I will add that this study looked at biological markers of inflammation and so on with cells exposed to vape vapor. If you are looking at it and saying “looks like there is activity, so maybe there is harm, more likely than not” but not saying anything about how much harm then it is not very useful for making choices. Sure, it is not without some risk, but a quantified risk assessment would say that based on the current best evidence it is likely not anywhere near as bad as smoking and it is easier to taper nicotine out if you want to do that.

From a public health/harm reduction perspective vapes may be a useful tool if used correctly, or a terrible additional harm with increased addictiveness and known dangerous chemicals, such as the popcorn lung issues. We need rational science and appropriate regulation, not panic and bizarre policies.

Broadly speaking it seems mostly to be the point of focus. In Libertarianism it is all about the individual, having freedoms from others, and being an island.

In Anarchism it is about specific external coercive forces. Those forces impact individuals, groups, communities, and so on.

So a Libertarian may think about food security from a perspective of deregulating supply so that you can choose to buy unsafe food because you think it is a good idea. An Anarchist may instead think about mutual aid, local cooperative production, and preventing external power structures like corporations or governments restricting sharing of resources.

It serves more than one purpose for me, so the calculation is a little different. My freezer has about $1200 of meat in it. If the temperature in there gets up over freezing the meat will start thawing and become damaged or spoiled. Saving that meat from being spoiled would save me spending that $1200 all over again.

The solar panel means that even if the whole power system is out for multiple days I should be able to keep my freezer below zero and keep my meat frozen. Last year we had snow, for the first time here since the early 90s, and it took down power lines on the other side of town. People there were without power for as much as 4 days, which obviously would be enough to heat my meat back up and ruin it, so it isn’t a ridiculous possibility.

Also, I intend to make something larger over time on a trailer which I can move from house to house as I move, being a renter. I want independent power and learning a little with this system is a good stepping stone to building out my own system with much more custom parts, especially including a larger battery system, inverter, and more panels. I plan to run as much as possible from the DC to skip inverter losses, so using cheap modules to pull from the 24-48V system I build to do USB C ports with 100W+ output gives a lot of options, along with using smaller dedicated inverters for required loads like a kettle.

The coolest thing is the fully DC power supplies for a PC. You can run directly from a battery and solar system with just 12V, 5V, 3.3V, and a few little bits and bobs. Very fun stuff.

I think you’ll find different answers based on country because of circumcision. If you have a foreskin it can be pretty variable how much urine will be held by surface tension and hard to remove with a quick shake. You will also find differences based on the local culture, for example in Germany men usually sit to pee while that is rare in places like the USA.

The battery degradation is overblown with lithium iron phosphate batteries, which is what is in the Bluetti Elite 30. If you aren’t putting it through deep discharge (greater than 80%) or high temperatures (above 30°C) it should still work well for a long time. The higher your draw on it, pushing up to that 600W limit, the worse the impact is too.

That said, it can work very well as a UPS for a freezer like what I have mine for, and adding a solar panel extends the usefulness of it a lot. I have a 200W panel which gives around 130-170W at any given time through the day, leading to a full charge in theory in about 2 hours. My freezer pulls around 60-80W with transient spikes to 700W when starting the compressor, but the power station can boost to cover that need for a short time. Over a day I use about 550Wh per day, so about 4 hours of sun per day in theory. It should be covered by the panel I have but the capacity is a little low so I can’t get through the night at this point, it has to switch over to AC after a while. Still, during the hottest hours where I need the most power I am getting solar to do it, so that’s handy.

Anyway, yes, they are useful, another more powerful system is definitely in the cards for me, but they are a great first step and handy as a backup for bad weather.

Super Mario Sunshine was absolutely awesome fun, but Pikmin is the winner for me. I just love how cute they are and the constant marching sounds they make, absolutely adorable. I think Super Smash Bros Melee was the best multiplayer fun on the GameCube and really did lead to some screaming among my peers.

Yep, definitely a good time to take plan B. Also, the responsibility to use protection is on both partners. Being as he was sober he was in a better position to manage this and made an active choice not to. You bear the burden of what happens and dealing with it, but he gets to have fun and run away. Very uncool.

I would consider how well you could really consent and if you want people who don’t care about that to be involved in your life. You, along with everyone else, deserve someone who will not take advantage of the situation to get off at your expense. Also, he should really foot at least half the bill for the plan B, without him it would not be needed and if it becomes a larger and more expensive problem it would be something he was responsible for there too. Any self respecting person should pay for their share.

