I’m using Deezer, because its Duo plan’s T&C doesn’t require couples to live in the same household. (Fuck Spotify because of their shitty plan.)

Unfortunately Deezer’s Android app sucks, because it never reaches the server. Sometimes songs are just restarting or stopping, and you have to press the “add to favorites” button hundreds of times to finally successfully add it to your list. It’s horrible. But in the browser it’s smooth, there’s no problem with it. I even find songs I would never expect to find there (much more than on Spotify). Also you can create playlists together with others, even if others are using a different streaming provider.

If your only choice is between YouTube and Spotify, I’d go for Spotify because fuck Google, and also Spotify app is smooth, and has the ability to control your music from your phone even when the music is playing on another device. (This is possible to do with 3rd party apps with any music player, but Spotify has it built in.)

They say, nowadays nearly any laptop you could get is garbage due to insufficient cooling. Maybe they look promising at first, but you cannot use them for longer than 2-3 years, because the components simply get cooked inside. The only ones worthy of spending money on are the business-grade laptops, but they’re crazy expensive (for a good reason). Therefore you should probably look for a used one, maybe from a company dealing with refurbished devices. Sometimes it’s possible to get one that had been used for like 6 months, and you still have a number of years of warranty on it.

My personal favorite is the ThinkPad T, P or X series. Those are quality products, and there are official video guides, spare parts for self repair. I’ve also read about bad experiences about a T580 (I think) here, on lemmy, but the circumstances were unclear to me. They wrote about a bending motherboard issue, when you pick up the laptop holding only at the corner.

Framework laptops are also recommended a lot, but I’ve never gotten my hands on one, I don’t know their build quality.

Do you remember 9gag? Some of you certainly do. Anyway, during those times they created another app called 9chat, later renamed it to Cookie, and later renamed it back to 9chat again.

Well, we met there, on 9chat/Cookie.

There weren’t an insanely huge amount of people there, and there was a section for newcomers to upload their selfie and/or introduce themselves. And I found this gorgeous girl there, started to text her, and to my surprise, she actually replied and didn’t even ghost me.

We had a nice conversation there, and we continued on WhatsApp, and three months later we met in real life too. This was 7 years ago, and sadly we’re still in LDR, but the most important thing is, we have each other.

Everyone should invest that time.

You can do just that. Before you begin the quiz, there’s a link to skip the quiz and directly enter your preferences.

I’m not from the US, so I don’t know how accurate this is, and I also don’t know if this thing has ever been updated (I found it a long time ago), but there’s this tool that might help with deciding: https://www.whereshouldilive.co/

I’m using Qwant. Works better for me than DuckDuckGo.

Oh there’s a lot.

• When I was a kid, parents and teachers used to teach, if you have sore muscles a day after an extensive workout, you need to work out even more in order to reduce the soreness. In fact, however, you need to rest those muscles.
• I thought, pepperoni was pepper. (Like bell pepper, just smaller; similar to chilli). Then my girlfriend enlightened me after a confusing conversation, that pepperoni was a kind of salami. And then recently, at a company event before ordering pizza and after a very confusing discussion of what toppings we order, it turned out pepperoni was actually a kind of a salami, but not everyone agreed. So by now I’ve learned that pepperoni is neither of them. It doesn’t exist. It’s listed on pizza menus, and when you order it, you’ll get something for sure, but you won’t know in advance what it would be.
• This isn’t new, the realization was several years ago, but fits this list nicely: I thought, perfume was something for women. It turned out, there was perfume for men too.
• Parents used to teach, if you read in the dark (on paper, not on a screen, I must add), you’re ruining your eyes. But if you think about it: wtf does low light do to your eyes? By that logic, you’re constantly ruining your eyes while sleeping.
• For some reason I used to think, you could simply delete related entities bound by foreign key constraints in postgres, if you ran the query in a transaction. Once when I finally needed to do this, I learned the hard way I was wrong.

There’s a lot more than this, probably I’ll update this comment in the future. Or not.

Milk chocolate without any nuts.

At first I wanted to say sushi, but basically anything I order online, because they’re so expensive. But during those few occasions I really feel like royalty.

