters in very common femdom situations, just with no nudity or explicit dialogue (though there is partial nudity in some cases, the typical stuff you see in anime) because that would get an 18+ label. It's all about having female characters mock the protagonist and being superior to him.

    Of course, as the series goes on, it begins deviating from this premise more and more and becomes way less in-your-face with the femdom, but that was the purpose of it and the driving force behind it early on, and certainly what a big part of the readership sought out.

    Overall, I don't think what I said puts this manga outside of suggestive romcoms with similar themes. After all, lots of works do this thing where they lean into common fetish tropes/culture but then make it safe for work so the manga can sell to a broader audience. It's kind of a cliche by now.

    But since you're particularly concerned about how the minors are treated in this work in particular, I would say they're treated suggestively, more so early on than later on, so if that's your primary issue then I'd skip this.

    5 votes

  17. Comment on The algorithm failed music in ~tech

    Sheep
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    In a broad sense, peace of mind I suppose? Not having to worry whether I'm missing some frequencies that I could otherwise hear. The only reason lossy formats exist is to save storage, but since...

    In a broad sense, peace of mind I suppose? Not having to worry whether I'm missing some frequencies that I could otherwise hear.

    The only reason lossy formats exist is to save storage, but since storage isn't much of a concern to me, having everything in flac is acceptable for my use case.

    4 votes

  18. Comment on How has AI positively impacted your life? in ~tech

    Sheep
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    In a couple ways. For work, since I'm a translator, I have sometimes used AI to help me translate. Not to give me a direct translation, but to give me alternatives to translation solutions I'm not...

    In a couple ways.

    For work, since I'm a translator, I have sometimes used AI to help me translate. Not to give me a direct translation, but to give me alternatives to translation solutions I'm not pleased with but can't come up with alternatives for.

    For example, if I know I want to use a proverb in a certain line of dialogue but my mind just isn't coming up with anything decent, either because it's on the tip of my tongue or I just blanked out, I tell the AI "Give me proverbs that carry so and so meaning" and then, and this is the crucial step, I analyze the output using my expertise (look up if the proverb is real, see if it fits in context, etc.) and evaluate if any are good enough for what I want to use it for.

    Sometimes I reject all solutions, sometimes I edit one better, and sometimes I like one so much I use it as is. I see this in the same way as looking up words in a dictionary, which I also do. It's a tool, and because I know its strengths and weaknesses, I can adjust it to my usage.

    These all then go into my glossary if they're noteworthy enough, meaning I gained permanent knowledge, so it's a win-win in my book.

    As for non-work related uses, I have used AI to un-enshittify searches for basic things that should be easy to find but modern search engines make the process daunting. Essentially very basic searches that, if I Google them, will have me wade through pages and pages of content that may or may not be relevant.

    A good example: the other day I needed a quick comparison between a few body washes, and while I checked each individual page for said body wash, I wanted actual explanations from outside sources on what some compounds did, so I asked the AI to compare the products for me just to give me a general overview and then look up the relevant compounds on my own. Essentially I used it to filter out search results and give me what I actually care to look up.

    I see IA as bypassing this tedious search and filtering process. But I never just take the AI's word for it. Usually I use it as a starting point to find actual websites or pages that will actually lead me to the information I want.

    In a broad sense, I try to use AI as a tool with the things I know it's generally good at (parsing loads of text data to find what I'm after), but I never use it to think for me or take its results at face value. I'm always checking the sources, which sometimes definitely leads me to conclude the AI got it wrong, but I still find it valuable in shortening my time looking for something.

    7 votes

  19. Comment on The algorithm failed music in ~tech

    Sheep
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    Thank you for putting so succinctly. This is my biggest argument against the people who praise streaming platforms for their algorithm and how that helps you find new music more easily. Yes,...

    Thank you for putting so succinctly.

    This is my biggest argument against the people who praise streaming platforms for their algorithm and how that helps you find new music more easily.

    Yes, streaming definitely helps you find new music, I've been there too, but if you actually analyze the music you find, you will invariably notice sooner or later that everything you're finding basically concentrates into this amorphous blob of same-sounding songs.

    It's not that the new songs you find are bad, but they start trending toward "music you turn on just to have music playing" rather than music you listen actively, and at that point is the algorithm doing that much for you? (note I am not saying that having background music to zone out or focus on work is bad, I'm just criticizing the discovery process of the music specifically)

    I ended up hating losing the love I had for music when I strictly listened to my mp3 collection that was 100% curated by me, so I went back to it (and switched it all to flac versions while I was at it) and bought a DAP as well to take my collection on the go, and now I'm so much more engaged. Yes I might not discover new songs as quickly and effortlessly as I used to with streaming (though there are mitigating tools for this a la last.fm), but when I do, I genuinely think it feels better because it was a conscious decision, like digging for a treasure and finding it and feeling all giddy over it.

    I seriously recommend people try being more active in their music library. It can be such an engaging activity.

    13 votes

  20. Comment on Tips for becoming a tea person in ~food

    Sheep
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    Regarding dairy, while I know it's common to add milk to tea in many cultures, you don't have to. My family never adds milk to their tea and we drink tea pretty frequently. It's just a personal...

    Regarding dairy, while I know it's common to add milk to tea in many cultures, you don't have to. My family never adds milk to their tea and we drink tea pretty frequently. It's just a personal choice.

    I do not consider myself a tea person at all, so I don't have much more to add but I think the old adage of "it's all preference" reigns supreme here. The best tea is the one you like, so don't try too hard to be a "tea person" so to speak, and more so try to find what you enjoy.

    2 votes