I didn’t hate my Windows Phone when I had one.

Mostly; they just force themselves into the process for publishing each app and have an effective veto on apps. So yeah, no stores fully independent of Google.

When Biden was president the Democrats passed the Chips Act, which has grants for chipmakers to build in the US. When Trump took power he basically stopped issuing these grants to companies that were set to get them.

My understanding is that basically Intel will give 10% of itself if Trump stops blocking the grants it was already set to get. I guess Intel’s thinking is that if they make the US a part owner, then Trump won’t obstruct the company so much.

This might sound like good news (kind of) in that the government is getting equity in return for the money, but I doubt Trump will enforce the original requirements and purpose of the grants, so Intel probably won’t end up finishing many of the factories it was supposed to build. It also sets a precedent that you can’t rely on goverment grants to do things as future parties may change the terms of the deal retroactively, even after you already started.

Short answer to your precise question, for while you’re transitioning to a new treatment:

What triggers for you a strong, negative emotion, every time you’re exposed to it? I knew I was recovering when they stopped hitting the same way. In my case, I was extremely sensitive to my friendships and was ultra-tuned towards any suggestion they were growing distant from me. A late reply to a text (bad), or two friends hanging out without me (devastating) really hurt. I knew something was up once those stopped bothering me so much.

Longer ‘answer’ detailing my whole experience:

Since I was a young child I was always unhappy, worried, etc. Suicidal ideation started in my early teens. In my late 20s, at the start of the pandemic when I was unemployed, living alone, and friends I had made in grad school were all ditching town to quarantine with their families, I was in an emotional crisis and I had real doubts I’d survive. I sought out treatment again (attempts years earlier failed for BS non-medical reasons, not worth getting into). I was initially prescribed with bupropion, which while it tends to be a good first choice for many people, in my case it enhanced my negative emotions. That was very, very bad. I was quickly switched to venlafaxine (FYI while it has terrible side-effects when getting onto it they usually resolve after a couple of months).

Anyway, after a few months of being on it / some dose increases every few weeks from the initial low dose, I started to feel better. I stopped craving the endorphins I’d feel from the extreme emotions of suicidal ideation, and I stopped overreacting to negative events / perceived slights from friends (say friends A & B played golf together and didn’t invite me, even though they know I hate golf and maybe just wanted their own 1:1 hang). This is sounding like “he stopped feeling anything”, but once the stress & anxiety & rehashing of the bad parts of my childhood disappeared, there was finally room for me to become the person I had always wanted to be (goofy, care-free, smiling, relaxed). The depression & anxiety didn’t fade into numbness, it got replaced with happiness. I can honestly say I feel happy a majority of the time and I’m one of the happiest people I know; I recognize bad events but they just don’t affect my baseline all that much. It’s like - if depression is always feeling bad, and while good events momentarily help they don’t last, then I have “anti-depression”. This whole process probably took about a year.

With the supervision of my doctor I am in the process of getting off venlafaxine. There’s nothing wrong with staying on it forever if need be, but some of the newer theories of how these drugs work suggest that your brain grows new neural circuitry as it adapts to the drug, and it’s the new circuitry that actually helps. If that’s true, then once the new circuitry is grown the drug isn’t actually needed anymore. We’ve been slowly decreasing my dose, monitoring my mood, and so far I’m still feeling great. I’m now on the lowest dose, and if things continue as they have then I won’t need a refill in 2 months.

