I was a late bloomer and I still feel like my brief brush with religion in my late teens and early twenties crippled my social skills for over a decade. Having said that, I managed to have a few awkward dates here and there and fewer still became relationships. Something they don’t tell you is that 80-90% of dates are awkward and terrible, but for many people including myself, when it clicks, it clicks.

I knew a woman at work once. I always stay very professional at work but I am friendly and nice to people. One day we were doing some bullshit paperwork and had a really good conversation and at some point when we were smiling and laughing I felt the vibes. We got a beer with friends after work. A few weeks later she got fired for some stupid shit but we stayed friends and dated for a month or two after. In this instance dating was primarily fun and adventurous. Getting to known each other etc. Bonus points because she had a cool roommate and her ex who came by for the kiddo once in a while was a cool too.

Another women I dated was already a longtime friend of mine. She went away to college and I saw her rarely for years. When she moved back, I invited her to hang out and we hit it off. We had a lot of fun and I felt the attraction, so I asked her out on a date. Because we had such a strong friendship beforehand, dating her felt like hanging out with my best friend, but more romantic.

For me, the thing that changes it from friend hangout to a date is:

1. Intention, everyone has to know it is a date.
2. A date typically has some hint of a potential romantic and or sexual interest, even if it’s subtle, not stated overtly, or vague. Having said that, it’s better to be bold and clear. When I first started dating I used to go in slow for the kiss when the vibes were right. I never misread the vibes too badly, but it’s 2024, so now I always get verbal consent before I even kiss someone. I was honestly surprised at how often “I would like to kiss you,” or “would you like to kiss me” gets a yes. If you get a no, most people are thankful to have been asked and that somewhat counteracts any awkwardness from being shut down.

Due to immunocompromised people I regularly interact with, I masked and isolated much more and much longer than the average person in my area. I still keep a mask in the car and on my bike. They also come in useful when you don’t want to be recognized or bothered by people. I’m not sure if they cause problems for some facial recognition tech, but that would be a welcome bonus.

Sorry for being unclear about the way I used “vet” in the title. I can see how that was misleading a little bit. I wanted to hear honest opinions, so if you really like Kagi, I’m happy to hear about it. It’s hard enough to find info right now that we may soon is the opportunity to be picky about our information.

Do you have to be on their patreon? I’ve been hearing everyone talking about this and I find their sudden popularity odd. I found Some More News through Internet Comment Etiquette (best show on YouTube) and SMN struck me as cringy AF even though I generally agree with the presenters. What pulls you to this show? Not really judging, just a little surprised and curious.

The county assessors site for everything state and local. I will briefly check national, but I dont need the pageantry of network television to rile me up anymore than I already am.

That’s Warmbo’s show, right?

I’ve seen this in various threads on Lemmy. I’m sure Kagi has some cool features, but I don’t know how any search engine can overcome the walled garden effect that is plaguing the internet today. The data just isn’t out there to be curated anymore, it’s locked behind the hedges of the different sites.

I think search might have been killed. I expect in my lifetime, we’ll have to sign all our communications using encryption to keep algorithms from impersonating us online to trick people into buying stuff. I’m kind if surprised there isn’t an organized resistance collecting legit reviews.

That makes sense. In a recommendation thread, PIA or Nord would be the highest voted VPN, but if you read the comments and see your fellow privacy nerds talking about Mullvad, you might choose that because privacy is important to you. I also find popularity does not always corelate with quality.

I know Glassdoor has issues. I didn’t know they allowed suppression of comments. I imagine a former employer of mine would have gladly paid $$$ to fix their 1.7* rating rather than actually pay us more so we could actually give them a higher rating. Instead they had new hires rate the place highly before they got dumped into the live operation. Still one of the lower ranked companies on Glassdoor.

I found a few similar sites that seem more “pure”, but they really only work for the tech industry.

I agree with you about the torrent of sewage. Its hard to find good data. Honestly, a 1yr pre-enshittification reddit dataset searched with Ctrl+F is likely better at answering many questions than today’s google search.

This tip worked well in '22-'23 before reddit hit peak enshittification. Agreed on the time. Researching what you are getting is not as easy as it once was.

I never appreciated snapshots until I ran a server. I used to just install a new distro whenever anything significant went wrong. Now I use them everywhere.

I can’t switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit, the switch just reverts. I do think it looks beautiful and has weather stats that I use when I bike but other apps don’t always have (air quality, UV) .

The change was 95% unnoticed for me. I looked at the session one day and thought “oh yeah, I have been using Wayland”. I don’t mess with many games or AI GPU stuff though, so it may be that more complex use cases result in a worse experience.

I used the base model and it ran at a very acceptable speed with CPU only. Decent accuracy considering the recording was mediocre quality at best. Thank you for the suggestion.

I was able to quickly set up and use whisper (base) using Speech Note without issue and it saved me over 80% of what I would have had to manually do. Thank you for the recommendation.

Whisper worked for me. I’ll have to go back through and tag speakers and fox a few spots but you guys have saved me 80-90% of the work. Thank you.

Transcription of numerous voice mails and phone calls for a legal matter. Would like to supply transcripts with the audio files so we don’t have to pay as much time for the lawyer’s paralegals to review and decide what is actually going to be useful.

I like that terminology. I use some very high quality, high visibility FOSS software and sometimes feel bad that I more frequently donate to smaller projects that bring me value by filling a specific want or need that no one else is working on.

Yes, and the desktop is delightfully simple. Makes older hardware feel new but still looks good enough on modern hardware.

I hear you on the tiling. I wish my window arrangement on KDE was more keyboard based. As it is, I end up dragging and resizing across multiple monitors and workspaces.