Perhaps social media has had an impact, but IMO the larger issue at hand is that people (especially in the US) have both less time and fewer places to have casual conversations. People are working more across the board and have more distractions and things vying for their attention (mostly because of the internet and social media, ofc), so even when a situation appears, there is a higher cost to interact, whether that’s in real life or on the internet.

Fwiw, direct messages can be a swamp of nonsense, especially for people who post a lot publicly on social media platforms. They may not be intentionally ignoring you, but you get lost in the mess. Women especially get harassed via DM on basically every platform so there is a tendency to ignore DM functionality. Platforms that are already set up to facilitate random chats like forums, discord, etc are going to be way better for having a real conversation that could even become a friendship

Tiktok has been useful for several groups that are normally extremely supressed with other algorithmic social media. Tiktok isn’t geared towards the “what will make you angry therefore keep scrolling” or “what will make you buy more things” motivations that facebook et. al. are geared towards, so it will actually show you things you care about. It also has a tendency to show you opposing viewpoints from time to time, which makes it surprisingly useful for deprogramming people from misinformation.

For people with specific medical disorders or conditions, tiktok was excellent for finding others and sharing information. For people of different minorities that are normally supressed on social media, it was excellent for building community.

So sure, if all you watch on it was dancing teenagers, that’s what you are gonna get: Vine 2.0. If you curate your feed a little then it’d help you branch out from your interests without the primary goal of keeping your eyes peeled to it or grabbing more ad revenue.

if you are part of a group that tiktok was basically the only social media network that had ever been helpful for, it’s a big deal that it’s going away. Its not about the format of the videos, but the algorithm and its focus on your interests rather than making money.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filelink-provider-for-send/ this add on can be pointed at any send instance, so long as the instance isn’t too diverged from the popular fork or Mozilla’s original project.

The Thunderbird team has talked in the past about bringing Mozilla Send back as more of a feature for Thunderbird files embedded in emails, hence some of the work that’s happening off and on by Mozilla themselves in the original project, some of which has been merged into the project this post is about.

Its been in testing for a bit. It got bumped from the last major desktop Thunderbird release and since Thunderbird releases used to be synced to firefox ESR releases its been a slow turnaround to get their schedule moving faster.

Its an f-droid metadata issue that the team is already aware of https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/8478

I’m in a swing state with an abortion measure on the ballot, and while all the polls claim it’s close, I’m not really sure they are properly accounting for the number of voters that have been activated by the possibility of enshrining pro-choice into the state constitution.

These polling strategies are complex and a lot of thought goes into them, but they rarely can account for uncommon circumstances that increase voter turnout in local or state elections and how that will effect the national election.

While this is entirely personal reexperience bias, I also wonder how effective these polls are at reaching a representative survey group. I know at least on my phone basically all survey calls and texts go to spam and I wonder if older, more conservative voters are getting overrepresented due to their likelihood of not having those kinds of spam filters in place.

Best be careful when changing sheets anyway. It’d be a shame if your mattress wasn’t properly killed before being shipped from Sqornshellous Zeta and it went on a flollop rampage after being exposed to too much sunlight.

Lots of mythology is compiled from many incomplete sources, and not all common accepted stories will completely mesh up with others. It’s also not uncommon for the myth of one village to be completely different from another regarding a particular entity, even if the towns are within a hour walk. What we have now is often just what survived.

Generally speaking I’m not opposed to sqlite. The case of a notes app is the one exception.

If i need to make a big find and replace change, i dont need to rely on the app to have the capability or whip out a sql editor or cli tool. I just open my favorite text editor and do it. Or chain some cli tools built into the os.

Its not even about data portability or export. Its about working with the data.

Exactly. Not a huge fan of notes apps storing the data in a db.otherwise there is a lot to like about joplin. With obsidian i open my notes in codium all the time to make mass edits or fill gaps that obsidians UI cant meet, which is not possible with joplin.

Fortunately with obsidian as long as you keep the plugins on the lighter side and keep any non-markdown content in seperate files via linking, im not too worried about having to jump ship if it ever goes bad. Worst case if a plugin dies or i have to migrate, the actual loss of data is that some plugin used json or whatever and it’d have to be converted or replaced.

I do have hope at least that if the company folds they’ll open source it, or turn a blind eye to a community reengineering effort. And what is unique about obsidian markdown and metadata will probably get community-built migration tools quickly if enough people jump ship en masse.

But for the time being Obsidian is the best option for me and i dont feel that bad about it.

