I don’t mind algorithm feeds as long as it’s not the default view and as long as it’s not mingled with the normal feed. Reddit is an example of the latter case. They mix “promoted” content as well as “you visited a subreddit once so we think you’ll like this post” content along with posts from subreddits you subscribe to. I find that annoying.

So I wouldn’t mind if Lemmy had an algorithm to recommend posts as long as it was in a “recommended posts” section. Then people who want it could click over to it and people who don’t like that could just ignore it.

I think normal died around this time in 2019 for me.

To give some context, in Judaism Rosh Hashanah (which coincidentally just ended) is the new year. There’s a superstition that whatever you do on Rosh Hashanah will be a reflection of the upcoming year. For example, if you nap you’ll have a lazy year.

Anyway, that year, my younger son and I were at Temple for services. We noticed someone sitting behind us who seemed odd, but didn’t think much of it. At some point, he left so we focused on the service.

Midway through the service, my rabbi suddenly shouted NO with the same force as Gandalf addressing the Balrog. Then I saw why. The “odd guy” was running down aisle shouting happy new year to everyone. He was wearing a t-shirt. And ONLY a t-shirt.

He reached the front and tried to get up the stairs to where the rabbi, cantor, and torahs were. Only, my rabbi clotheslined him back down the stairs. The ushers rushed in and dragged him off. My son was smart and looked away. I wasn’t as smart and got “visual confirmation” that he wasn’t wearing anything below the waist. It was only for a moment but it burned into my brain.

So remember how I said “how Rosh Hashanah goes, your year goes?” I joked with my wife later that hopefully this wouldn’t mean we were going to have a crazy year.

Then 2020 hit.

Only I think this got stuck somehow and now EVERY year is crazy.

And the worst part of those days is when you feel like it’s wrong of you to complain. After all, you just had a series of minor bad incidents happen to you. None of them are THAT bad.

Meanwhile, one of your friends has multiple cancers, your wife’s mother has serious medical issues, your son’s allergies are so out of control that he can hardly breathe… And you’re going to complain that you had a few minor things happen?

Um… Hypothetically speaking…

Not my manger (thankfully), but I worked near people whose manger did this. I’d be working when suddenly I’d hear the guy yelling and screaming at some employee who did something wrong. Even if the guy did something incorrect, the proper managerial response is never screaming at them in a public location.

The manger is still working for my company, but I’m not near his employees anymore. I’m not sure if age mellowed him out or if he still screams at his employees.

I’m in IT also and agree. On the other hand, you don’t want a manager who manages too much. I had a manager who would try to micromanage every aspect of a project. He would constantly stop by with suggestions about how to improve the projects I was working on. It would have been fine if he had good insights, but his ideas never worked out.

He would also come to me and declare that my top priority is now some weird project that he thought up which had no buy in from anyone else. (These would quickly die after launch or fizzle out when he got another great idea.)

Farscape is always my answer to these questions. I enjoyed Peacekeeper Wars, but it definitely felt rushed. Had it been a full season, it would have been frelling amazing.

Same here in America. People are going about their days and don’t want random people sticking their noses into other people’s business.

Maybe if you’re sitting next to someone for awhile you might strike up a conversation. Maybe. (“Boy, they’re taking a long time today. Must be short staffed!”) But I don’t recall this ever happening with me and I’ve been to my fair share of doctor’s offices over the years.

I gave up watching a show (Smallville) because it was too much of a pain to find a tape to use in the VCR, make sure there was enough room to record my show without recording over something else, finding which tape had which episode, and watching the episodes while still leaving the tapes at the start of my wife’s recorded program.

Once the era of DVRs and then streaming hit, watching shows became SO much more convenient.

He was going to type filament, but it burnt out too quickly.

I was visiting my parents one year and found some old cassette tapes. I showed them to my kids and played a song. My youngest liked the song and wanted to hear it again. He was surprised when I couldn’t just hit “repeat.” Instead, I needed to rewind, rewind, rewind. Not far enough. Rewind, rewind. Too far. Fast Forward. Too far. Rewind. Too far but good enough.

When COVID hit and I was going to work from home, I was convinced that I’d hate it. I assured myself that it was okay because COVID would only last a few weeks and then the world would get back to normal. (Oh how naive I was!)

Once I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. My commutes weren’t that bad before, but now it’s just “walk up the stairs.” I don’t need to worry about traffic or parking spaces at all. I also don’t need to worry about people stopping by to chat when I’m in the zone. Yes, people can message me on Teams, but it’s easy to switch over and postpone dealing with them if it’s not important.