I set the timer on the dishwasher to finish approximately when I get home after work. However, that day I didn’t really know what time I would get home, as there was an after-work BBQ event.

When I arrived at home and stepped into the kitchen, the timer showed 0:00 and shortly afterwards it switched off.

My proudest achievement in like two years.

And do Israeli people actually approve of this genocide?

There are! FediTips usually shares some channels on Mastodon that they consider interesting. It’s worth looking their posts through: https://social.growyourown.services/@FediVideo

I respect everyone’s wrong opinion.

I’d rather pick that, than starve to death.

I can’t imagine stopping to work. If I retire, I’ll have no money. I cannot count on pension either.

But I have an IT job, it’s just sitting in front of the computer all day; it’s not like a physical job I wouldn’t be able to do at old age.

Water; yes.

End of the day, nothing you can do will change what’s happening half way across the world, so why let it change you?

I beg to differ. Here are a few things you can do. I agree these won’t make an impact, but if enough people are willing to do these, it could work:

• Donate money if you can afford it. (Just carefully check where you’re exactly donating to.)
• Promote non-propaganda, factual information. Muscovy spreads disinformation through social media and propaganda websites using their trolls. So why can’t ordinary people step up and upvote, share, publish, and promote factual information? Sure, the algorithms of social media platforms favor the disinformation, but again, if enough people are willing to overcome what’s happening, I believe, it could make a change.
• Promote education. Only stupid people can be influenced by the far right propaganda. Unfortunately there are way too many stupid people.
• Just do what you’re good at. If your profession is irrelevant, that’s fine. But if you happen to be a hacker, or want to become one, go ahead, and fight online scammers and trolls. Are you a software developer? Wanna be a web developer? Create something that has an impact if you have the free time and interest. Make it open source. Encourage others to join. Again, if you have no affinity for this kind of stuff, it’s totally fine.
• Do your research and vote on elections.

In my opinion, this kind of mindset of “you cannot do anything, get used to it” is a very demotivating and harmful piece of advice. Because that’s what’s been going on all this time; everyone being ignorant, while evil people never stop doing what they’re doing.

“Carry a laser” - Mr. Mister

When it comes to Facebook, Instagram, and other mainstream social media, just stay away, it’s not worth it. I had Facebook, and it was just full of trash. I haven’t had Instagram, but it’s not very appealing either.

A LinkedIn account, however, for professional reasons is very much advised. Or Glassdoor.

Although over the recent years I saw some decline in quality on LinkedIn, as it’s getting full of shit posts, but you can completely disregard what’s on the feed. What you need LinkedIn for, is to build a professional profile, have your former and current coworkers in your network, and find and apply for jobs. Or even just let opportunities come to your inbox once you have an impressive profile.

The most amazing workplace I’ve ever had was possible thanks to LinkedIn, with almost no effort on my part. I have to say, this isn’t typical though. It’s only likely happening in countries where there’s a labour shortage. But a recruiter (among tons of others) found me from a well known company, their opening looked good to me, so I gave it a try. After just one interview I was hired, and I didn’t even have to apply for the job.

My most recent job was with a relocation to a different country. I can’t even imagine how this would’ve been possible without LinkedIn or Glassdoor. But I achieved one of my big life goals.

A career advice I got about ten years ago: create a LinkedIn profile and always keep updating it. If you do so, you’ll see it’s kinda awkward to go back in time and retrospectively edit things and connect with former coworkers. But since you haven’t had an account yet, I don’t see any other choice for you.

As for Glassdoor, it’s maybe a bit less popular than LinkedIn, but nowadays you can find opportunities there too. The best strength of Glassdoor is that you can find reviews of companies, sometimes they’re also reporting their salaries so you know what to expect. In some cases, individual reviews may be misleading as they’re forced by the company (which is btw against the terms of use), it can be a good indicator if you find thousands of good reviews or thousands of bad reviews.

Regarding the fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc.), they’re much better than their corporate equivalents in terms of quality, but they’re not immune to misinformation either. And also not immune to the user’s own stupidity. Obviously, don’t share what doesn’t belong there.

Edit: added notes for Glassdoor