It’s true. Using floppies is too easy for decent nostalgia usage. To prove the point: how many people do you know who use floppies for nostalgia reasons?

In terms of nostalgia-buying, we millenials are now the older generation. I doubt it’s all the 15-20yo who are buying CDs.

It’s the same as when network providers said that cars need 5G for self-driving cars, and the car manufacturers were like “What for?”.

I always thought it came from “being pressed through the coffee grounds”

That’s basically the same thing. When you feel sleepy, you aren’t at the end of your reserves. Your body tells you that you are sleepy at a time when you still have reserves.

Blocking these receptors doesn’t tap into any magic hidden energy, it just stops your body from telling you that you are running on fumes. Thus it allows you to go farther into your reserves. In extreme cases to the point where you collapse, because you really don’t have any reserves left.

Edit: Just to be clear, going into your reserves is not a good or healthy thing. It’s not some magical potential unlocker or something, but it’s running your body under circumstances it’s not made for. If you use caffeine when you really should be sleeping, that’s short-term ok, but can lead to some serious consequences in the long term.

Susceptibility to both what you describe as external or internal peer pressure always comes down to your own insecurities.

For example, I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t smoke. Never did. Growing up there was quite a bit of external peer pressure. But I still decided to not drink or smoke and I stuck to it. Your actions are your actions, and you can’t blame anyone for them no matter if it’s external or internal peer pressure.

But the whole premise is flawed. Having to “blame” someone for your own decisions is always a sign of not exactly being in control of yourself and your life. It’s always a sign of not being exactly mentally fit. Because this action in itself is a sign that you don’t take responsibility for your own actions, but instead look for someone else to blame your decision on.

I don’t see OOP doing that in the cartoon. She takes responsibility for her own actions. “I peer pressured myself”. She realized the mechanism at play (she wanted to fit in, and thus did something she actually didn’t want to do) and took responsibility for it. She’s not looking for blame anywhere at all.

The way caffeine works is that it allows the body to release energy reserves that it usually “locks” away from you. It allows you to tap into these reserves for concentration and makes you feel less tired.

That’s helpful for short-term use, giving you more energy and concentration.

But if you use too much caffeine for too long (“too much” depends on your body and “too long” is a few days), the body adjusts to the caffeine levels and now you have the same energy reserves and concentration that you had without caffeine before. Caffeine thus loses its effect on you and your baseline shifts, so that you need caffeine to be on the same level as before.

If you now stop your caffeine intake, this swings back. Your body thinks you are really tired and you get headaches, bad mood, low concentration and so on, until you either take in more caffeine or you abstain long enough for your baseline to shift back.

That’s why there are people who say they can’t work before they had their first coffee/energy drink. They literally can’t, because if they aren’t on the level of caffeine they are used to, their body tells them that they are super exhausted. This is the caffeine dependency/withdrawal effect.

You literally described peer pressure.

If the test passes, all of these are fine. If it fails, well, you got to dig then.

Hey, it worked. This is just as valid to prove that the internet connection is up.

The good thing is that coffee withdrawals are over quite quickly and don’t have long-term effects.

But getting peer pressured into an addiction by one’s mom of all people is ironic.

“Uhg, McDonalds again. These assholes always waste my time with the same ad over and over again. I just want to watch a video. I hate these idiots.”

Yes, the brain registers. If a brand keeps annoying me over and over again with intrusive ads, the breain does register.

They make money for those who sell ad space.

Overall, developing (in open source or not) or creating art or whatever one is into my once advice is to cherry pick whatever strangers are telling you. You only listen to the healthy advice and everything else must be like water off a duck’s back.

This part here.

Only taking healthy advice and ignoring everything else is something you can do if you are super mentally stable. If you aren’t this is often not possible.

In commercial development that’s easy. I don’t really care about the product I am working on. I am doing a good job working on it, but it’s not my baby. Also, I am a developer, so I develop. There’s customer support people who get paid to have customers scream at them.

If this is your personal pet project, that you love and that you poured your soul in, that’s more difficult. Especially if you are already struggling with mental health.

And I don’t like it when we say “only mentally stable people who don’t mind engaging with a toxic community deserve to be FOSS developers”. That’s just not right.

The peanut butter example might be overly simplistic, especially because it compares b2c to b2b, but other than that the original point is actually correct.

In B2B it’s very common to order things before they are manufactured. If a company orders 100 new company cars, it’s very rare that the car dealership (or even the car manufacturer) has all 100 of them on their yard, ready to be taken away.

Especially when you are talking about large-scale b2b purchasing, it’s very common that orders are taken months or even years in advance.

And here we aren’t even talking about regular “my company needs to buy 100 RAM sticks to upgrade the laptops”, but we are talking about manufacturing deals. They always order stuff like RAM chips way in advance, even if only to secure reliable and predictable pricing and availability.

Tbh, without the last three steps, this is how business works in general.

You order parts for devices that don’t exist yet (if they existed, you wouldn’t need to order parts). Same with creating new data centers. You don’t build the data center, and only when it’s all fully finished go shopping around to see if the hardware you want to run is available or not.

Trying to capture mathematically impossible profits and satisfying inexistent demand are the only real points here.

Obligatory damn clankers.

You’re drowning out the potential of your competition. That’s marketing, and if you stop then your competitor takes over or a small business won’t grow.

Tbh, I don’t think it’s that powerful. I’ve been happily googling on DuckDuckGo for years, same as I have been using Post-its from all sorts of companies and in fact never from Post-it. I don’t think this brand is even available in my country.

I’ve been using “Tixo” for “sticky tape” even though the Tixo brand went out of business around the time I was born.

In fact, if a brand name becomes genericised, it loses its power. It stops being a brand and becomes a generic term for anything in that space.

Brand recognition also goes the other way. You know, like when you see a McDonalds and you instinctively go “Ugh, these asshats who keep wasting my time with always the same ad over and over again when I try to watch a youtube video.”

Intrusive ads don’t further positive brand recognition but instead cause brand fatigue.

That’s the neat thing, they don’t.

Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it’s a well-known fact that this doesn’t work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it’s not worth the money.

So what are ads actually there for then?

First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone’s too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.

Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.

But