Casual Conversation

Recently, I've been trying to find ways to manage my time better. The biggest problem is that I would get stuck in YouTube binge-watching sessions that I couldn't pry myself away from. I would constantly be looking for the next thing to click on that was just interesting enough to keep my attention.

As I became more and more disillusioned with my situation, I began to realize just how severe the problem had become. I spent most of my free time just watching videos. Not socializing, not making anything cool, not learning any new hobbies. Just YouTube. Was this the life I really wanted? How many of those videos do I even remember anyway? Oh god. Thousands of hours of my life are being lost forever... I HAVE to stop this. How?

Analyzing my behavior quickly revealed the culprit — YouTube video recommendations keep tempting me with content that I never planned on watching. My eyes would always be drawn to the wall of titles and thumbnails for me to click on next, and that kept me in a vicious cycle. Click on a mildly entertaining video, look for another mildly entertaining recommended video, click. Rinse and repeat.

What if instead of doing that, I threw it all out and only chose a select few really good channels to watch? Oh wait, that's called the subscription feed!

I went through all of the channels I subscribed to over the years. Disturbingly, I found that I didn't actually care about most of them. It was cheap, mass-produced content to make the creator lots of money, and it was just barely entertaining enough to keep my attention.

I removed 95% of my subscriptions and kept only the best channels. These were often beautifully presented, thought-provoking STEM content, which prioritized quality over quantity. Now, instead of a binge of 30 videos, my subscription feed for the day had... just three. That's it. After those three videos, I would be done for the day.

There was only one thing left to do now — delete the recommendations.

I wrote a hacky script that simply removed the recommended video column and end screen, and finally, I added the YouTube homepage in a webpage blocking plugin so I only looked at the subscription feed. Just like that, I had fixed YouTube. There were no more distracting recommendations. The choice of what to watch was back in my hands.

It only took 20 minutes before I grew completely bored and wanted to do something else. But that's not a bug; it's a feature. That sense of boredom is there to push me to do something meaningful with my life — make something, pick up a new hobby, or meet people. The fact that I felt it so strongly meant that my plan was working. All of those things I always wanted to do... now I can actually do them. As long as I never allow endless scroll feeds and recommendation algorithms to rule my life again. But knowing the damage they've done to me, I never want to go back.

Because to be free, I ultimately need to make the Internet boring again.

What about you? Do you have measures to prevent the Internet from taking away all of your free time?

I will elaborate more in the replies, just be nice.

Tldr... I hate how one of the most common advice you receive as a loner without social life or a partner is to get a dog. I'm taking care of a dog for a while now as a favour, since I'm unemployed and have "nothing to do" (my brother went to his gf beach holiday house for the summer with her, his daughter, my younger siblings and my mom, couldn't take the dog, it's old) and I'm miserable, I HATE this. I don't wanna have to deal with any animal after this.

Hi! I (21M) recently developed a lot of tender feelings towards the idea of a particular kind of relationship lately.

For many years, I knew that I was heterosexual, but I never felt any romantic spark that made me want to actually pursue a relationship. Eventually, I assumed that I wasn't interested, but a part of me always wondered if I was wrong.

One day, I got bored and tried to imagine a hypothetical relationship that would feel wonderful and natural for me, irrespective of societal norms. After hours of roleplaying hypothetical scenarios and writing down what made my heart the most happy, I finally settled upon a coherent vision for a theoretical partner.

She'd be really sweet and loving, but the twist is that she'd often take lead over me. She'd be on the confident and assertive side and would totally break my brain. She would often initiate affection unexpectedly, and I'd get all flustered and totally melt for her. She would adore my softness instead of expecting me to suppress it. She would call me cute nicknames like "Cupcake" or "Pumpkin", and I would feel very comfortable and safe with her.

This blew my mind because it went against everything I thought hetero relationships were. And yet, I responded so strongly to it. I began searching to see if anyone else felt this way and I found "role reversal," a term referring to the inversion of traditional heterosexual relationship dynamics. I found a role reversal community and it had the most adorable art I've ever seen and perfectly encapsulated what I wanted. (Some of this content can be found on Lemmy at !rolereversal@lemmy.ml. I love this post in particular. Honestly, I'm thinking of reviving it and posting content there myself!)

A day later, I woke up with constant euphoria and a nonstop firehose of vivid romantic fantasies. It lasted all day, every day. For 10 days straight. My feelings were so intense that I barely ate anything and only slept for 3-4 hours a night without getting tired.

Those fantasies not only showed me how wonderful a relationship would feel, but also that I myself would want to be very affectionate and adaptive to my partner's needs, not just my own. I was enamored with the idea of being the sweetest, most loving boyfriend I could be for her. It wasn't long before I wanted a relationship like this more than anything else.

