You might not have the lifestyle to do this, but I find taking a short nap (like 20 minutes) in the early afternoon helps reset my brain and boost my energy levels. It doesn’t even need to be a nap, just taking that 20 minutes to lie down and close my eyes can help a lot.

It doesn’t need to be coffee, or even high quality coffee, but I agree that having a routine you devote a small amount of time to every morning for a reward at the end is a great way to start the day. It combines meditation and achievement, which are both great boosts to your mental health. Like you, I do the coffee thing but I know other people like to start their day with a run or a workout which has additional health benefits and leaves them feeling more upbeat about the day ahead.

The variable refresh rates on my newest one do make it more viable for other tasks like web browsing, that’s true.

Yeah it is pretty cool, I agree!

Gaming mice, in particular those designed for FPS players, have improved a lot within the last decade. They are incredibly light now and wireless mice are as responsive as wired ones. You can get well built mice with great sensors for very cheap, and there are loads of different shapes and sizes to choose from. It’s actually getting really difficult to buy an objective bad mouse now.

Interesting take. This is a technology that is often claimed to be a slow mover, so I’m curious what you’ve seen that suggests the opposite.

I get it, the problem solving can be really frustrating when you just want to relax and play some games in your limited free time. Personally I just installed Linux on a secondary drive and switch to Windows during startup for the games that don’t work well with Linux (usually multiplayer games with anti-cheat). I still use Linux as my main OS since gaming is not what I spend the majority of my time doing.

There is no such thing as “universally bad at being funny”, as I explained. Humour is subjective.

Focusing on the people and communities, since takes like “Lemmy has no ads” or “reddit has more content” are so obvious that there is zero point in sharing them, I would say Lemmy is better. I think the quality of discourse is a lot higher and people are more likely to type longer, thought out and educated (or well intentioned) comments. If I were to put it really simply, I’d say Lemmy’s community is more centred around discussion, whereas reddit is centred around reaction.

However, one issue with Lemmy is that fringe groups and views are overrepresented (particularly left-leaning ones), which can result in an echo-chamber effect in many discussions. I find pile-on attempts, or accusations of fascism, Nazism and right-wing trolling, are a lot more common here towards users who don’t immediately join in with a far left circlejerk or attempt to bring a little more nuance or critical thinking to a discussion. Dylan Marron, host of the podcast ‘Conversations With People Who Hate Me’, once said in an interview that social media pile-ons from people who are actually on your own side hurt a lot more than pile-ons from people who fundamentally disagree with you and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. It frustrates me that some Lemmy users shutdown and try to “other” people the moment they have a minor or semantic disagreement with them, instead of taking the time to hash it out or just politely agreeing to disagree. It’s kind of ironic that federation allows communities to isolate themselves, yet instead these people remain federated with everyone and then get really offended and outraged when they’re confronted with world views that even slightly differ from their own.

But anyway, that type of person is still a minority and Lemmy is, for the most part, a significantly better environment than reddit for polite and intelligent discussion.

If you’re explaining every single joke in the same sentence as the joke (which is what /s is), it’s not funny. Humour is not, nor has it ever been, about inclusion. It is about being funny. Not universally funny; just funny to people who understand and appreciate the joke.

I think the disabling of downvotes on Beehaw and similar instances really helps. It reduces the pile-on effect, which in turn makes people less defensive and more open to proper, good faith discussion. In general I think the solution is to not find “uplifting” communities, but rather to replace whatever communities you’re currently visiting with better equivalents. The world is not as depressing and scary when the people you’re talking to about these big issues are genuine and/or educated (and by educated I just mean “took the time to read the article before commenting”).

lol

Generative AI will be forced on you, regardless of whether you want it in your life. The entire world is moving in that direction very rapidly. We are not just talking micro scale like which web browser you use - every institution you rely on in your daily life will have AI implementation at some level.

That all sounds pretty reasonable to me. You AI holdouts are going to have accept it in some form sooner or later.

There aren’t many explicitly racist or anti-racist people in the world. I think that’s a pretty big misconception people have about racism; that it is predominately an individual quality as opposed to a much broader systemic problem. Even then, my personal experiences suggest these views do not have to define a relationship if you take the time to unpack and better understand them. Most racism we see in the world is generally not born out of evil or hatred but rather fear or ignorance, which are universally relatable human conditions.

Nah I definitely disagree with that statement. It is absolutely possible to maintain a healthy relationship with someone whose perspective on ethical issues differs to your own.

I’m not sure I agree with that either. In my experience it depends entirely on the willingness of the people in the relationship to listen to one another and their ability to understand that disagreements about political issues, current affairs, religions, etc, don’t actually have to define them as people and, therefore, their entire relationship. People from opposing sides of politics and life actually have a lot in common because the human experience is a universally shared one. It’s all about breaking through the artificial barriers that would keep us separated online and finding those commonalities.

I disagree with you on politics, I don’t think that is important to a relationship if the people involved are able to discuss and disagree about ideas amicably. Unfortunately that seems increasingly less common in our modern society as algorithm-based social media continues to push people further into their respective echo-chambers. Of course, I am not here to tell you that you can’t look for that in a partner, I just don’t think the concept of political compatibility should universally apply to every relationship or even a majority of relationships.