Spyke

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If I stop drinking does that decrease risk of cancer?

Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’re worried about getting cancer from 3-4 drinks per year, it sounds like you might be dealing with a fair bit of anxiety.

Stress caused by anxiety is bad for your health and a possible cancer risk, and almost certainly worse for you than 3-4 drinks a year. I don’t want you to now be anxious about your anxiety, but this might be a good thing to focus on to improve your general quality of life (and possibly reduce your cancer risk in the process).

You could start by talking to a doctor or other medical professional about it, or try finding a therapist in your area. The therapist search on https://www.psychologytoday.com/ is a good place to look, or try an online service like Better Help.

[edit: corrected overstatement about stress being a major cancer risk]

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Vision Pro Teardown—Why Those Fake Eyes Look So Weird

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I won’t argue about whether this is dystopian, but the practical reason for the face projection is that they wanted to make this not just something you wear sitting alone in your basement, like most other VR headsets. They wanted it to be usable around other people, at a workplace, with family, etc.

Interacting with someone wearing a full face blind is just weird, so they thought that making the eyes visible would help make this a bit more socially usable.

I’m not sure that’s really going to work out — seems at least as awkward as Google’s failed Glass project — but Apple’s design decision has some merit.

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Zelenskiy Releases Personal Income in Transparency Push

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His actual name is written in Cyrillic so the latinized versions are all just ways of trying to write a bunch of latin letters that roughly correspond to how his name is pronounced. That’s going to be quite different across languages that use the latin alphabet, even across different accents in the same language.

If you were to write a word like 🚽 the way it actually sounds, would it be toy-let (canadian), tuy-leht, (if you’re from parts of britain) tay-let (if you’re australian), tee-let (new zealand)….?

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Record profits are unpaid wages

I’m a socialist, generally vote for socialist or at least left-leaning candidates, support socialist policies and agree with the premise that record profits are basically unpaid wages.

But, seeing the hammer and sickle pop up in my Lemmy feed makes me really uncomfortable. I grew up under communism, and a good chunk of my family was killed and oppressed by people in uniforms with that symbol. To me it represents all that can go horribly wrong when socialism is stripped of empathy and compassion and married with violence and intolerance.

For me, it’s a bit like seeing a swastika. Really hard to get behind it, even though I know the symbol predates the NSDAP.

Is there really no better alternative for symbolising modern socialism?

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A decade after a disastrous launch, is Apple Maps finally good?

The other day I used Apple Maps in my car for the first time in a few years. I gotta say something about it felt nice.

Maybe it’s the aesthetic? The names of towns and geographic features are in big letters and flow across the map nicely — the name of the peninsula I was driving across was stretched along the length of the peninsula itself — and it felt a bit like I was traversing an old timey map, maybe like in an old Indiana Jones movie.

If I need to find some obscure business, I’ll still use Google Maps, and if I’m on a well known commute I’ll still use Waze, but for just general ambient map display, I think Apple Maps might be it now.

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Biden sanctions Israeli settlers over West Bank violence

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This is due to Biden needing to go to Michigan, with its huge arabic population. His campaign people wanted to avoid loud and awkward protests from members of his own party, so they threw a tiny bone that they knew would make a big headline splash.

I hate to be this cynical, but listening to his campaign managers making the rounds on the political insider podcasts… they are overwhelmingly “professional” and entirely inauthentic.

Even if biden himself is earnest, this campaign is shaping up to have all the stage managed authenticity of Hillary’s 2016 run.

I’m worried.

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This man had a 'poor' credit rating because of a glitch at Equifax. Now, he's warning others | CBC News

There have been a number of attempts in Canada to sue credit agencies for libel. None have succeeded so far, largely because the cases have been a bit murky.

This one seems really clear cut though. I really wish this person would try to sue for libel. A successful precedent could end up drastically changing the way credit scores work in Canada. The credit agencies might suddenly find themselves having to be accountable for their sketchy practices. Imagine that!

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Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It

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A while back, I (with a few others) built and sold an innovative tech company to a large “enterprise”. What you’re describing is exactly why they bought us and how things played out post acquisition. I’ve since left, but the thing we built is now in shambles, buried and suffocated by bureaucracy and institutional ineptitude. The parent company has learned nothing, continues to keep buying smaller tech companies, and can’t seem to figure out why things always turn to shit.