In retrospect, perhaps it's unsurprising that my ideal relationship would be nontraditional. After all, I have spent my whole life fighting masculine gender expectations. I'm super outwardly emotional, I love to make people happy, I'm very gentle, I love adorable things, and I make myself look cute, nerdy, and non-threatening. I loved it when some of my female friends called me adorable and gave me cute nicknames, and I was full of admiration and gratitude when one of them physically protected me.

I feel like the phenomenon of role-reversed relationships is likely more common than the actual usage of the term. But perhaps I'm still a bit of a unicorn. So, what do you think? Have you seen relationships like this in the wild? Have you known about these dynamics, or are they unfamiliar to you? I'd like to know your thoughts!

Hey.

I never lived in a city, not talking about the huge cities like London but average 50.000 to 150.000 people cities so I figured I'd ask people on here who actually lived in a city.

I grew up in a small town and now I built a home in a few miles away from where I grew up in another smaller town and everything would be cool if I wouldn't have "fomo".

My town has about 1000 people living and the next larger city has about 500.000 people (40 minute drive by car or 1 hour by train). And two other smaller cities with each about 75.000 people but only 25 minute drive by car.

Now that my wife and I have settled I can't get rid of fomo feeling.

I catch myself thinking "man if would have built in the city,..." but my wife is right. We can't afford property in a city and heck, even if we could afford it there is no property left to buy. And then when I visit the city to go shopping for clothes or just eat out I am always glad I can leave again.

But than I wake up the next day and would think it would be awesome to have a gym in the same block, a grocery store under my flat, a nice bar or coffee around the corner where I could socialize with others. But then my wife comes again with reality: "And it all costs money. You'd be broke two days after paycheck if you live in the city how you live in it while you visit it" and then she explains that life in the city isn't all that great and I ain't missing out because most people aren't more social in cities than in our town or small city next to our town.

I imagine city life kind of vibrant though. "Hey let's host a boardgame night" and 10 people showing up. But it might not be like how I imagine it? Is city life kind of overrated or am I missing out?

I go to the bigger city maybe once a month to go shopping for clothes I can't get here. Like for example the skater shop a few brands. A few friends and I also take the train every half a year to party a night out but take the train back home. There are many things I also don't like about the city, for example sometimes the smell, the homeless, the traffic, and I sometimes think I'd still need a car because of groceries, visiting family in the country side where I live now so I couldn't sell my car anyways. Now that I have "settled" I shouldn't be thinking about this anyways but there is always this feeling I am missing something. Maybe I should have lived in a city just for a year to experience it before building, but I never had the desire to. I was always happy leaving the city and I still am happy when I can leave after a whole day in the city but maybe I'd like it longer if I'd live in it?

This feels like a topic I am going to ignore til I am 85 and then add to a list of things I regret: "Never experienced city life when I was young".

The only thing that makes me feel good though is that all my friends that currently live in cities are searching for property out of the city and want to move back where we all grew up and all of them saying I didn't miss anything. My wife is also saying it, so I guess they might be kind of right. I am saying "kind of right" because this might be something that only one can judge for him/herself if city is good or bad. I feel like I have no opinion on this subject and this makes me crazy.

Edit: The only big city life experience I had was three months traveling through South East Asia where I stayed like a week in Bangkok and I remember many nights in Kao San Road partying. But that ain't anything one can do every day in the city especially if you work. That was like vacation city experience and I sure do know I was glad when I left Bangkok. The next city experience I had was Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in Vietnam which was okay but I left it after day 3 feeling drained. The best experience I had was in Singapore. But I figure after reading all about Singapore that no city in my country could keep up with Singapore. I think I'd like living in Singapore more than in Bangkok or Saigon lol. But even Singapore was really busy...

Thanks in advance

So, I had this idea a few months back, where I was thinking of bringing my kid along. The gist of the trip in question was that I was setting up a server cluster at the head office, and there was no real reason why I couldn't bring one of my kids along. And a few Lemmings wanted me to report back, so here I am.

Before making a decition and a plan, I kind of tried to poke and prod my son (I'll be referring to him as E from now on), trying to see if I could spark some curiosity with computery stuff beyond roblox. So I asked him open questions such as "When you're connecting to a roblox game, what are you connecting to? Where is that game running?" That way I got him curious about the concept of servers in general. At first he was a bit baffled how a 10000$ computer didn't even have a screen and keyboard, but I got to show him a few screenshots of IPMI, which was easy for him to understand.

After making the call that I could bring him along, I asked my boss, and he was fine with it. I then booked us hotel rooms "for free" as I had enough bonus points to use. Same thing for airline tickets, so there was no real extra cost to bring him along. Plus school doesn't start until 17th of August, so there were no conflicts either.

