Do you guys have ghost kitchens over there? Because there are several dead-seeming restaurants in my neighborhood that are actually just ten different restaurants on door dash and never appear to have actual customers because they just have delivery people running in and out.

Also whatever your brilliant-ass cheating scheme is, your TA has probably seen it 27 times already.

Also that thing where you go mess up the headers in an empty or irrelevant file and pretend your homework got corrupted to buy yourself an extra day was invented pretty much at the same time as electronic homework submission.

Also your mileage will vary depending on the book/edition, but a lot of times a "new edition" of a textbook is just a transparent cash grab by the publisher and is 99% the same material with different page numbers, so it's worth asking the prof/a TA if the previous edition is pretty much the same. You can generally get "outdated" editions of a textbook for startlingly little money. Like I'm talking sub-$5 for a book that's $140 new sometimes.

When I was a TA for a gigantic intro class they'd just released a new edition of the book we used but they'd only sent us two desk copies (publishers send free copies to professors who teach out of their textbooks), and the class was run by a professor and three TAs, so the TAs all had to share one copy of the new edition and taught out of the old edition 90% of the time. They'd only changed one chapter, so the professor scanned that one chapter to PDF and we handed it out to anyone with the old edition.

We also had, for some reason, like five boxes of the old edition under a desk in the department office and gave them out to anyone who would take them. You can hardly give old editions of textbooks away.

Having at least a few hours of sleep between all that shit you studied and your test will get better results than pulling an all nighter to study like 4 more hours. First of all, your brain sucks balls at information storage and retrieval when you're exhausted. And second of all, sleep is when your brain organizes all the new info you picked up, so you will actually remember more of what you studied after you've slept.

The Secret of Monkey Island Super Metroid Yoshi's Island

My middle school required all shirts to be tucked in and they meant ALL SHIRTS. They went around making kids tuck in sweatshirts. It was dumb. And also racist because it was the 90s and the rule was made in response to baggy clothing being popular especially amongst black kids, so they considered large untucked shirts to be gang related.

I switched from Hey to Onmail because it's basically Hey without the douchey CEO. Also I was an early onmail adopter so I have my first name for an email.

It has a free tier but I pay for it. I switched away from gmail because I wanted my email to be a service I'm the customer of that I pay for, rather than me being the product.

I don't even like Dicks cos I don't eat burgers but I do like talking about eating bags of Dicks.

Sometimes I pick something arbitrary to look forward to. Like, make a reservation at a restaurant with great desserts for 3 weeks out or something and look forward to that. Or decide I'm gonna be excited about Amazon announcing new hardware in September because maybe we'll get more kindles with USB C charging.

I'm super hyped for Pikmin 4 coming out on Friday. Nintendo basically can't miss with Pikmin games so I have no doubt it'll be excellent, and I just replayed the first three.

Yeah I did a free trial, tore through the 100 free searches in like a week so I'd need over 300 to get through a month, and I refuse to pay $25/month.

I really liked it while it lasted but I don't $25/month like it.

I can believe it. My apartment is wired dumb as shit, basically the entire place except appliances and the bathrooms is one circuit. Found THAT out when I tried to plug in an iron when the AC was on.

Nah. Grew up with a gas oven, have only had electric since leaving my parents' house, stuff tastes the same. TBH most people prefer electric ovens because they heat more evenly.

I got a smartwatch early in the pandemic because time stopped having any meaning and I started missing meetings all the time because I'd go do something not at my desk and then forget I had a meeting until I was super late. Also I had to set up reminders to do normal shit (eat lunch, walk dog, feed dog) because otherwise I'd forget. I tried doing it with reminders on my phone but then I'd set my phone down five feet away and forget.

Basically I have a smartwatch because my brain is broken and I need an electronic device strapped to me to nag me to behave like a human being. :(

I love wireless headphones because I'm the specific flavor of clumsy that was catching my headphone cable on drawer pulls and doorknobs like 3x a week. I still have good wired headphones I use for serious music listening, but for most day to day stuff I went wireless and they honestly have lasted longer than a lot of my wired earbuds because I am such a shambling disaster.

