Technically yes, but I don’t mean technology as phones/laptops/tablets/etc. Imho, the biggest factor in social isolation is atomization due to bad urban planning. When everything and anything is only accessible by car, you lose any connection with your local neighbourhood and local stores/cafes/etc.

In environments where people walk around the neighbourhood, doing small daily shops, going to local businesses and taking mass transit to work/school/restaurants/bars, then you’re much more likely to interact with people rather than driving around in your social isolation-mobile.

Urban planning can be considered a form of technology, which is why I said technically yes.

EDIT: Oh, another big factor here is the loss of the third place. It still exists in some places (local pubs in British towns, local coffee shop in Portugal, etc), but in places without a socially normal “hangout spot” that is separated from both home and work/school, it’s much harder to meet acquaintances which may in time become friends.

At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn’t set any lofty goals

This is absolutely the right approach, even if you were planning to quit from the start (not the case with you, but still). “This is my last ever cigarette” just caused me to delay and delay and delay. The only realistic way to do it for me was one craving at a time (“I’m not smoking for the next hour”), then a day at a time. Handling the hours and days was hard, but once you do that the weeks and months take care of themselves.

Vaping for me was a major misstep. Just caused me to consume more nicotine than when I was smoking.

There’s two separate addictions going on with smoking: habit and chemical. What patches, nicotine gum, etc are trying to help people do is tackle them separately.

This means you can focus on getting out of the habit of lighting up after a coffee, or after a meal, or whatever triggers you had, while delaying the chemical withdrawal which seriously messes with your head until later. Tackling the two seperately is easier for many people.

With that said, patches don’t work for everyone, and I hope you find the cessation aid (if any) that works for you. Quitting smoking is an absolute bitch.

For me personally, the most helpful aid was nicotine gum, and then swapping out the nicotine gum for normal gum once I was confident I’d kicked the habit part and could focus on the chemical withdrawal.

The kitchen is operated by volunteers and rely on donations and food banks. I Believe this is also common practice in many temples within India proper.

Here’s a great little mini-documentary on that I saw on exactly that a few months back. Sikh temples seem amazing in terms of the sheer numbers of people they feed with no limiting criteria.

Lol, took me a minute to figure out you’re literally talking about a football match happening now. I was re-reading my comment thinking “Wait, what’s this got to do with Ukraine? Did the Romanian government do something that hit the news I don’t know about? What does this mean?!?” xD

Probably most countries think so of themselves.

Funnily enough, Romanians are the exact opposite in this regard. Romanians tend to think that Romania is terrible, backwards, and filled with awful people. That isn’t exactly the case (like any country, it has it’s pros and cons, and there’s a lot we need to work on) but it is how they tend to see it.

Start looking now. Tell prospective employers that you’re working on the certification and include it in your CV (as a work in progress, ofc). Job searches take a long time, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’re out.

Edit: @MrBobDobalina@lemmy.ml has exactly the correct approach for getting it in writing. Keep it professional, emotionless, as close to an accurate summary of the situation and the decisions made as possible.

So on the gaming front, pretty much any mainstream Linux distro would work for that. Proton is pretty damn stable and great on any distro that supports Steam. If you like Bazzite though, you do you.

For pen testing, must-have skills are nmap, bash, sqlmap, wireshark and the burp suite. If you know how to use all those, you’ve got basic coverage of most common attack vectors (password cracking is also covered by bash, there’s 101 different password cracking algorithms in various CLI spps).

I’m a lazy ass who doesn’t care much about customization, hopefully someone else can help you with that :))

A quick Google shows that someone got sharex working on Linux: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/issues/6531

Might take some effort and learning bash and WINE + winetricks to get that running, but hey, you’re gonna need to do that anyways for the pentest stuff :)

If you want something useful, maybe some more info on what you use your computer for? Advice for a glorified web terminal would be “Click the Firefox icon”. Advice for learning bash would be a massive rabbithole.

App suggestions are also very dependent on what you use your computer for.

Basically 4 things:

• Pick your own admin. I’m sure the kbin admin is awesome (can’t be worse than spez, lol) but it’s nice to have the option

• Have more control over what your server federates with. Hate interacting with people from a specific server? Move to one that blocks it. Want to interact with people from a blocked instance? Move to one that doesn’t block them. Basically more options.

• Don’t like the rules on your server? Go to one where you like the rules better.

• Your server is down? That’s fine, go to a different one temporarily. You’re gonna feel this hard on Monday. Kbin’s gonna get crushed by the Reddit hug of death. You might wanna join up to a small Lemmy instance that the horde won’t notice if that happens and you still wanna be on.

If you like kbin’s admin, federation settings and rules? Then cool! You’re missing absolutely nothing from being there (except when it’s down). It’s nice to have options though.

Secret number 5:

If you know how to host a server, you can host your own Lemmy instance and have all the powa!