So, last sunday, the night before leaving, I sat him down in the kitchen to explain what we'd be doing, how, and why. I drew a basic network diagram of the server cluster and how we were going to wire up the network. I also was sure to let him knew that this wasn't something he needed to remember, I just wanted to show him the underlying concept. Besides, I know that his ADHD would've made it hard to remember it without physically tinkering with it. I had some SFP transcievers I could show him so that he could recognize a fiber connection when he saw one. Afterwards I showed him on a map where we'd be flying to, where our airport express train would take us, and where we'd be both staying and working. Afterwards I helped him make sure he had everything he needed for the trip; clothes, charger, etc. In addition to that, I suggested that he could hit the download button in the Netflix app on his phone so that he'd have something to watch while we travelled.

Monday:
The next morning I told him that he didn't really need to take his ADHD meds. There'd be so much for us to do anyway that there wouldn't really be many quiet moments where he could bounce off the walls. Plus, his concerta tends to mess with his appetite, and I've learned the hard way that traveling on an empty stomach is a really bad idea. Eat when you can - There aren't many opportunities to do so. We left the house after saying goodbye to everyone, and after a quick stop by the store to pick up some road snacks we were underway for the roughly one hour drive to the rather small regional airport. I've traveled through it enough times to know exactly how much time we needed, so we were done checking in and all that 10 minutes before boarding. After takeoff I suggested that now would be a good time to watch some of those downloaded netflix shows. But no, he was perfecly satisfied just looking out the window for an hour.
We touched down around 10:15, and went through the airport without much of note. We grabbed our checked bags we headed for the airport express train. Actually, both checked luggages were mine, but one of them was on his ticket. I had a bunch of spare parts and stuff that I wanted to bring to the office permanently. It wasn't heavy, it was just big. I had to chuckle when I saw how people reacted to a 12 year old kid rolling behind him a Pelicase that looked like it weighed more than him.
Oh, and one thing: We live in a very very small town that someone somehow managed to squeeze into the terrain, between a fjord and two mountains. While we've traveled through larger cities, he's not really used to anything else than this pretty quiet place. When we got off the airport express train and out of our station in the center of The Big City his first sentence was "I can now see more people than I've ever met in my entire life". Yup, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring him in the first place - The world is big, and our corner of it is very very small. Some perspective is always nice.
We went straight to the office where he got to meet my boss and a coworker. Yup, we're only three people. We're a pretty small company, but it's a standalone unit that serves as a support arm for one of the biggest corporations you've (n)ever heard of, so we have all the resources we need without much of the corporate wank that comes along with large companies.
I was then showed the pile of hardware that was waiting for us. Servers, switches, cables, and PDUs. No server rack, though. After getting an update from the vendor, we sadly learned that the rack wouldn't arrive in time, but we worked around it by building what I refer to as a server pile: Everything stacked, connected, and ready for use, just so we could get started.
But first I wanted to show him something: The office we have is in a building that basically rents out office units to smaller companies, but the building as a whole is rather large. And once you have a company owning a building like that they want to make it as cool and attractive as possible in terms of decorations, including getting some novelty items. So on my phone I now have a picture of E sitting in the drivers seat of a DMC DeLorean in the buildings lobby.
After that, as well as some lunch we got to work by opening boxes and making sure we had everything we needed. We then started wiring up the basics just so we could prepare the machines. So now E knows how to check the Meraki dashboard to find the DHCP address of a server, log in to IPMI on that server, and configure its static address. This took most of the day. After that we checked into the hotel, and as we got up pretty early, we just decided to get some fast food delivered and and chill at the hotel for the rest of the day.

Tuesday:
First we carried it all into the "server room" (It's another office right next to our actual office, but we use it as a server room), and then we ran all the cables we needed. It was actually pretty convenient to have his small hands available for reaching into the hole we drilled in the walls to get the cables done. After this it was time to begin setting up the servers. As these are operating in a cluster, they would all be set up the same way, except hostname and IP, so the plan was that I'd set up the first server, then he'd set up the next two with my support, and then we'd see if he could set up the last one by himself. It took some time for me to figure out how to get the procedure ready, but once done it was fairly straight forward. So E know knows how to set up Debian 12 on mdraid with redundant grub install to two harddrives.
After work we visited a reptile park right around the corner. While it's called a reptile park they have other stuff as well, and since E has always been fascinated by turtles he really enjoyed being able to touch a rather big one, as well as a bearded dragon.

