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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

There’s a small panel in the ceiling of a small closet in an upstairs bedroom. Open and squeeze through it and I’m in the attic space. Need to use my cell phone flashlight because it’s pitch black up here.

Walk across the joists to the far end and carefully lift away the insulation between the joists.

Use my phone and order a bunch of shit from a bunch of apps to be delivered to my house. Turn off the phone in case the agents can track me with it. Carefully lay on the drywall, distributing my weight across as much of the panel as possible to reduce the risk of breaking through into the room below. Cover myself with the insulation I pulled away earlier.

Now these foreign agents are going to have to find that ceiling panel, climb up in there, search under insulation to find me, wrestle me through that tiny access hole and whisk me away. All the while there are Uber drivers and pizza delivery guys showing up. And that’s all suspicious as fuck, so someone’s going to call the cops before long. If these are foreign agents, they probably don’t want to deal with law enforcement.

So I figure I need to hide under that insulation for maybe twenty minutes before shit starts getting crazy.

This sounds like another version of the “definition of freedom”.

Is freedom being unrestricted from doing whatever you want? Or is it protection from people doing whatever they want that would otherwise injure you?

I guess I’d argue that banning slavery in the middle of a culture that embraces it is, in fact, authoritarian. Similarly, enabling slavery in the middle of a culture that rejects it is also authoritarian.

It gets more interesting when the population is split on what they want policy to be. I think Prohibition is a better comparison since it’s less emotionally charged.

Was enacting Prohibition authoritarian? Sure seems that way, even though it had a lot of support. Was rolling it back also authoritarian? The people who originally supported it and now see it taken away probably feel it’s authoritarian.

IMO as long as people are happy to argue with each other about basic definition of words, the answer to the original question is “it doesn’t matter”.

My company has everything, but the titles are usually self-assigned.

Back end developers tend to write weird front end code, so their front end PRs usually need extra scrutiny.

Front end developers tend to write careless back end code, so their back end PRs usually need extra scrutiny.

I am a full stack developer, so all of my PRs need extra scrutiny.

I always think of that scene from Hot Fuzz where they’re talking about why someone wore a hat low on their face.

“Because he’s fuck ugly?”

“Or he has something to hide.”

Both can exist and I try to keep that in mind. Someone wearing something covering their identity either is cold or doesn’t want to engage with people. If the latter, there’s a slim chance they pose a threat, or they have their own reasons that are no concern of mine.

I note these people more than if they weren’t covered, but I don’t really change my behaviours in normal situations.

You’re not doing anything wrong. A hoodie is a yellow flag without more information. Keep doing what you’re doing.

Of COURSE it’s Karlach

“I’M GOING TO PAY! YOU CAN STOP WATCHING ME FFS!”

What am I doing for this time? Am I fixed in place, unable to move and communicate? Do I have an interesting view? Of what? Do I have my current sense of self and identity?

What happens when I get back to now? What about everyone I knew? Do they still exist? What happens to my stuff? Was I never around to buy it in the first place?

And what kind of billionaire? Like I’m sitting on a pile of $1,000,000,000 worth of precious metals? Or a bunch of less liquid assets like stock?

Aspartame is one of the most widely studied food additives ever and I’m not aware of any conclusive results that ever came out suggesting it’s harmful.

If anything, it’s probably safer than all the other sweeteners just because it’s received so much attention and study.

The answer to this question is hugely region dependent, so you’ll probably get vastly different answers that are all still valid.

Where I’m from, we’re in a housing crisis. There aren’t enough homes for everyone, property prices have ballooned well beyond reasonable year over year, to the point that anyone under 40 will not be able to buy their own home in their lifetime unless they have rich parents or work very very high paying jobs.

In this climate, someone buying a house so they can charge an insanely high rent (because rents and property values are closely linked) is… I’m not sure what the word is, but they’re clearly more driven by personal gain than any sort of common good.

Airbnb is the same issue when you have such limited housing supply. Someone else isn’t in a house because that house is off the market for people to live. There’s a reason why Airbnb is tightly restricted and banned in many cities.

Now while your stereotype landlord might be a lazy, parasitic ghoul, the fact of the matter is people need to rent just as much as they need to own. If someone owns another piece of property and they rent it out and maintain it, it’s kind of difficult to complain too much about it.

I know people who have had fantastic landlords that kept up the properties, did proactive upgrades, and seldom raised rents. I also know people whose landlords broke the law many times by refusing to deal with maintenance problems on a timely basis, increased rent by the maximum legally allowed amount every year, and were quick to evict the tenants because “family was moving into the home” (they didn’t). You get a great mix of shitheads and good people in any market.

The people arguing at either far end of the spectrum can easily be ignored. At best they have an axe to grind and use every opportunity to engage in hyperbole to support their naive position. At worst they’re trying to manipulate public opinion for their own purposes. At any rate, the more extreme and absolute an opinion you read online, the more easily you should be willing to reject and ignore it.

Ok, but all that nuance aside, if someone comes up to me and asks “Landlords. Guillotine or no?” then I’m going to say “guillotine!” because there wasn’t any room left for a conversation.

I thought “banging” meant intense and exciting. I guess it means lawsuits, memes, and public ridicule?

VR is the next 3DTV. It’s a neat technology that doesn’t need to be mainstream, but we have no shortage of company marketers desperately trying to create a narrative that every home needs it.

unscented bar soap. For my body and hair.

At first I was worried that ditching shampoo and other products with moisturizers would leave me feeling flaky and dry, but it was surprisingly easy.

I’ve shifted to the opinion that the overwhelming majority of beauty products are unnecessary and are just a market in search of a problem.

Not American, so I usually check the front page of CNN to get a general sense of what the media is talking about right now. I get a lot of my political news from Seth Meyers’ and Stephen Colbert’s monologues as well, since the snark is fun.

For local and regional news I use the CBC and my local newspaper.

And I guess Lemmy, but that’s more of a secondary source than a resource I think of when I’m searching for current events.