Specifically thinking of stuff that make your life better in the long run but all kinds of answers are welcome!

I’ve recently learnt about lifetraps and it’s made a huge positive impact on how I view myself and my relationships

    • In the same vein, wanting different outcomes requires different incomes.

      Take all your actions and add them up = this. If you wanted that not this, all your inputs need to be under the spotlight and changes made; including and especially habits, vices, behaviours, opinions, assumptions, collection and quality of knowledge, relationships, etc etc. Sometimes the cost or sacrifice from and of yr current self is large and largely invisible.

      Being uncomfortable means you’re learning. Learning means you’re growing. If you’re never uncomfortable, you haven’t reached luxury and made it, you’ve reached stagnation and have stopped ‘living’ your life.

      Choosing the lesser of two evils, or the devil you know, or never doing anything about a life you don’t like or want, is cowardice and will slowly crush your soul into despair. Choosing the unknown might end up sucking, but it might be better. If the known is guaranteed to suck, take the unknown - at least there’s hope there and despair, a feeling worse than pain, is a failing to find hope.

    •  jet   ( @jet@hackertalks.com ) 
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      This is true. But if it’s somebody important your life, social pressure can help.

      Demonstrate the lifestyle you want to help them lead. Give them opportunities to join you, not pushy opportunities just let’s do a thing together. And you demonstrate the better lifestyle.

      No it wouldn’t get somebody off drugs. But it might help somebody exercise more or eat healthier if you normalize it

  • That “coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, can have lasting effects on nearly every organ and organ system of the body weeks, months, and potentially years after infection (11,12). Documented serious post-COVID-19 conditions include cardiovascular, pulmonary, neurological, renal, endocrine, hematological, and gastrointestinal complications (8), as well as death.”.

    This is true regardless of symptom severity or health status, every person is at risk. I think most people really aren’t aware of this, they absorbed the narrative that it’s gone, mild, only kills/harms the vulnerable, etc. This isn’t really their fault, there are a lot of factors that have led people to that belief, but people should know their lives and livelihoods are much more at risk now than 4 years ago.

    And that this isn’t inevitable, there are simple methods of disrupting transmission and protecting yourself and others. COVID-19 is here to stay (unless we do something about that) and it has impacts on every person infected and on society at large. That shouldn’t mean folks accept illness and worse quality of life. We adapt and adopt precautions in our life to reduce long-term health impacts, like we’ve done before with many other illnesses that plague humanity.

    • And the possible risks are compounded with each infection. People are acting like covid just isn’t a problem anymore, like it’s gone away. Meanwhile, roughly 100 Americans are dying of covid every day - and we’re not even in a surge at the moment.

      • I’m too lazy to verify your numbers, but realistically, covid nowadays is simply just another life risk. Yes, people are still dying and that’s bad, but most of them are just in the age where people tend to die of such infections.

        I’d guess, there are about 4 million deaths a year in a country the size of the US. So having something on the order of 100k per year due to covid isn’t that concerning, if the lifespan isn’t affected that much.

        We have vaccinations against covid. If you’re properly vaccinated, you’ll probably be fine and younger children will grow up in a world where you just get covid once in a while and get better immunity than we old folks could ever have.

        • Get this though: many children still do end up hospitalized. The majority of them have no underlying comorbidities or conditions. Their only reason for ending up in hospital is luck of the draw. That was presented at the CDC meeting where the recent booster was approved. It’s not just the elderly or infirm who end up in the hospital and die from it. It’s still killing, hospitalizing, and making seriously ill way more people than flu.

          • Yes, but as I said: this is just life now.

            You’re getting all raved up about covid, but in reality, this is just a tiny bit more risk. Yes, more risk is bad, but what is the alternative? Continuous shutdown forever?

            You have to accept, that there are just some risks that we have to accept. If you’re going out on the street, there’s a chance you’ll be run over, do you stay indoors all the time because of that?

            • No, we don’t have to just accept continuous illness and death. Why do you think that it’s necessary for people to suffer when there are simple solutions? There are steps between nothing and total shutdown, read above for some of them.