Wednesday:
Last day for E. He would be traveling home in the evening, while I stayed behind. I figured it probably wouldn't be very interesting for him to see dad pushing buttons for five days straight. Most of the day was spent doing some basic setup stuff like installing packages and managing all of the disks installed in the servers. E now knows how to configure RAID6. Later in the day we got a call that our rack was right around the corner. And hoboy, this turned out to be quite the adventure on its own. Well, when we were ordering the rack, we basically just wanted to make sure that it was big enough for any future needs, so we ended up with 42U. And it's a pretty old building, so ceiling clearance wasn't always there. I think we had 5mm to spare when we were manhandling the rack into the elevator. This took the rest of the day - When we finally had the rack in the server room, it was time to head back to the hotel and pack his things.
The return trip was pretty uneventful. Turns out that at 12 year old you're allowed to fly alone without someone from the airline escorting you everywhere, and as he's flown before I didn't really feel like he needed it either. I just got one of those security gate passes so that we could get something to eat in the terminal together. "But I don't know where to walk when I land?" He asked. Well, I just told him to follow the other passengers, and eventually he'd meet his aunt. Afterwards I walked him to the gate and made sure he got on his plane. Once the plane took off I headed back to the hotel. While on the train I checked flightradar to make sure that his flight didn't have to divert or anything. He landed while I was still on the train.

People keep telling me that dating today is a war zone, facing all kinds of challenges.

Dating apps don't seem to be directly trying to help solve the problem as much as generate revenue. In fact, they are very directly motivated to not make great long term matches.

Some people seem think that just getting out there and hoping for the best is the answer. Maybe that's true, but it's still very random. I was wondering about a hypothetical alternative:

What if you could go to an agency of some kind get rated through a thorough evaluation process? Would that be helpful ? It's not perfect, and many things are hard to measure. But maybe it's a less random starting point and can escape the exclusively money driven approach of dating apps.

Feel free to have a look at !movies@lemm.ee !television@lemmy.world and !animation@lemm.ee

Today, I'm embarking on a 30 day experiment to see if I can live (and do my job) in the modern world without a smartphone.

Why?

I've been a tech enthusiast all my life: always had to have the latest, greatest, newest, and shiniest gadget I could afford. Here lately, it feels like the tech is taking over and just making me miserable. "Always connected", notification fatigue, endless doom scrolling, "download our app for [super basic thing that shouldn't require an app], etc. I love my smartphone, but I feel like it's a "ball and chain" that's causing me unneeded stress.

I've been wanting to try this for some time, but the "killer app", so to speak, on my smartphone is hospot mode. I use that heavily for both work and personal use, and I only recently realized that modern "dumb" phones could do that now. Suddenly this experiment became possible, so I bought a cheap dumb phone and decided to give it a try.

So, can I go 30 days without a smartphone, and will I see any quality of life improvements (or perhaps the opposite)? Only one way to find out.

Conditions of the experiment:

I bought a modern-era "dumb" flip phone and moved my SIM to it yesterday evening. It's not a true "dumb" phone, though. It runs a stripped down version of Android, so I'm able to install a few "must have" apps that I need such as my MFA and credit union app. I made a concession with the banking app since the closest branch office is 45 minutes away (I don't consider the MFA app to be a concession since some of the dumber dumb phones had support for at least TOTP generators).

That's it for the apps. No email, IM/chat apps, web browser, etc (though I can run all of those it seems). The only "apps" will be the ones that would be standard for a dumb phone of the mid 2000s (calendar, camera, alarm, music player, etc). I've already connected it over USB and loaded up era-appropriate music from my local collection 😆

Rules:

1. I'll allow myself to carry my smartphone (w/o SIM card) in my bag, powered off, in case I do need it for something urgent, but I won't carry it on my person or use it beyond immediate need. Will connect to my "dumb" phone via its hotspot for internet.
2. If I do need to break out the old smart rectangle, I should look to see if there is a way to accomplish what I need without it.
3. This experiment cannot interfere with my job duties.
4. I've setup an SMS bridge on my server to forward certain critical alerts. I used to do this back when all phones were dumb phones, so I don't feel it's breaking the spirit of the experiment. These will only be "the datacenter is on fire" level alerts, so I don't anticipate many (or any).

So, here goes. I'm not sure what to expect or how this will turn out and even less sure I'll make it the full 30 days. Wish me luck.

Personally I've been rocking Sauvage by Dior for a while

I've been lurking for over a year and I finally made an account 🎉

Now that I can customize the communities I see I'm wondering, what communities are you part of/do you recommend?

This year is the first time I've watched the Olympic games, and I absolutely loved watching judo. Imagine my thrill when I found out judo will also be featured in the Paralympics!

Anybody else planning to watch the Paralympics? If so, what sport? I am a bit curious about "blind football" and "wheelchair basketball" (as titled in my language), so I might give those a try as well.