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.

Rubik’s cube was my favourite for a few years when I was commuting by train. I had a 40-60 minute trip each way for work and it was an amazing way of killing time without going mad.

Then podcasts and audio books came in and honestly, I can manage sitting still with audio playing. I need it to be stimulating enough, but running everything at 2x speed is fantastic and really makes a huge difference.

That said, I also have a notepad and pen so I can write things down while sitting, so I plan projects and write questions to be answered later. That helps a lot. I also have my phone which is great for passing time, Offline Games is a fantastic set of games that dont require purchases or ads. I also have my first aid kit on my belt and I regularly go through it and make sure all is well, along with my tech pouch. Organising those and cleaning them out works well.

Is that meant as a sort of joking, the smoking causes the cancer thing? I mean, yes, we all know smoking causes cancer, that isn’t being debated. It is more about the effect of taxation on rates of smoking and this type of strategy seems to have the effect of driving black market tobacco, not reducing smoking.

Yeah, so it makes me think that more people are professing to quit or their data on sales shows a reduction but it is more likely just a shift to untaxed tobacco.

Yeah, it is insane. My partner used a vape to quit and it was actually useful. I titrated the nicotine level down by 10% per refill, usually taking about a fortnight to get through. The use level would increase for the first few days but drop back down by the next refill. By the end when we dropped all the way to zero there was so little nicotine it wasn’t really noticeable. After that it was just the behavioural habit and that dropped by itself after a few months.

Compared with nicotine gum and patches it was way more effective and really did result in a long term quit. They are now approaching 10 years quit and it was absolutely worth doing. Harm reduction would suggest using vapes to help people quit and honestly to replace smoking all together.

In my opinion if it was just a crop like zucchini and you just had to meet agricultural standards, manage exposure to things like e. coli, get the product tested occasionally for heavy metals, and so on, it would be much better. Making it illegal doesn’t work, regulating it out of existence doesn’t work, but dealing with the harms from the other end, setting up programs for getting people off addictive things and using the health system etc, seems much better. I really think getting rid of the control and access these massive tobacco companies have and which was built directly off slavery and genocide would be a good idea.

The price for a 20 packet of cigarettes here in Australia is around $42 in AU dollars, so about $29. The production price is closer to $5, or about $4 USD. All the rest of that is taxes and that means you as a black market producer can make something for $5 and sell it for $30 and make $25 in profit, or you can sell way more at $20 or $15 and still make massive amounts of profit. You could kill the cartels and gangs tomorrow by dropping the tax and it would reduce the market for illegal tobacco to zero. The fact that our government don’t is a good indicator that they don’t actually care.

So this sounds like a good idea and I was a big supporter of it when the prices here in Australia went up, but I was wrong. We increased the prices with the thought that this would reduce uptake for young people and increase quitting or at least reduce use in older people. Instead we ended up creating a black market for untaxed tobacco. Since then we have had a massive increase in the level of gang activity. This means a fair few young people getting involved with these gangs and ending up committing crimes and going through the “justice” system. We have had drive by shootings, stabbings, abductions, and recently a mistaken abduction of the wrong person resulting in his dismemberment and death.

Increasing the price a little can have an impact but once you cross a threshold the criminal side becomes much more attractive and things become dire. The increase in people quitting may be because people have quit smoking, and I sincerely hope that is it, but in my opinion it is likely a significant portion of the change is a reduction of legal tobacco use and an increase in black market tobacco use.

Down here in Australia we constantly have people walking around with thongs (flip flops) or barefoot and in swimwear, so bikini top for women and bare for men. Honestly I don’t see a problem with it, I walk around with very minimal shoes now and I used to walk around barefoot most of the time when I was a kid. If you aren’t walking on a road with tonnes of broken glass and no footpaths then you are fine. As for people who complain about women having their chest exposed honestly, learn to not stare. It isn’t the job of women to cover up so you don’t have to put in effort.

Our beach culture is great because it is so laid back. If I had a business near the beach I would assume my customers would be barefoot and topless and make appropriate accommodations including somewhere to clean their feet off and taking care to keep the floor from being sticky. When I lived in the UK I found the constant demand to wear shoes stifling and awful and the USA felt really judgemental and gross.

Just to reply in a real and not snarky way, the BBC has a strong anti-trans bias as well. The question is about factuality and reliability. Fox News will run anything that fits their ideology and in the case of trans issues demonizes trans people and trans affirming care.

To be clear, this doctor is making a vague claim of there being “young children” getting “irreversible” medical interventions. I mean technically getting a vaccine is irreversible, getting antibiotics cannot be taken back, and setting a broken bone can never be undone. Irreversible is meaningless in this context. What he is claiming is that there is some sort of harm. This is not true.

Surgery is not done on young kids in general. The rare cases are not really worth considering and do not represent trans care in general. The exception does not prove the rule and honestly I have not seen any evidence of children getting trans surgeries.

What is common is the use of puberty blockers. These are medications used safely for preventing precocious puberty and they delay the onset of puberty. This allows time for the child to work through their gender issues and be able to make an informed decision before starting hormonal transition to trigger the correct puberty for their gender. Putting off puberty has small enough consequences to be reasonable and for trans kids it can be really important for reducing risk of harm.

Fox News is dishonest, this doctor is dishonest and violating their Hippocratic Oath, and this discussion is a bullshit anyway. This constant ranting and raving about half a percent of people is just crazy. Nobody needs to talk about this without a qualification or loved experience. If you don’t know what you are talking about then it is a good idea to say nothing.