I tried to use Copilot but it just kept getting in the way. The advanced autofill was nice sometimes, but its not like i’m making a list of countries or some mock data that often…

As far as generated code… especially with html/css/js frontend code it consistently output extremely inaccessible code. Which is baffling considering how straightforward the MDN, web.dev, and WCAG docs are. (Then again, LLMs cant really understand when an inaccessable pattern is used to demonstrate an onclick instead of a semantic a or to explain aria-* attributes…)

It was so bad so often that I dont use it much for languages I’m unfamiliar with either. If it puts out garbage where i’m an expert, i dont want to be responsible for it when I have no knowledge.

I might consider trying a LLM thats much more tuned to a single languge or purpose. I don’t really see these generalized ones being popular long run, especially once the rose-tinted glasses come off.

I’ve been windows-free for about 8 months as well. I’m a more casual gamer so i haven’t had to venture out of steam proton yet (but i’ve got bottles on hand to experiment anyway) A few of the games i tend to return to every few years will definitely need bottles.

I built a beefy system, and I was initially planning on running windows (or one of the de-microsofted builds) on a vm with pass-through GPU (shunting my linux over to the on-cpu gpu when im running it) but so far i’ve had no need to continue setting that up. I proactively placed all my steam games on an ntfs filesystem just in case i do in the future.

Either way, i’m glad to have the flexibility to make windows work without dual boot, but so far it looks like i was being overly cautious. Probably cant play some games with anti-cheat right now… but i so rarely play those types of game.

Petco carries a “sofresh” litter that you can refill. Its unscented and does just fine keeping smells down. If i smell anything then i probably forgot to empty it.

Not particularly low dust but also not any worse than purina or others i’ve used. And its cheap due to refilling. I have a few petcos that i pass weekly regardless so its pretty convenient for me, at least.

If you are feeling like social media may be a negative factor in your life at the moment, then take a break. Intentionally stepping away for a week or more helps me from time to time. There is also nothing wrong eith deciding to skip lemmy/kbin/etc for now and only using a server/platform that you find most helpful. Some people hate mastodon but love firefish. Theyre both pretty much fully federated eith each other and offer microblogging, but the experience is different. Kbin and Lemmy have some key differences, too, which can chsnge how you experience the fedi.

I think, especially with lemmy and mastodon, that the time i spend is positive. I avoid the busy generic communities and spaces and focus on ones specific to interests. But sometimes fedi drama or a bad actor that moderation was slow to handle can make for a bad time. Or even just bad news in the wider world can make the fedi less of an escape.

With mastodon, i picked a server with a heavy presence of people in my career space and social similarities, but also with a decent amount of diversity, and that has meant that the moderation and especially the local feed are more likely to be neutral or positive than negative. Honestly, time spent on mastodon, for me, tends to be almost exclusively uplifting and informative because of that server choice. I value several mutual connections highly. That’s not to say there isn’t negativity or that I am in a box… thats why diversity was important to me. I rarely found twitter to be uplifting and it was only sometimes informative, and i never had mutuals on twitter that were this active and made social media worth it to me.

If you are seeing a lot of stuff you’d rather not, changing up your server could help. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple accounts on different servers, or even following the same people from different accounts. There’s nothing wrong with being on a server that is more aggressively moderated if that gives you a better experience for YOU. You could have an account for casual use which is intentionally less dense on content to avoid doom scrolling, for instance. Federation means that you can use these platforms as isolated or loose forums in addition to or instead of being connected to the wider federverse.

I mostly used reddit for a small handful of communities. It would not have mattered to me if those communities were on reddit or on forum software. i did most of my browsing from mobile, and i almost never used the website unless i was using it as a search engine. That definitely led me to use reddit far less than if it was an ever present tab on my computer.

I find that most people are fairly understanding as long as it doesn’t effect them. Coworkers and friends tend to give the benefit of the doubt and are understanding. Sometimes you have to remind them, but usually that clears things up quickly. Sometimes, those of us with chronic migraine also develop some anxiety about missing things or letting people down, even if people are very understanding.

The gaslighting… most of the time it’s people who don’t know enough about migraine (or don’t care) and start to see patterns as laziness, avoidance, or similar. Miss a few wednesdays in a row? Guess what, your manager might think you’re avoiding that wednesday team meeting… Miss a few tests or a presentation in class? Well, clearly that’s because you weren’t ready and wanted to buy yourself more time… Sometimes they’ve bought into some misinformation that all you have to do is eat some magical salt every day and you’ll be cured. Or they disbelieve the existence of chronic conditions entirely. That’s where a manager will find a way to use some performance metric to get rid of you or a professor will treat you like a drain on their time.

