It’s wrong, but also, it’s right a surprisingly good amount of the time.

Yeah, happens all the time with all kinds of different instances. Just do yourself a favor and set-up an account on at least three but preferably around eight different instances and then maybe if you’re super lucky you’ll always be able to find at least one that’s up and running when you want to get on.

Also, one of my big gripes is that so many Lemmy instances have various uptime monitoring services in place, but then when you check those while the site appears to be down, they almost always indicate that the site is fully operational and just fine. Those things are close to being useless, anecdotally speaking.

Be a queen. Don’t be a drag.

Founding fathers wore wigs.

Humans are already imposing upon our pets and depriving them of their autonomy, simply by keeping them in captivity. Any argument against merciful euthanasia grounded in concerns about how it is imposing are moot.

As for pulling human euthanasia into this context, do yourself a favor and don’t. You might be surprised at how common euthanasia is in humans. At least in my part of the world, it’s largely a wink-wink nudge-nudge situation, but it does happen with some regularity. Also for people who are actually suffering in decline, there are all kinds of supportive care options being provided that simply aren’t feasible or economical for pets. There’s also not really the potential for the same kinds of perverse intentions with pets as there might be for people. Like, the list goes on.

So, basically from either of those two perspectives, let alone the fact that both apply, the argument against euthanizing pets that you’ve presented fall apart.

Having said that, this is often not a simple and straightforward decision. But since we’ve already established that we’re imposing upon them one way or the other, it really comes down to what kind of imposition do you want? The animal is going to die soon one way or the other. You can impose upon it and force it to experience the pain and fear and discomfort of its body naturally shutting down over the course of days, weeks, or months. You could impose upon it and decide to euthanize. What can you live with?

On a more personal note, I’ve had to have 2 pets euthanized.

One was a cat who managed to escape outside, it got hit by a car and then a neighbor’s dog mauled it. Literally pieces of broken rib and punctured lung exposed as well as untold other injuries. No hope of recovery. The idea of letting it suffer another moment was not something I could live with and it was going to die anyway.

The other was a dog with congestive heart failure. There comes a point where there are no more medications and no higher doses that are effective. The animal literally is experiencing the sensation of drowning. They’re terrified and in pain, exhausted, and suffering. The vet might be able to alleviate it a few hours or even a couple of days with a procedure to manually remove the fluid, but then you’re just going to put the animal through this again and soon. I could not live with myself forcing the dog to endure that knowing there was another option.

Plus, I have seen the pet owner that refused euthanasia and wanted their pet to die a natural death. The dog had cancer. I’m honestly broken up enough just thinking about what I witnessed that I can’t even bring myself to type it out. So I’ll stop there other than to say I’ve seen people dying of cancer in their final hours – there is a world of difference in those things, at least in modern times. The pet was clearly distressed, in pain, and suffering. The people are being made comfortable with drugs and medical care.

And then there are actual good developers who could or would tell you that LLMs can be useful for coding, in the right context and if used intelligently. No harm, for example, in having LLMs build out some of your more mundane code like unit/integration tests, have it help you update your deployment pipeline, generate boilerplate code that’s not already covered by your framework, etc. That it’s not able to completely write 100% of your codebase perfectly from the get-go does not mean it’s entirely useless.

Way back in the day I was invited to a private sub that tracked various “stealth” advertising / scam / shill rings on Reddit. I guess one of the founding members noticed a comment or post of mine complaining about the very obvious behaviors I’d noticed, and turns out, there were a large number of people in this group keeping track of it.

I’m not going to bother watching a youtube video, but I have to wonder if it’s pointing out the same kind of stuff we’d been noticing for well over a decade.

Type 2 runs rampant on both sides of my family. I’ve had symptoms since I was a kid, and have been tested almost every year as an adult. However, my test results have always been in the healthy range, so I guess I’m not diabetic, at least not yet.

It’s strange to read through the comments and see all the symptoms and recognize them in myself.

Granted, I think the only diagnostic tool most care providers in the USA look at is the A1C number. I’ve asked many questions over the years: could my symptoms be caused by something else, is it possible that A1C numbers might not be a reliable indicator for some people, and things like that. Basically get told not to worry about it.

Either way, I still get tested each year.

My nose is more sensitive than average to certain types of foul smells mostly in the poop and rotting organic material categories but also things like mouse / rodent urine, skunks, and cigarette smoke. Oh joy.

Mostly it makes me feel like I’m going crazy because I smell these things when nobody else seems to notice leading me to wonder if I’m just hallucinating the smell. But sometimes I put it to good use by being the early warning system of skunks in the area and sometimes I’m the first to notice when the milk is starting to go bad.

Heartburn / acid indigestion. Racing thoughts. Back pain. Severe thunderstorms. Just to name a few things.

Well, that was my answer before I read the other comments and see that most other people have interpreted the question differently than myself.

You probably know this, but for others who might not: MS is now allowing some/many/all (???) people to extend the security updates for Win10 for another year free of charge. You have to go into the Windows update area and click a button to accept. At least in the USA, this seems to be a somewhat newly available option, as it was there the last time someone asked me to look at their laptop to see if I could upgrade it to Win11.

Quite some time ago, the messaging I was getting from Microsoft was that Windows 10 security updates were going to end this year. I didn’t really keep up with the news on that front, but I did notice that there was some kind of law suit in the EU that from what I recall basically came down to the fact that MS would have to continue to provide security updates to Win 10 free of charge for EU users.

Literally within the last week, a buddy of mine asked me to look at his computer and see if I could upgrade it to Win 10. I could not, as it doesn’t have a supported processor. But what I noticed is that MS now offers the option to extend security updates until 2026 with the click of a button.