              Covid isn’t like people going in the street risking getting hit. Covid is a communicable illness spread by others, not a personal choice someone makes. People can’t just choose to never be exposed even if they wanted, we have to interact with others. Further, people can and do avoid being run over in the street by walking on sidewalks and crosswalks, riding in vehicles with protections, with lots of traffic safety rules in place to minimize accidents. Right now our covid elimination strategies are similar to that of traffic safety in the early days of automobiles when there were no safety regulations. Right now we have a bunch of people driving wildly with at best ineffective vaccines, we need a lot more than that if we want to stop repeatedly trying to dodge covid crashes and have any sense of stability in actually living with covid.

              • There are no simple solutions. Vaccines solve 95% of the problem, but not 100%, and the remaining 5% are what you’re complaining about.

                All other solutions can only be temporary, since they require massive changes in pretty much any aspect of our lives, and they will cause massive problems in other areas.

                You’re basically proposing suicide for fear of death.

                • Actually I’m proposing life is valuable and we should protect it.

                  The vaccines don’t solve the problem and the solutions do not require massive change, but they do require people reflect on what’s important and adjust their behavior accordingly. I think that living a good life is important so I believe we should do things to better those odds, like reducing the amount of damage covid does to the body. Choosing continuous illness and your worse years coming much sooner sounds closer to suicide to me. Masking, improved ventilation and filtration, paid sick leave, and other simple steps are not absurd and shouldn’t be temporary. We know easy ways to reduce massive suffering, it’s ridiculous to me that people oppose it.

    • To add to this, SiDock is an awesome project working on an open-source, patent-free, self-stable antiviral for covid using the computers of volunteers. Anybody can volunteer their spare computational power with a few clicks. I have been crunching it since 2020 and find it very fun.

    • Exercise grows your hippocampus
    • So do antidepressants according to recent research
    • Small hippocampal volume is an excellent predictor of depression and anxiety
    • Exercise grows your hippocampus, in a dose-dependent way
    • Exercise grows your hippocampus
    • Exercise grows your hippocampus

    This is the most important fact I have ever learned.

        • It straight up reads like cult craziness or crazy 2 am infomercials. HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD! I’m glad you’ve placebo’d yourself into happiness though lol.

          You said Exercise grows your hippocampus in 4 different bullet points lmfao. Great, it increases size by 2%. It proves nothing about whether it affects depression in adults. In fact, the studies show they do jack shit except help memory lol.

          Exercise training increased hippocampal volume by 2%, effectively reversing age-related loss in volume by 1 to 2 y.

          More showing it means little to nothing:

          https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811917309138

          https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2017.00085/full

          The effect of aerobic exercise on hippocampal volume in patients with psychotic disorders

          Four studies examined the effect of aerobic exercise on hippocampal volume in people with schizophrenia or first episode psychosis (n = 107). Aerobic exercise did not significantly increase total hippocampal volume compared to control conditions (g = 0.149, 95% CI: -0.31 to 0.60, p = 0.53, Table 2). Among the two studies which reported effects on left/right hippocampus separately, there was no evidence of effects in either region (both p > 0.1). There was also no evidence of heterogeneity or publication bias influencing these results.

          The effect of aerobic exercise on hippocampal volume in other populations

          Data in other populations was insufficient for pooled meta-analyses, and so results from individual trials are summarised below. Individual trials which examined effects of aerobic exercise in patients with depression (Krogh et al., 2014), mild cognitive impairment (Brinke et al., 2014) and probable Alzheimer’s disease (Morris et al., 2017) all found no significant effects on total or left/right hippocampal volumes. One study examining the effects of exercise in young-to-middle-aged adults found no change in total hippocampal volume but did find a significant increase in anterior hippocampal volume following 6 weeks of aerobic exercise (Thomas et al., 2016).

          Effects of exercise in relation to participant age

          Meta-regression analyses were performed to examine the relationship between mean sample age and effects of exercise on hippocampal volume. No statistically significant associations of effects of exercise with sample age were found for total, right or left hippocampal volume (all p > 0.05).