I’ve seen a fair few people go through a similar problem, having trouble with food and hating that fact. Unfortunately it is a fact that you are having that issue now and will in all likelihood have that issue in the future. That said, the suffering here is coming not from the “picky eating” itself, it is the judgement and pressure which is causing most of the suffering.

Obviously it sucks for you to be unable to grab some random food from any random food stall or restaurant, not being able to eat at a food court can be annoying and not having a safe food available can lead to hungry times. That is all shitty and it sucks a lot. The problem here is that if you just had that and everyone accepted it then you would have a fairly normal experience of food with a small tweak of sometimes not being able to have something or sometimes going hungry until you can get home.

Anyone who has Celiac’s disease is in the same boat, but their experience is really different. Why? Because their needs are recognised as a medical need, therefore acceptable. Other people recognise that if they eat gluten they will have medical issues including very serious and obvious physical problems. In other words, people can’t deny their problems are real.

Neurotypicals often deny the experiences of people that they cannot relate to. They do this with autism, they do this with ADHD, they do this with PTSD, they do this with poverty. If they haven’t experienced it then it isn’t real, but once they experience it they are happy to shout from the rooftops that it is real and horrible and everyone should be kind about it.

You have a real, measurable, replicable difficulty around food. It isn’t just you. It is you, me, my partner, several of my clients, tonnes of the people in this community, and so many people around the world besides. It is normal to find that kind of sensory issue difficult to manage, but you have also been taught that it either isn’t real or you are choosing it in some way. It is real, you wouldn’t choose it if you could, and you have to live with it.

I would recommend learning about what works for you and then defending that set of strategies vigorously. If you need to have a known safe bag of jerky or a protein bar in your bag then you need that. If you need to abstain from food at an event and eat before or after, do it. You are the one who has to live your life, not them, so you should get to decide how to do it.

Honestly, being a woodworker for yourself is fantastic fun. I would recommend learning about it on your own and not limiting yourself to woodworking only as a career. If you love it you can do it on your own terms and in your own time. If you make things people want you can sell them. If you make things you like you can keep them. The skills you develop are yours and you can benefit from improving them. Having someone else employ you means they take your labour and turn it into profit for them, so they end up reducing your autonomy and ability to explore while also extracting money from you.

Lol, clear goals can be helpful for sticking to a plan.

Wow, that is the most see what sticks approach I’ve seen for a while. Definitely a good time to try the steroids, how effective has it been? When you say deaf was it like everything was underwater, like a blocked ear, like low volume? Or something else entirely? My family has a history of hearing loss but it was the mundane gradual loss for the most part.

Damn, what kind of inner ear issue? Is it impacting your balance? Hearing?

True, though I heard a saying and it stuck with me. I prefer toes to potatoes, meaning I would rather not eat potatoes than lose my toes to diabetes.

I used to work in IT, mostly around web hosting as a systems admin. It was all wonderfully fun and interesting technology turned to the most awfully mundane and soulless profit motive.

Now I work in disability support. I work with kids who are autistic to help develop skills and engage with the world. I also help their families and at home carers to get difficult things done which means every day is different. One day I am helping get kids ready for school, another I am replacing a door, another I help someone fix their TV and learn the new menus, another I help someone shower. It varies a lot but the part I like best is being strong for the kids.

They love vestibular stimulation and really need it sometimes so I get to pick them up, flip them over, spin them around, and use an excess of strength to do it safely and without hurting them. The kids literally shout my name when i arrive and run out to see me, so I’m clearly not doing a bad job, and kids a super honest so I would definitely know if I was.

I also help people with dealing with systems like our social security system and things like licenses and voting. For some of my clients they have real trouble navigating systems like that and because I am also autistic/ADHD I can understand their perspective viscerally and actually accept and support them where they are. I personally hate those systems, but I have worked with them enough to understand then now and can help others with them.

So from a medical perspective the relief of inflammation can be extremely liberating and can feel godlike indeed. Getting that by suppressing your normal immune function is a very short term and unsustainable option, but there are a few other options that can have similar if less intense experiences.

Reducing inflammation by removing something you are allergic to can have a similar relieving impact, though it can take weeks to even months for the immune cascade to settle and it may remain overactive for even longer if it is a long term exposure.

Removing a long term stressor like changing job, fixing your ergonomics, changing your shoes, or moving more can have a similar impact.

Changing your diet to remove highly inflammatory foods and replace them with less inflammatory foods can also work well, though finding out what is or is not inflammatory for you can be a bit of an experimental process, some people respond to different things with an inflammatory response for reasons I don’t understand.

