It’s actually amazing how quickly it killed my usage of the site. I deleted my account years ago but still lurked every now and then. Now I literally can’t go back, I won’t download the app and the new site layout is pretty much unusable for me.

I wish I could somehow convey to whoever is collecting data on me that this is a thing I like.

Like there’s all these entities trying to collect data on me to figure out how to sell me stuff and I want them to know the fact that Aldi lets cashiers sit down positively influences my decision to shop there. If other grocery stores adopted this I would prefer them over stores that do not.

Late 2000s but close!

I stuck it out with old.reddit for awhile. I deleted my account because too I would get halfway through writing a reply to things and say “nah not worth it”.

But without old reddit I won’t even bother lurking.

Reddit became sort of unusable. The community has changed a lot and I felt like I didn’t really know the site anymore.

I originally wasn’t going to find a replacement and spent a few years without one, but I found myself lurking Lemmy more and more so I made an account. Not sure if it will stick though.

Figuring out what to do when a friend needs money.

If you asked me when I was younger I think I would have either said I won’t loan friends money at all in order to preserve the friendship, or maybe something more altruistic like that I wouldn’t loan someone money, just give it to them. I had an idealistic view of what my adult friendships would look like where they either don’t end up in bad situations, or if they do it’s because they make bad choices and the consequences are their own.

But as an adult I have had friends who needed money I can’t afford to just give away, but if I don’t help them then they may lose their home. Often the amount they’ve asked for isn’t the end of it, after all if I cover one month of someone’s rent that doesn’t necessarily mean their circumstances have improved over the course of a month.

I’ve had to set boundaries, accept losses and say no to people I care about who need my help much more than I ever thought I would.

She was my friend’s cousin, we met my freshman year in high school and just hit it off right away.

Dated until junior year and broke up, which in high school felt like an eternity.

It was an immature sort of love between two very young people who were both years away from even beginning to figure out who they really were. We grew in completely different directions and our inexperience made us both pretty bad partners at times. But it was still love nonetheless, and the first time I had experienced it.

Ayy you got the reference!

I started because I wanted to grow Thai holy basil which I was struggling to find in stores, extended to different varieties of kind of pricey hot peppers, then a few flowers to keep it looking nice. I’ve had a few bad seasons over the years that made me almost quit but at this point it would feel weird to not have a garden to take care of.

The maintenance can occasionally be a pain but it’s sometimes nice to have a good reason to get up early. It only becomes too much work if I get greedy and take on too many plants at once. I try to keep it to a small and manageable amount, and choose plants that don’t require a lot of care.

Going for a walk is an essential activity for me to reset. Riding my bike has a similar effect. I’ve started leaving my phone at home.

Reading as well. Something light-hearted if I’m seeking joy.

I have a small garden on my balcony. It’s not successful right now but it’s enjoyable to watch something green grow.

So far:

Work, during which I’m kind of procrastinating.

Tonight my wife will be at the gym so I might finish a garden project.

Then dinner and tidying up.

Followed by video games and then bed.

I’d reckon my day will be about 30% what I want to do which is just slightly above my usual average.

Rimworld

Stellaris

FTL: Faster Than Light

Crusader Kings 3

XCOM: Enemy Within

Honorable mentions:

No Man’s Sky, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas.

I work in IT infrastructure (not AWS but something like it) and the reality is that there are a few blocks like AWS and Cloudflare out there. That doesn’t really make things less concerning considering if they were actually pulled it would cause a lot of problems.

So to be clear, if something managed to completely disable or “control” AWS it would be disastrous, and AWS is under attack from multiple vectors including AI Agents, including their own INTERNAL AI Agents. In December 2025 Amazon’s internal coding AI agent Kiro decided the most efficient course of action to resolve a minor bug in AWS Cost Explorer was to completely rebuild the production environment, causing a 13 hour outage for Cost Explorer while engineers manually rebuilt the environment.

The thing is, in the picture you posted AWS is this fragile single block holding everything up, when in it might be more useful to think of it conceptually as say, a major highway. Would it be a disaster if terrorists were able to suddenly destroy/control all of I-75? Yes. Is that feasible? No. Kiro caused a really bad traffic jam in one segment of one highway, it didn’t destroy the whole thing.

A highway can experience traffic incidents and recover. Major jams could be intentionally caused by bad actors or poor maintenance, and highways have to be altered, upgraded and maintained to limit the situations that can completely shut down segments of it.

But the concern is more that key segments will be impacted, not the entire thing.

That’s more of what people in my field are concerned with, and there’s efforts to try to lock those key segments down and account for potential threats. How well that’s being done is a different story.

It is an essential aspect of being Linux users that we claim our preferred distro is the absolute best and others are garbage not worth using. It’s in the terms I’m pretty sure.

I do it periodically. My phone contacts are restricted to friends I speak to frequently, family, certain work contacts and a limit of 3 people I don’t really talk to anymore but am leaving the door open for.

Right now allergies, I’m under-caffeineinated for how little I slept because I had to work last night, and I have unnecessary emails in my inbox.

More generally I feel the time I have to dedicate to the things I would like to do and the time I have to dedicate to work and tasks have reached unsustainable levels.

If I bought a lot of stuff or I bought something age restricted like alcohol. The person who watches the self checkouts is always really busy so if I need to wait for them to come look at my ID I’m going to be there a minute.

My cat does this when I’m drinking tea and his response is some mix of disgust and concern.

Not super thin crust but not thick either. Heavy on the cheese, topped with mushrooms, anchovies and basil.

For what it’s worth when I went to Japan I did think “man, people who are really into anime would love this”. Especially Tokyo and Kyoto.

There was anime stuff everywhere in Tokyo and I saw some really interesting temples and stuff in Kyoto.

Weak to slop and they don’t seem to have an internal “okay that’s enough I should put my phone down” voice.

Even young people I know who are on their phones a lot have some concept that it’s time to look up and forward, but endless content seems irresistible to the brains of boomers.