          In conclusion, this meta-analysis found no effects of exercise on total hippocampal volume, but did find that exercise interventions retained left hippocampal volume significantly more than control conditions. As these positive effects were also observed among the subgroup of studies of healthy older adults, the findings hold promising implications for using exercise to attenuate age-related neurological decline. Currently, the overall quality of the evidence is compromised by the fact that 10 of the 12 studies included some risk of bias, therefore more high-quality RCTs are now required. In additional to RCTs, a prospective meta-analysis examining how changes in physical activity and fitness predict hippocampal retention/deterioration across the lifespan would provide novel insights into longer-term neural effects of exercise, while also reducing the impact of methodological heterogeneity often found across exercise RCTs. Further research is also required to determine effects in younger people (Riggs et al., 2016), and establish the neurobiological mechanisms through which exercise exerts these effects, in order to design optimal exercise programs for producing neurocognitive enhancements. However, the functional relevance of structural improvements has also yet to be ascertained. Nonetheless, the link between cardiorespiratory fitness with both structural and performance increases indicates this as a suitable target for aerobic training programs to improve brain health.

          • So it’s right there in the results you quoted:

            In conclusion, this meta-analysis found no effects of exercise on total hippocampal volume, but did find that exercise interventions retained left hippocampal volume significantly more than control conditions.

            Apparently it simultaneously shrinks your right hippocampus while growing your left, for an average change of zero while the left grows?

            That’s the only way that sentence makes sense.

              • Agreed.

                I wonder if it would “regenerate” an atrophied or shrunken hippocampus. Like the way rest and nutrition won’t make your skin larger but it will heal missing patches of skin.

                I know I’ve seen claims from reputable sources that exercise raised BDNF levels, and that BDNF leads to hippocampal neurogenesis. I can find the sources again I’m sure if you’d like; let me know.

                But how could hippocampal neurogenesis be happening without volume change? Could it be replacing dead cells (and preventing shrinkage)? Packing neurons in more densely?

              • Okay so it’s not making anything grow. Yeah that’s probably it.

                Though that is still an effect on hippocampal volume.

                Maybe they meant to say something like:

                “Overall exercise doesn’t affect hippocampal volume, except in cases the hippocampus is actively shrinking in which case it can slow down the left side” (and reading between the lines possibly on the right side with a p value a little higher than significant?)

  • Magnetic USB connectors are a thing and can save your cables/devices not just from wear and tear (unplugging/replugging constantly) but also from cables being tripped over or otherwise pulled. Highly recommended if you’re using VR! Sadly there are no standards to these.

  • The cable is the weakest link of Earbuds for durability.

    IEM’s with replaceable cables are readily available and getting very cheap & good these days (e.g. Moondrop Chu 2, Truthear Hola, etc)

  • When you’re about to face a high risk, high reward situation, you should willfully, willingly start to hyperventilate, as this helps your brain …

    NEVER take any stranger’s advice on the internet as credible without checking it with a specialist. This is especially true when said advice relates to your health and/or safety.

    • Yeah IMO not so much shortcuts but file management is often lost on the old and the young.

      What is a file. What is a file type. What is file size. Where do files go when you download them. What is your user directory. How do you rename files. What is a file sync app like google drive.

      This stuff could save so many people so much time. Every day millions of professionals are emailing clients “Thanks for sending that though, but it looks like you’ve emailed me a shortcut instead of the actual file.”

        • That article is completely accurate, I see pretty much everybody save their documents on the desktop but if I were to make them find it in the file explorer they wouldn’t have a clue where it is. With macbook users they just use the search feature and probably haven’t seen a directory in all their lives.

          The people at my school call all laptops “chromebooks” or “macbooks” and only do their stuff using the Google web apps (docs, sheets, slides, forms, etc). As a degoogled and pretty savvy individual it kind of hurts my soul as I’m over here using stuff like libreoffice on my Linux machine.

          • Yep, that’s precisly my experience from uni as well. And it wouldn’t be a problem if this “alternative mental model” worked for the people applying it. But it doesn’t. They keep losing stuff, working on 5 different copies of an essay, not keeping track which one is current; they just add workload to everyone collaborating and then someone has to handle this shit. And who does it? The techy “nerds”, such as you or me. The iPhone, iCloud and Google Drive really fucked the people who will have to at some point work professionally with GenZs (speaking this as Gen Z myself)

  • Tires can get damaged internally and the only real way to tell is to dismount them from the rim. If there is internal damage they can potentially explode while being filled with air.

