Imagine coming up with policies that actually help people rather than punish them. This is weird and sets such a dangerous precedent.

Behind every decision to replace staff with yet another LLM is endless frustration for customers and clients.

I had an urgent leak to deal with earlier this week, and when I called my rental agency they told me they couldn't do anything until I'd logged it in their online system. I logged it in detail with photos, then it took me to an LLM. When I told the LLM I wasn't interested in further chatter and just needed a plumber sent over ASAP, I got a text saying my request wouldn't be dealt with because I "did not complete the conversation with [their] agent." All the while my light bulbs were dripping... I felt like I was taking crazy pills.

Easily the assholes on motorbikes who go out of their way to be as noisy as possible and cause a whole row of houses to vibrate tangibly.

At my last place I used to wake up 2-3 times a night from this.

I grew up with the Internet of the noughties and saw some screwed up stuff. That should have been on my parents, but I turned out okay anyway.

Canada’s just the latest to join the mass surveillance club.

As someone who works in defence & surveillance as a systems engineer (so by every measure a civilian), I'm still the one on the right... military grade hardware is a fucking nightmare to integrate into larger systems.

I have this friend that I invite over sometimes, but he has this habit of extending that invite to mutual friends without telling me, and so I’ll suddenly have 2 or 3 people rocking up to my place unexpectedly.

It drives me absolutely bananas. It was supposed to be a low-key hang out and now I have to come up with group activities on the spot.

God I love London lol.

I don't have any stance on this comic or this artist (never seen them before), but comment sections are kind of exactly for opinions to be shared.

He is being childish, but if I am completely honest, it sounds like you are a little too. Not in how bothered you are by the situation (understandable), but more how you perceive it.

I totally understand wanting to just do the work and cut the meaningless chatter, but the reality is a job usually has more abstract requirements outside of specific job tasks. One of these is getting your manager to like you. Social cohesion is one of the things workplaces tend to look for.

Not every manager cares about small talk perhaps as much as yours does, but that’s the situation you are in.

My advice would be to decide on one of the following 1) work elsewhere where you can thrive without this obstacle, 2) develop the skill of faking being interested, or 3) do nothing but get frustrated and possibly miss out on promotions or similar.

Wishing you the best, from a socially inept person with autism who relates to that dread, haha.

What in the world are you talking about?

I’m bi and hooking up with myself would be the absolute dream lmao

I’m also very insecure in general, so I don’t think it’s an ego thing - more that any sense of vulnerability would likely disappear.

Just putting it out there, because I have been silenced every time I have tried to talk about my negative experiences with minoxidil:

I was on a 10% topical formulation (so 2x the strength of regular Regaine/Rogaine) and the stuff destroyed my skin on a permanent basis. About a month or 2 in I started noticing lines and wrinkles where I previously had none, my eyes were really puffy, and I started to look like the 'after' photo in those PSAs about doing drugs. I had to come off the stuff and take collagen supplements daily to even slightly reverse that. I'm not back to baseline and likely never will be; that shit aged me by about 8 years in the span of 6 months. It was honestly much worse than hair loss itself.

Before I came off it, when I told the ""clinic"" that prescribed me what I was experiencing, they said it was placebo. Meanwhile, other hair loss sufferers online told me that I was making it up because I was jealous of other men's gains (???)

I am by no means saying this will necessarily happen if you take minox, but it wasn't even a reported side effect on the leaflet (where it lists common/uncommon/rare/very rare side effects), and I was genuinely trying to get it on there so people could be aware that this is a risk.

I would be super cautious of oral administration. When I was on the topical, it was only in contact with my scalp and any part of my body that would touch my pillow while sleeping I guess. Can't imagine what it would have done going through the digestive system instead.

Sincerely, fuck the hair restoration industry and the way it preys on desperate people.

Sorry that this isn't necessarily super on-topic (or uplifting), but seeing/hearing about minoxidil brings up a really bad experience.

Am Brit, have 3 credit cards, am I missing something?

I only know one adult who doesn’t have any.

Edit: I think you might be confusing us with France, where the vast majority pay with debit cards.

I think you’re imagining the difference between them from a technological point of view to be much bigger than it actually is.

I have debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard for both. Using them feels identical; one draws from your bank account balance and the other goes towards an invoice sent to you at the end of the month.

When you pay with them, the vendors themselves don’t see any private information about you, other than the card number and the way your name is written on the card. Some of my cards only have my first initial and my last name.

They can, however, track that card number across multiple purchases or with partners to build a profile.

Visa and Mastercard themselves can see a lot more, but that’s a given if you use any kind of banking services anyway.

In terms of where they’re accepted, I’ve used them all over the world and the only time it mattered which type I use, is this one flight where Ryanair was not accepting debit when I was trying to buy water… Somehow you have to borrow money to eat/drink on board, which is just silly.

I’m done living in this shithole.

Not that I ever would, but if I went into the women’s they’d (rightly) tell me to fuck off or report me to staff.

I talk to myself when I am thinking, especially if what I am thinking about relates to emotional processing. I have never recorded myself doing this, but I don’t think I vocalise complete sentences. While I’m processing, I repeat a contextually relevant word or phrase over and over again, even if I think I’ve moved past it in my head.

I find myself doing this in public sometimes (whoops), but with silent mouth movements. Earphones help me avoid looking dodgy or like I’m hallucinating.

I need my AC unit upstairs to sleep, but I need it downstairs so that I'm not peeling myself off of my chair every 5 minutes while working. The struggle is real.

Genuinely considering buying a second, despite barely having the space.

Good Lord, this is the UK’s Rwanda scandal all over again.

Serious question: can anyone vouch for a search engine today that prioritises… searching? and does it well?

I used DuckDuckGo for a couple of years, but I’d found the result set frequently lacking compared to Google. I’m currently on Brave search (+ Brave Browser), and it’s good for text, but it does shove an LLM response at the top and is pretty bad for image results.

What is the purpose of counting channels? A handful of servers I’m in have one.