So, thanks EU folks! Already knew ya’ll were awesome, but I assume this change of heart from Microsoft was a result of that suit. I appreciate it.

It weighs heavily on me, to say the least. It’s nearly impossible to have an even slightly tangentially political conversation with them that doesn’t leave me deeply disturbed and/or infuriated, so I pretty much avoid it altogether. Now the deepest conversation I allow is “how’s the weather” and “what are you having for dinner tonight?”, and that’s sad.

But it’s absolutely the case that engaging with them on political stuff is destructive to my psyche. And even worse, they have a way of turning otherwise entirely non-political topics into something political. These are not the people who raised me or the values they raised me with. And there’s no real logical consistency to any of it other than it’s definitely going to be in agreement with whatever the latest opinions are on Fox News and Facebook.

As a kid, the only particularly “conservative” view point they shared was on immigration. They absolutely believed the whole “Mexicans are taking our jobs” bullshit. I remember even asking them why they aren’t mad at their bosses for giving their jobs to the “Mexicans” and never getting a satisfactory answer for why that was given a pass.

And then from that one little common thread, the rest of the conservative/Republican agenda has wormed its way in. So, naturally as the conservative agenda morphed into a more fascist agenda, so have my parents’ beliefs. With age and health related mental declines, these ideals have become more cemented. These are people who will never forget or forgive Democrats for NAFTA, but also believe that Republicans wanted universal healthcare for all yet Democrats gave us Obamacare instead. They grew up growing and selling weed to make ends meet, and yet still believe it should be illegal and people deserve to be in jail for it. They have a gay kid but believe gay marriage is wrong, because the Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman, and the government shouldn’t be involved at all.

They honestly buy into the idea that police officers and pastors are infallible. If someone is arrested, it’s because they are guilty of something. No pastor would ever sexually abuse a child, they are a pastor after all. If the president says something is true, it must be true. And again, none of this is how they raised me or the ideals they expressed when I was growing up, so it’s definitely like living in some kind of bizarre reality that’s tough to come to terms with.

On the NSFW profile: There’s a one-off rule set in place, as best I can tell. If you’ve ever participated in a post or community that’s NSFW / quarantined / etc, even if your content itself was not NSFW or if the thread/community was SFW at the time but was later marked NSFW / quarantined, and even if you’ve since deleted your content or it was removed by mods, your profile will be marked as NSFW. At least, that’s how it appeared to work back in the day.

If you are 100% certain that you’ve never posted in an NSFW / quarantined thread/community and that nothing you’ve ever participation has since had a status change, then that might actually be evidence that there was some suspicious activity. No guarantee, of course, but for example if someone hacked into your account then posted a bunch of Only Fans shit that was quickly removed, it might lead to the locked account and the NSFW designation.

Granted, I’m not saying that you didn’t get banned for the anti-reddit comments and out-reach. I do know that anti-reddit comments aren’t necessarily automatically deleted / removed and accounts aren’t guaranteed to be banned for it. Usually, it seems like that’s reserved for cases where, objectively speaking, the comment was rule-breaking (common themes being abusive lanugage / name calling) or otherwise off-topic. I’ve seen numerous comments on Reddit talking about Lemmy, linking to Lemmy, as well as to other alternatives, even speaking unfavorably of Reddit and its dear leader, that stay up and are left untouched. But we also all know that all it takes is one prickly admin or ceo to take personal offense. Nature of the internet being what it is.

One of my older Reddit accounts was blocked on several top subs for abusing the report button.

One of those super mods posted a photo of someone endangering their pet on multiple subs. The content was literally against site-wide rules but also broke sub-level rules on each of the subs it was posted. I reported the photo on each sub it was posted to separately. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that super mod was a mod of every single one of those subs. So, they had the ability to ban/block me on each one for “abuse”.

Oh, you must’ve had a medical emergency in the USA and now all the bills have arrived.

While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.

I was going to say the same thing. Learn from my parents (and me). These do not make great pets for kids, assuming you love your kids and your kids love their fingers.

I like Linux, use(d) various flavors of it, and have had experience with / exposure to it for over 20 years. But no, I’ve never had a remotely flawless experience with it on a desktop or laptop environment. Wish I could offer more help or encouragement, but figured I’d at least chime in with some emotional support by affirming that you are not alone in that experience.

I would recommend Linux to technologically adept people (ex: tech professionals, computer science students) and only indirectly to less technically proficient people in the form of suggesting something like a Steam Deck for portable PC gaming to someone who might be interested.

But for an aging parent or my best friend’s kids? No. Sometimes I already feel like I’m a free on-call 24/7 IT support tech for friends and family, and that’s with mostly Windows and Android devices that pretty much just work the way folks expect (even if that way is broken/crumby/irritating/etc).

A whole local LLM? Tell me more, I’m actually curious. I’m wondering how useful it would be to train.

Hopefully this won’t get me too much negative reaction: I’m not a proud pirate. I’d rather not pirate at all. I’m kind of ashamed that it’s come to this.

There were a few solid years where I literally did not do it and felt no desire to, back when streaming was new, and there were only a few serious players. I’d love to return to that era, but I know it will never exist again.

So now, I and other members of my family, pay a ridiculous amount of money for a rotating suite of services, trying to do things the right way, and still, there are way too many times when we can’t find anything we want to watch on any of those services and/or the thing we wanted to watch is not available on any of those services.

Finally broke down and just said fuck it. I tried to support this mess as best I could in hopes it would get better, but fully knowing it wouldn’t. When it definitely did not get better I said no more.