Even meetings are nicer. Most of mine aren’t on camera so I can get up and walk around my work area during my meetings.

I’m even healthier working from home. Previously, I’d bring a bunch of food to work to make sure I’d have enough and then snack all day. Now, I don’t bother going back downstairs except for lunch and for that I can take time to make a healthy lunch (salad or something).

My current job is now permanently work from home (my “home base” was moved and is now a 10 hour drive away so I’m DEFINITELY not commuting in). I’m not going back if I can help it. (If I were to ever leave this job, I’d make working from home a priority.)

My “favorite” (in hindsight only) popup experience: I was new to my job and was taking a short break from work to look something up on Barnes and Noble’s website. Except, I typed BarnesNNoble dot com instead of BarnesAndNoble. I was presented with the image of a woman sans clothing and it certainly wasn’t a book she was enjoying!

Obviously, I’m at work (and right down the hall from my boss). I do NOT want to be viewing this stuff now so I close the window. Except up pops another window with another woman definitely not reading. Close. Another one. Close. Another one. Close. Another one.

I actually started sweating because I was sure that my boss would walk in any moment and ask just WHAT I was looking at during work hours.

Finally, I managed to hit close before the pop-up script was able to run. We take pop-up blockers for granted today, but those times between the invention of the pop-up and the pop-up blocker were treacherous times to be online!

I remember getting my first computer: A 286 with a whole MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. I remember thinking that there is no way that I’d ever fill up that 40 MEGA-bytes!

Now, I’m typing this out on a phone with specs that would have shattered my brain at the time - and my phone isn’t even top of the line. “Wait, your phone has 128GB of storage? Like 3,000 of my 286 computers?!!!”

I still remember passing by “the pit.” That was the section where the high school kids were allowed to smoke. It was outdoors, but they always left the doors open. I needed to pass by to get to class and hated the stench. So I’d hold my breath. But the crowds were always slow so it was a game of “will I be forced to breathe the stench, will I get by in time, or will I pass out?”

Yeah. If someone could give me $10 million, but I had to relive my 4 years of high school, I wouldn’t take the money.

I remember this vivedly and I’m straight.

In high school, I was very awkward socially (decades later I could find out that it’s autism, but at that point it was just called “he’s shy and awkward”). I had a group of bullies who would follow me around taunting me.

Usually, they’d leave me alone if they were alone with me, but there was one exception. One of my bullies loved pretending to come onto me in the locker room. As if being in your underpants changing in front of other guys wasn’t embarrassing enough as a teen, this guy would pretend that he was gay (he definitely wasn’t) and that he was attracted to me.

I remember feeling ashamed of being identified by someone as possibly being gay. (A feeling that present day me realizes wasn’t right, but I was a teenager and being gay wasn’t widely accepted then.) I wanted desperately to prove that I was straight, but had no way of doing that. (See above about being extremely awkward socially - I didn’t have my first date until about a decade later.)

I’m going to assume the “magical doubling” is totally legal and tax free. Meaning, the bank won’t come after me for the accidental deposit in a few days and whatever process added to my account also sent money to the IRS in my name to pay the inevitable tax bill. Obviously, my answer would be different if this weren’t the case.

It would make a small improvement in my life, but not much. I’d lock the extra money away in savings and likely wouldn’t touch it, but it would provide peace of mind in case things went south financially.

If it was the early 1950’s, then: Black people and white people can use the same facilities. There aren’t “black bathrooms” and “white bathrooms.” There aren’t separate water fountains depending on the color of your skin.

Segregation was still around a mere 70 years ago.

It was super easy, barely an inconvenience!

I left Reddit and jumped here. I admit that I look into Reddit every so often - mainly for a local subreddit - but 99.9% of my Reddit usage is now Lemmy usage.

For my Twitter->Mastodon jump, it’s not fair to compare. I had already basically abandoned my Twitter account before I ever heard of Mastodon. So it wasn’t really “jumping from Twitter to Mastodon” as much as it was “going from nothing to Mastodon.” That signup was easy as well, though.

I’ll admit that the “pick your server” step can be a little daunting. It feels like you’re choosing the most important bit right at the start and can overwhelm people, but it’s easy to switch later if you want. Smoothing that process out somehow would be my only recommendation.

I like buying LEGO minifigures and then designing/building biomes for them to inhabit. I use BrickLink Studio to design the builds and then upload my parts list to BrickLink to get used bricks to build them. I also post them on Rebrickable for free, but I’ve fallen behind and need to post more on there.

Here are a few that I’ve built.