Every time I share my experience I want to clarify a few things:

• For those who may get onto venlafaxine - it’s terrible side effects should fade over time. I almost quit taking it at first but I’m glad I continued.
• Some medications work for some people and not for others, while others work for them but not for the first group. Probably depression & anxiety are just symptoms of different afflictions. We can see the common symptoms but we don’t know which affliction causes it, but each affliction needs its own treatment. As a result the best you can do is keep trying treatments until you find one that works for your affliction; there are so many out there that there’s probably one for you.
• Related to the above, but therapy may help. It wasn’t super effective for me but it didn’t hurt either, but depending on the underlying cause you may have better luck with it.
• I’m going off venlafaxine because whatever underlying cause of my symptoms appears to have been permanently cured. That won’t be true for everyone - some diseases require ongoing medication to treat. Don’t go off your medication without your doctor’s supervision & approval; you’ll need your mood monitored to ensure it doesn’t worsen and some of these medications should never be abruptly stopped.
• One of my biggest regrets was not pushing harder earlier in my life for treatment. While my baseline is happy, I do get pissed thinking about how much I unnecessarily suffered and that I didn’t get to enjoy most of my 20s. If a reader (yes, you) are chronically unhappy and unsure whether to get treatment, just go for it.

Not sure if you’re joking or being sarcastic, but here are a few examples where the mere absence / presence of a Y can’t determine sex & gender.

• Sometimes a person has XY chromosomes, but the body developed in a female manner because the fetal cells were resistant to testosterone. Such a person has good claim to being a woman (she developed that way) or a man (he has a Y chromosome; his brain could have been sensitive still to the testosterone to still develop male-coded)
• Sometimes a person has XX chromosomes, but the body developed in a male manner. Usually (though not always) this is caused by part of a Y chromosome ending up on an X. Such a person has good claim to being a man (he developed that way) or a woman (maybe she lacked enough testosterone to male-encode the brain).
• Other conditions such as XXY combinations, or chimeras (some cells XX, some cells XY), or other intersex conditions where some body parts develop male, some female.

To me personally, I view trans people as a type of intersex person. It seems entirely possible that you might have a person whose brain cells were more or less resistant to testosterone and/or exposed to testosterone and truly is a man/woman in a woman’s/man’s body. You don’t need to bring choice or culture into it - I think biology alone provides good evidence to believe trans people about what gender they claim to be.

And people wonder why employers are hesitant to hire juniors.

Lol I remember when I was around pre-school / kindergarten age and I was asking family members how to spell words so I could type into a Windows 3.1 “run program” dialog box “make sonic game”.

they can be fined.

Sounds like no? How are they going to make a company with no assets or staff in the UK pay the fine? American courts likely won’t enforce it.

Your approach won’t work if you’re behind carrier grade NAT or you can’t open ports. My landlord provides my internet so I use tailscale (with headscale on my long distance vps) to connect everything and it works great. It uses LAN when I’m home, and NAT punches when I’m elsewhere.

You will be if you call customer support and get an AI that can’t help.

Probably legal (for the buying company) but customers should sue the original company and get paid out of the money used to buy it.

Ditto. I use unique passwords for services I care about / someone could exfiltrate sensitive data, and a cheap reused password for services I don’t care about and could easily regain access to with a password reset email.

Entirely depends on who’s publishing the image. Many projects publish their own images, in which case you’re running their code regardless.

It has co-op, which with this patch now works between consoles and PCs.

It’s not even necessarily the ISPs that are doing it. In many cases they don’t like this because their users start getting blocked on websites; it’s bad actors piggy-packing on legitimate users connections without those users’ knowledge.

There are residential IP providers that provide services to scrapers, etc. that involves them having thousands of IPs available from the same IP ranges as real users. They route traffic through these IPs via malware, hacked routers, “free” VPN clients, etc. If you block the IP range for one of these addresses you’ll also block real users.

When I worked for a startup we’d sometimes go out for lunch and everyone would have a drink or two. We also kept beer in the office fridge but that was reserved for more Friday afternoons.

Yes but there are ways to protect against that. For instance you can configure Tailscale clients to only trust nodes that have been signed by trusted nodes, or something like that.

Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).

I goofed around in Adventure Mode a decade ago and kept spawning new characters trying to find a necromancer’s tower filled with zombies, BUT with a magic book that makes you undead / immortal. Eventually I got it, which was cool, until I realized that as enemies hack at you you lose body parts. I think by the end I was like a single finger or something absurd?