I know people who worked on Bixby and the one thing they have in common is they all hate Bixby and think it's garbage.

Tiktok because Twitter already made me spend all my time raging out at random annoying assholes until I finally quit it and apparently tiktok is just that but with a more effective algorithm.

Also "ragebait but video" is like the last thing I need.

KFC: Kitten's freakin' cute

I love USB-C in a lot of ways but I also have two different projects that are sitting and waiting for me to solder in the USB C connectors, because JESUS H CHRIST. Those things were not built to be attached by human hands.

Also, like, adult humans don't do so good if they only get to sleep for an hour or two at a time. I don't have kids but I have a puppy and my mental health improved 10x when he stopped waking up every night because he needed to pee. Just going from two 4-hour blocks of sleep to one 8-hour block.

Then he hit puppy adolescence and had a massive sleep regression and I was getting an hour or two of sleep at a time between SCREAMING PUPPY INTERLUDES and promptly lost my fucking mind. I gave up on crating him because I needed the sleep.

"But it's not actually scary!"

Yes, I know, that's why it's a disorder and not just being a reasonable person who's afraid of frightening things!

I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like "Aw yiss I'm gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!"

I've been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don't need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.

People get so hand-wringy about what dogs can and can't eat. Like I've had people tell me not to let my dog eat apple because there's a chemical in apple seeds that's converted to cyanide in the gut.

Like, first of all, I'm not feeding the seeds to my dog, and second of all there's not enough of that stuff in one apple's worth of seeds to hurt you, and third of all you'd have to basically chew the seeds into powder, a thing that dogs famously do not do, to get even that tiny harmless amount.

It's not safe for dogs to eat chocolate, grapes, or alliums. Everything else is kinda fine. (And tbh growing up my family dogs ate all of those things a few times and were fine -- how dangerous it is depends on the concentration of the toxic thing, the size of the dog, etc.)

tho to be fair "change your pillowcase" is probably a decent bit of advice for a lot of teen boys in particular. I knew a lot of guys in college who only washed their sheets once a semester. 🤢 It's the "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" of acne advice.

Oof this is like every bit of job advice my dad has ever given me. He means well but he also hasn't job searched since like 1975.

Well that's a tactical error.

Honestly, this is even more boring than that. This is some rich dude who has made obsessing over his health and his diet his entire life. He's not actually DOING anything other than pretending orthorexia is 1. something he invented and 2. a substitute for a personality.

1. Something you're at least vaguely interested in and don't mind doing.
2. Something you're at least vaguely interested in and don't mind doing.
3. Blockchain, because it's a scam that is rapidly disintegrating.

No one else can tell you what you should pursue. I didn't know what I did or didn't like until I tried a few things and figured out what aspects of them I like and what aspects were not for me. For instance, I don't like frontend programming and I absolutely hate dealing with external clients. I do something more like data engineering, which a lot of people find deadly boring but I find perfectly satisfactory.

The other thing that's been really important to me is decoupling my career from my self-worth. My job is not the most important thing about me. My job is something I do so I can get paid enough to do the things I actually want to do. I don't need to LOVE my job. I need to like it enough to mostly not dislike having to do it 40 hours a week. For me this means I don't find the work boring, I work with nice people, I mostly don't have to do things I HATE (e.g. client presentations), and I'm not doing anything that conflicts with my values (e.g. I wouldn't work on blockchain, or law enforcement projects).

When I was in grad school we got a lot of potato quality third generation photocopy PDFs. I used an iPad but this was also back when the iPad was basically the only viable tablet option.

I'm pretty sure they put them together because that's how you keep everyone from becoming suicidally depressed after watching Grave of the Fireflies D:

Insist on going to Dennys and then throw a fit about the lack of vegan options at Dennys.