All of this is in the context of the United States (I’m sure many other countries handle this a lot better, as usual). It’s really uncommon for migraine to be well-understood at work or school. Especially if you don’t have a current diagnosis, which is also common since doctors tends to brush it off or require some extreme logging to even consider, or insurance companies will refuse to pay for the testing and MRI scans usually required to have an official diagnosis and meet ADA requirements. Like any non-physical disability or illness, schools and employers tend to continually forget and fall way short of ADA recommendations. Especially with chronic conditions that may have phases of being worse or non-existent for months at a time. “Well, you didn’t have this problem last quarter, so what gives?”

Chronic migraine. People think its just a headache, but that’s really just the most obvious symptom and least complex symptom. Family practice/generalized doctors know too little about it to recognize it. Everyone around you thinks you’re just being dramatic. If they can push through a headache then why cant you push through a migraine?

Migraine is a cycle that lasts days. It has phases: prodrome, aura, acute, postdrome. The acute phase (the headache part) is just one phase. Sometimes the headache isn’t even that bad, or long. Sometimes it lasts multiple days. Its a neurological disorder and, in a lot of ways, basically is like your nervous system short circuiting for a few hours or days. Triggers have a lot to do with severity, but there is also a lot of bad info about triggers too. With chronic migraine, you could avoid all triggers and still have 1-2 migraine events a month, and those events dont care about your calendar.

Because information is so badly shared and everyone (mostly unintentionally) gaslights anyone with migraine into thinking they’re not suffering from a chronic condition, many of us go a long time before discovering useful information or getting diagnosed.

There are a ton of signs during the prodrome phase which, once you know what to look for, can help you avoid (sometimes) the acute phase by taking meds soon enough and focusing on avoiding known triggers. Even standard over-the-counter stuff can short circuit a lot of migraines before the most painful part. But also, some of the prodrome stuff alone can make working or completing tasks difficult. I often start having trouble speaking, get very tired, have difficulty focusing vision. General brain fog. This can be hours or days before an attack.

After the headache phase, the postdrome is often more brain fog, speaking issues, low energy, but also sometimes a euphoric state which can make getting back into your normal schedule really difficult.

I miss family events. I miss friend events. I have to cancel stuff all the time. I worry about scheduling things for fear of being in a headache phase. I’ve been lucky with employers being understanding, esp with the work from home setup and mostly DIY hours, but i absolutely couldn’t work a job with shifts.

I also have that UPS rack mounted, just the cage nut bolts. It doesn’t concern me at all. I have it towards the bottom of the rack since its heavy(ish) but its also not too deep so there isn’t a lot of flex on it.

Thundercast is a great listen! Its not all about mozilla stuff either. Mostly a group of thunderbird team members hanging out with a few discussion topics.

Sounds like it will probably be behind a subscription like Firefox Relay and Mozilla VPN, and probably very affordable like those. Server costs and all.

Definitely looking forward to more info about this. I really enjoyed the original send, and solving large files in email without needing to wire up a webDAV drive or go to another service to upload would be awesome. Presumably it’ll be thunderbird focused, but hopefully it can be used from a browser extension or web app to use on the go or with webmail clients too.

Don’t quote me on this but i recall seeing something a while back about how a significant part of the windows kernel was already ported to rust. The windows kernel has been fairly decoupled from the UI layer for a while, that was one of the big efforts in the 8.1 and 10 versions: to have a core that xbox, phone, and desktop could all share.

You wont be able to revert everything, since 115 is essentially a new underlying UI framework. Your best bet is a fork like betterbird since you’ll be able to just load up your profile and keep going fairly seamlessly. But chances are rheyll eventually catch up to 115, and betterbird may diverge further or follow along.

Thunderbird 115 does have a decent amount of customization still. You can switch the list views from the new cards look back to the table layout, if that is your main dislike. It’s the icon at the top right of the inbox list next to the quick filters button. You can also change the layout to a horizontal one from the hamburger menu under views.

As far as tool bars there is not much you can do other than try to get as close to your preferred setup with the customize capabilities. Just right click on the top header area, just like in firefox. It wont have everything from older versions of Thunderbird, but most of the common tasks are available to use there instead of in the message veiwer or on the list/table view.

And of course, there may be some add-ons which restore some UI elements or features you miss. Many of those things would need to be re-implemented for the newer UI framework and would need enough people who use them to justify an add-on dev or the thunderbird team to make it happen.