I am always teetering on the edge of doing this, not because I think it’s a good idea, but just because I really, truly love fruit…

Yes, I don’t think I have another app but more features on some apps I use (Smartdock, Joplin, Librera, Rimusic) would be slightly life-changing.

he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.

seems like the first step to improving is being given information on how you’re doing, and the second is being mentored/trained?

What do you use for TTS? I’m interested in both a service that’ll turn a PDF into an audiobook and that reads a document line-by-line. I use Librera for the latter but the FOSS voices available on F-Droid leave a lot to be desired.

Can I ask how you ended up there in the first place? I can scarcely think of a more interesting place on earth.

How integrated are you into the local community? How well do you speak the local language? I’m a foreigner living abroad and I would never trust either my own perception of this place nor 99% of other foreigners’ perceptions.

Surprised by how hiɡh up Mexico is!

Why were there trackers initially?

Jesus, why the downvotes? Someone give this man a dragonfruit. So much for friendly, casual discussion

I disagree. I’ve only ever had luck with the white ones.

I’ve done this and still only gotten lucky like 1/20th of the time. Very hard to tell when they’re ripe and flavourful

I’ve always wanted to learn to sing, ever since I was a kid. I even started taking lessons before I went through a major life change that pushed all of that aside. I meant to come back to it but I realised recently it just doesn’t matter to me enough to pursue it compared to other things I want to achieve. And it really never became fun for me: it seems like the only way to improve is to 1) make it a team sport, which isn’t an option for me, 2) start improving from when you’re young enough that you’re not self-conscious, or 3) painfully just listen to yourself be awful until you improve as an adult. Which is totally 100% doable, but pretty joyless & not worth the time investment for me rn.

Good for others but doesn’t work for me as it’s not on mobile sadly. There are several mobile translation extensions but they all rely on Google/Microsoft/DeepL & I don’t know how to assess the privacy consequnces of that.

Not too good. I had a half hour long conversation with a friend on the phone recently & I realised it’s the first time I’ve had a phone conversation with somebody I actually wanted to talk to in months, except for that time I called another friend freaked out bc I was scared of my neighbour harrassing me. Not exactly the same giddy energy. This phone friend and I tried to meet up and got foiled multiple times. Shit’s exhausting.

My first edit to this post was “maybe I should take up gardening or sth but where to start” bc I want to be able to interact with and get feedback from just about anything besides my coworkers once in a while.

Sorry, I can’t hear you over my sitting down and standing back up repeatedly xD

But I have no reason to believe Discord is even an iota less evil than Facebook.

I wish I could loosen up and enjoy malicious tech but like I said, I just can’t unring that bell, even though it makes my life meaningfully worse. Iykyk

Thanks for sharing all of this. I agree with you. TBD whether returning to social media will be a net good or a net evil in my life, but it’s such a relief to be able to see people agree for once with what is such an obvious, high-stakes moral position.

Edit: I actually am not inclined to agree with a lot of the stuff in the first video. For one, I think sterilising human beings really is more of a practical than a moral limitation and I think he doesn’t give enough space to the instances of where it actually happened. And for another–I started to type about how I disagree with him on civilisation being necessarily a positive unambigous transcendence or whatever, and then about how calling bacteria & sharks mindless is arrogant, but then he goes full anthropocentric in the end and says that humans in civilisation are the only ones who can live meaningful lives and all animals following their instincts (& people living outside of civilisation today & the vast majority of human history apparently) are just perpetuating meaningless suffering? This is an extremely narrow-minded, arrogant, parochial, self-aggrandising perspective. I’m surprised he advocates for wild living for animals when he has no curiousity at all about how the world actually works outside of the human city and countryside. Really reaffirms my dislike of talking heads, especially those with the comments turned off lol.

In the article they talk about extremely subtle pronounciation changes. It doesn’t seem like it was a conscious decision.

I used to have a job where I was the only non-Indian on my team and I didn’t go as far as to develop an accent (also I went home every day lol unlike these guys) but I felt like I was unintentionally picking up some Indian affectations/word orders.

Antidepressants can have serious side effects that can persist even after stopping. Look up the Surviving Antidepressants forum. That doesn’t mean don’t use them, but it’s just a truism that all pharmacological intervention has risks. To see randos diagnosing & medicalising someone for a lemmy post that isn’t an obvious cry for help is…objectionable, and in poor taste, and imo diagnostic of some much larger problems, but I don’t have the time to spare to argue that point. But people promoting what could be life-altering compounds as no biggie demands a response. (Again, my position isn’t ‘don’t use antidepressants,’ it’s ‘messing with your brain chemistry demonstrably can have serious consequences and is a serious decision.’)

edit: rephrased

Thanks for your response. It’s not just the term “ownership” I am frustrated with, because there’s a reason we use the term: it’s accurate. I think in an ethical world we would be building a society and environment that allowed us to be good neighbours to cats (and all other forms of life) rather than forcefully assimilating them into our homes and taking away all of their freedom. I think veganism is a horizon most people have considered (even if just only barely) because of the brutality of factory farms but people hardly have the imagination to acknowledge the cruelty of what goes on in their own homes and alternatives (for obvious reasons: it’s relatively easy to not eat animal products, very difficult for any one individual to make a non-human-friendly impact on the environment around them). I think the way you think about your cat is fair. What prompted my rant was the kind of attitude that someone who responded to this post earlier had–“are you kidding, OBVIOUSLY my dog loves me, OBVIOUSLY I am entitled to make decisions about its reproductive rights, because even though he’s my best buddy he’s my inferior!” I find the “I’ll eat an extra steak for you” attitude vile but I almost never encounter it IRL whereas almost everyone I know will project the most convenient possible narrative and emotions onto their pets and praise themselves for keeping them. I mean, as I say in OP, it is what it is, it’s arguably better for a cat to be indoors in this messed-up world. But only arguably and ambivalently so. It’s most people’s cavalier attitudes about it that I find to be inexcusable and diagnostic of deep cruelty.