I found that getting rid of dairy, dropping carbs to very low, cleaning out mould, getting a much more physical job, and getting rid of chairs in general all helped me a lot with my long term inflammation issues. My nasal issues cleared, my back stopped hurting at all, my pants fit better rather than being tight on the thighs, my headaches went away, and generally life improved.

I would recommend a pattern of testing for you. When you reach for your phone to do something figure out how you would do that on your postmarketOS device. For example, if you go to your phone to check the weather take that opportunity to get weather working on your postmarketOS device. Do that over the next few days and you will find something that is harder and needs some help to get going. That’s a good thing to bring back to here. For example, can you access your bank from your postmarketOS device? What about maps?

The cool thing is if you switch those things that work over to the postmarketOS device as your default you will start picking it up first and trying to do the thing without really considering it, only to go back to your other device when it fails.

I would love to hear your results after you have tried this for a few days or a week. What works, what doesn’t, and what took the most work to get sorted. Those are all useful things for other people considering using it, and useful for developers too.

Nobody is actually shitty here but some things seem like they are not going to work long term. It is reasonable to have a need for some quiet time and to unwind from work. It is reasonable to need connection and validation of the relationship. It is reasonable to be upset.

He is not being reasonable about how he interacts with you. He is taking your lack of ability to be social at the level he needs as a rejection of him and in turn rejecting you. This is a lashing out response and it is not appropriate or effective. It will either result in the dissolution of the relationship or it will result in longer term toxic behaviours which will then result in the relationship falling apart.

You need to work a little less. That is basically the conclusion you have come to above and that may take time to enact, but it needs to happen. Neither of you will be happy until then. So your action should probably be to reduce just as you have said.

On your partner’s end he needs to build his own supports to take some of the load off you. He has a lot of free time that he could use going to a rock climbing class or something similar. That would give him the social interaction he cannot get from you at the moment. He also needs to work on how he talks to you about needs and his responses. He can’t put his self worth entirely in your hands. It is unsafe for his wellbeing and horribly damaging to your relationship. He needs to internally validate his worth and that is a skill, not a trait, he can learn that.

Some of what you describe above sounds like he doesn’t really understand ASD/ADHD very well and doesn’t get how burnout works. Maybe he could spend some time learning about how to be safe and healthy for himself in a relationship with someone on the spectrum? It is hard to know how he would react to hearing this, but he needs to recognise that a relationship with you is not the same as a relationship with a neurotypical and he needs to take care of himself to be safe in that relationship. It is not worse, but it is different. If he doesn’t learn how to manage his needs then they will continue to be unfulfilled and he will have a bad time.

And honestly, the dog situation is just devastating. If my partner lost their companion animal I would expect up to 6 months of very low function. For you to be working in this condition may suggest you are not able to grieve properly and are working to be away from demands, but it could also be it just doesn’t affect you in the same way it would affect my partner, we are all different. Take care of yourself and grieve as you need to, maybe spend some time talking to him about it if you feel safe doing so.

Oh, and consider planning out movie night or similar things, make it explicit what you need and book it in. Those expectations in advance can help.

So yeah, NTA, but also, nobody is fully shitty here, his behaviour seems less ideal, both of you can do things to make life better, I think this is salvageable.

One thing that gets me about AI chat agents is the idea of attack surface. If you have a clearly defined protocol you can curtail most of the possible attacks by narrowing things, only accepting well formed requests, and validating both on the user end and then on the server end before processing anything. An LLM is inherently wide in attack surface given the way it is structured. It can take a prompt which can be any set of characters connected together into tokens. These tokens can’t easily be filtered for intent or goal and yet they can get the LLM to drop other rules or restrictions because they are just other prompts.

A simple coded padlock is not very secure, but a door with no walls is less secure.

There are a few options for age verification, but the one I like best is at the ISP/device level. You make the account at the ISP level have a flag for being a kid friendly service. You could also have the government establish simple tools for parents to install on their kids devices which would limit other apps and services, for example by blocking porn or violent age inappropriate content. You could even have it tie in with the age advice for film classification, though the current classification guidelines are pretty horrible. All of that could be handled by a very small government team and could be deliverable in 6 months.

These are active steps a parent can take to limit their child’s exposure to the internet and do not come with added cost to the parent. They would be just as available for someone who is poor as for someone who is rich. It would be possible to protect kids from many of the more dangerous aspects of the internet while also leaving unmanaged devices free and clear, preserving the good things about the open internet.

Yes, they are fantastic. They do have a little bit of a Windows 95 aesthetic but I kind of like that.