I don't know, I just want to tell you about the time that my mom was sprinkling cayenne pepper on all her tulips to try and stop the deer eating them, and my little dog was following along behind her licking the pepper off the flowers.

He was a weird dog. A weird dog that loved spicy food.

This makes me sound like a total wanker but I reread my favorite Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. I find them both very comforting because generally nice people end up happy in the end.

I don't want to switch to something that costs more and that I like less?

A few of the chatbots I worked on, back when I did that, were actually good. Those companies had actually looked at their support traffic and figured out that like 95% of it was people asking the same 20 or so questions that had specific answers. Or at least that you could get to a specific answer with 1-2 followup questions. Like, a huge number of people just want to know how to pay their bill, and the answer is "go to this webpage or call this number".

It's kind of a waste of human time and effort to have a human answering all those questions, so the chatbot dealt with those (and tbh it was 50-50 whether those people even knew they were talking to a robot) and the actual hard shit got a warm transfer to a human agent who got the chat transcript.

Honestly the companies it worked best for, either their online documentation was a total shitshow so the chatbot was your best hope of actually finding anything, or a huge proportion of their customer base were total luddites who just didn't want to use a website and wanted to talk to someone. (We had to make our chatbots support Internet Explorer 11. In 2021. Because for some of our clients IE11 was like 30% of their traffic. I don't even fucking know.)

I used to design and maintain chatbots for a living, for a company that among other things sold bespoke chatbots to corporate clients, and I can tell you that the companies KNOW that customers don't want chatbots for customer service. They don't care. THEY want chatbots for customer service because chatbots are orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring customer service representatives.

A chatbot is gonna cost what it costs them to employ 1-2 customer service reps, but it can handle basically infinite traffic for that price. The GOOD ones handle the simple questions (your "how do I pay my bill"s and your "what are your hours"s) and then forward the difficult ones ("why is my bill fucked up?") to a human agent. But I absolutely worked with some clients (who I will not name because I do not want to get sued) that explicitly wanted to avoid letting customers get access to a human agent by whatever means possible.

Also a side note but basically no one lets people cancel accounts via chatbot. They inevitably want THOSE requests to go to a human rep so they can try to talk them out of it.

I don't know what it was.

I just know that one day I got on the bus and as soon as it pulled away from the stop THE STENCH hit me. Like poop, but worse. Poop and also rotting. I don't know. I never saw the source of the stench. I grabbed the stop-request cord as I leapt to my feet and hauled ass to the exit door and tried to hold my breath until we got to the next stop.

I walked home and it took basically the whole walk to get the residual stink out of my sinuses. I will never know what made that smell and I think I'm glad.

Yeah the second-worst burn I ever got was from steam when I was opening a pressure cooker.

The first-worst was from accidentally touching a soldering iron.

I'm old enough that I graduated high school before social media became a thing. My high school friends and I kept in touch via landline phone and ICQ. ICQ died and people moved so I have no way to find a lot of them again, especially the ones whose names are so generic I can't find them on social media.

I also have some friends I lost contact with because they decided to ghost me after I experienced a major trauma. We were young and I'm sure they didn't know what to say, were going through their own stuff, etc etc, but it was still very hurtful that they just vanished on me and never bothered to reach out even though they knew what had happened. It's been years and I'm not angry at them anymore but I have zero interest in being friends with them.

Part of the reason -- and part of the reason that I don't try harder to find people I was friends with when I was younger -- is that I genuinely feel like I'm a different person now than I was before some of that stuff happened, both because I experienced a really life-altering traumatic thing and because I just got older. The person who was friends with those people doesn't even exist anymore. I'd basically have to start those relationships over from scratch. I'm curious how they're doing and I hope they're well but I don't really want to reconnect.

Normally I'd agree but the prospect of two dudes I find morally repugnant trying to punch each other in the face has a certain appeal, since no matter how it goes at least one person I think deserves to get punched in the face is gonna get punched in the face.