    I see a lot of people filling up their tires while sitting straight infront of them and if they do explode it explodes straight outward. My tip is to connect the air gauge and then stand of to the side while filling, just in case.

    • I have filled a lot of tires and I cannot think of a single time where I had appropriate equipment to inflate the tire from any position that wasn’t right in front of it.

      • Don’t you fill your tires at the gas station? Here in Germany they have a stationary compressor with a hose (that doesn’t sound like it’s the correct word) that’s about 5 m or so and the buttons to fill in or release air are at the station itself. So you connect the valve and then have to get up and walk away to push the air in.

        • America has a similar setup except our hoses don’t attach to the valves, we have to hold them. And if they do attach, there’s usually a squeeze valve we have to squeeze near the tire to ‘open’ the hose and allow air in. America’s setup seems designed to keep you near the tire.

          • Interesting. I doubt my next statement, but I have to wonder if this is a setup that was carried over from when before gas stations were self-service (I was actually shocked how you used to not be allowed to refuel your own vehicle). Maybe something along the lines of “This setup is cheaper to run and if it’s only the underpaid employees complaining about a less-than-ideal way to fill up tires, that’s a cost I’m willing to eat.”

  •  zemja   ( @zemja@programming.dev ) 
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    Cement is highly alkaline. If wet cement comes in contact with your skin, it can cause third degree chemical burns. So don’t write your name in wet cement like Bart Simpson.

    • IDK if “third degree” chemical burns are a thing.

      Cement will dissolve the fat from under your skin, and a third degree burn is when you cook the fat under your skin.

      Also it’s not going to burn you within a few minutes the way we normally think of a chemical burn.

  •  wizzor   ( @wizzor@sopuli.xyz ) 
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    Lithium batteries are happiest between 20 and 80% state of charge. You should not store them outside of that range. Charging a little often also doesn’t hurt your battery like many seem to believe.

    Charging while cold is bad, but storing in cold is good.

    Also, NiMh and NiCd batteries are different tha Lithium based ones. Check what type of battery you have. Phones and EVs are almost always lithium though.

      • Quite a lot of electric cars will still have a lead acid battery for the low charge things like wipers, electric windows and electric mirrors. It’s simpler to do that than to have a complicated system to step down the voltage to something they can accept from a lithium ion battery.

        So essentially electric cars have two independent electrical systems that have nothing to do with each other. Interestingly this means that you can use an electric car to jump start an ICE car, even though a lot of people claim you cannot.

        That said some electric cars do go the route of a step down transformer so check your car.

      • GoodWill is a chain thrift store that uses legal loopholes to achieve charity status. A lot of charities are like this in America as well as elsewhere (should stress it’s not just an “American thing”). Sometimes the legal definition of a charity isn’t well-thought-out enough which allows for too much wiggle room when it comes to what a charity is. GoodWill achieved charity status by presenting itself to exclusively offer positions to people with disabilities in a society that does not favor them for job positions, but at the same time GoodWill underpays them and inserts them into working conditions comparable to the beginning of the industrial revolution when children would be injured or killed by the machines they were supposed to be working on.

        Autism Speaks, another famous so-called charity, has a similar story. They came into prominence for saying they will help “treat autism” and help those in need, and they are partners with Sesame Street, with whom they are co-sponsors. However, people often ignore their attitude is one of eugenics. They believe the people they present themselves as helping are burdens and will side with anyone who has acted on this, including Planned Parenthood and even the Canadian government pre-2020, the former of whom is preferential with abortions (therefore amounting to eugenics, in fact that was why they were eventually cancelled) and the latter of whom did not let anyone with a disability immigrate into the country for forty years.

    • In my very early life if I tried things and failed my parents would then try to help by offering harsh criticism and then a very tedious and didactic lecture. Made me unwilling to try to do anything.

      In later life I belatedly learned that being really good at anything usually involves being really bad at it for a long time. Also, there will come a point where you don’t suck at something and you will mistakenly think you have become quite good at it. You can still take pleasure from not sucking but be careful of overestimating your abilities.

      tl;dr - It’s ok to be bad at things, you have to be bad at things before you become good.