Opinion Havers

I've noticed increasing requests in places like !selfhosted@lemmy.world people asking for self-hosted or free web solutions for things that, to me, seem to be absurd tasks to go to web apps for. Examples I've seen are:

• Self hosted file hasher
• Self hosted image resizer
• Note apps

There are dozens of these. They vary in the amount of "reasonably benefit from being online," but mostly I'm coming to believe that it's because this group of people either don't realize there's a difference between native and web apps, or ... well, I don't know what the alternative is.

Going to a web app to resize an image is sheer idiocy. It's something for which there is a dozen of free, open-source, native mobile apps that don't require an internet connection, are faster, and are entirely within the capability of any mobile smart phone that would be able to access a web page. And it's even crazier on the desktop: even if you are incapable of using a CLI and running convert, you're probably running some desktop that has a graphics program that can resize an image. Why, the hell, would you self-host a service like this? The same goes for generating checksums of files.

Ok, so you need something to actually host an image for you, because your Lemmy client seems incapable of uploading images. That's a web service. And note taking? That's on the "almost acceptable as a web service", if you for some reason can't run SyncThing. Again, there are GUI markdown editors galore, text editors for the raw doggers, and numerous mobile apps that can more-or-less WYSIWYG markdown much less just plain text editors.

I haven't yet seen someone ask for an online calculator, but it's just a matter of time. Just... why? Are people really no longer capable of distinguishing between web and native apps, or is there some other reason I'm overlooking?

Only 7% of US adults have optimal metabolic health Source

While the US might be leading the way, the rest of the world isn't far behind.

Poor metabolic health costs billions of dollars a day, millions of lives shortened needlessly, and is totally preventable.

Manifestations of Poor Metabolic Health

• Type 2 Diabetes
• Cardiovascular Issues -- Hypertension -- CVD -- Atherosclerosis
• Obesity
• Systematic Inflammation

Quiz - Do you have optimal Metabolic Health?

• BMI < 25kg/m^2 && WC < 88cm (34.6in) women || WC<102cm (40.1in) men
• Fasting Blood Glucose < 100mg/dL && HbA1c <5.7% && No diabetes medication
• TC/HDL <3.5 && No lipid medication
• SBP <120 && DBP <80 && No BP medication
• No history of CVD

People can stop with the performative outrage when someone says "ethnic food", you understand exactly what they mean. Yes, since food is an element of ethnic culture, all food is "ethnic", but words and phrases have multiple meanings and, again, you understood exactly what they meant and it was Mexican or Chinese, not a burger place.

It's pretty much impossible to go to a public campground these days and just tent camp, without being sandwiched between giant RVs. They block views and also, often, the sun itself, and they are constantly running their generators so they can watch TV or whatever they do in there. Brightly lit strings of poorly aimed 5000K LEDs are common at night, so if you wanted to enjoy your flickering campfire or watch the stars, good luck. Often they have a whole living room set up outside with artificial turf, a huge canopy, chairs, etc.

If I wanted to camp in a semi truck parking lot I'd go pitch a tent in a truck stop. Camping as many of us knew it growing up, is pretty much gone.

Public parks love these types of campers for some reason, so nothing will ever be done about it. You would think they would designate part of their campgrounds as tent only but very few do.

Can't speak to private campgrounds, I assume it's even worse.

"Content creator" is a great term for influencers because it's completely devoid of any sense of talent, artistry, or craftsmanship. Its awkwardness as spoken serves to underline that fact. In fact I can't think of any other better ways to phrase it that aren't outright insulting. Anyone making actual worthwhile "content" can still go by the more specific descriptor: artist, essayist, filmmaker, historian, whatever.

Leisurewear: things like sweat pants, track suits, pajama pants, leggings. Out and about: anywhere you're not immediately and obviously coming to/going from working out, or in the case of pajama pants, literally anywhere at all outside of your home.

It all is so declasse and even trashy. No we don't dress as formally as they did in the 1950s, but being the tip of the spear of plunging standards by wearing Tweety Bird flannel pants grocery shopping or skin tight leggings out to dinner makes you uniquely classless.

If your behavior is driving the eradication of standards, yeah, your choices are bad.

Have some respect for yourself and others and throw on actual pants at least, even if you still must wear a hoodie with them. A collared shirt would be a bonus, but again, pants are the bare minimum here to seem respectable.

It's ironic, because even wealthy people are doing it, especially leggings everywhere. But that's the era we live in, where the wealthiest among us are often the most culturally vapid as well.

"Retard" is the perfect length for an insult and lends itself very well for emphasis. It rolls off the tongue in anger or disgust very well. Like with most insults, nobody even thinks about what it actually means (see: "motherfucker", "dumbass", etc) any more.

Furthermore, nobody calls the intellectually disabled "retards", and "retarded" is also quite rare now as is "mental retardation". So "retard" is perfect for repurposing as a general purpose insult. People who get up in arms about this are basically saying that the mentally handicapped are retards, which they are not, a "retard" is NOW your dumb friend who you are making fun of, and not an intellectually disabled person you never met.

Get angry about something else. Removing the slur from the intellectually disabled is a good thing.

Nobody likes ads.

But having ad breaks you can ignore, or grab food or drink during, or have a chat with a friend during, is way better than having ads all over jerseys and the stadium at all times. It's also such trash companies, like airlines from middle eastern dictatorships, credit card companies, and gambling megacorps. Just fucking garbage slop that you're staring at all game and in every promo photo of players and wearing yourself if you buy the jersey.

People are dressing their kids in gambling jerseys or Amex or fucking Etihad Airways! That's psycho actually.

Meanwhile, yeah, again, ads suck and therefore commercial breaks suck too, but as stated you can ignore them, mute the TV or whatever. And you can just get a jersey for your kid that is normal, just the player's name and the logo of the actual team.

The only semi-cool jersey ad is for that one that's an Ed Sheeran tour. That one is almost as awesome as commercial breaks.

Gambling is a net negative, full stop. Some people are really susceptible to it and will lose enormous amounts of money, going bankrupt and forcing society to finance their addiction. Yeah, it's fun, but it's just not worth it in terms of overall net harm.

I'm not a fan of the lottery or casinos either, but at least forcing people to clear the hurdle of leaving their house and going in person is something and it can be semi-justified as longstanding tradition.

App-based gambling (online gambling, basically) has pretty much no limits and someone can wager at any point they're conscious. So you have a megacorp using algorithms to essentially game as much money out of people as they can, and some people are going to just get wrecked by that, and society bears the costs. Furthermore it makes gambling such a lowest common denominator activity without any charm whatsoever, if it even ever had any. Beep boop, oops lost $2000.

Insult to injury is the constant ad spam for it.

I'm appalled by the state of LED lighting.

I would rather change every incandescent in the house for the next 20 years, than figure out all this.

I have an attuned sense for good lighting. I just do. So if I want good LED lighting, that doesn't look flat or cheap, I have to figure out the Color Rendering Index. That's a single number which tells you how good the LED is at showing true color, except, it's a scalar value that describes a 2D vector of possibilities (magnitude x spectrum). So not all CRIs that have the same value are the same quality.

You mean I have to figure out which LED bulb is gonna make red look red?

This is all setting aside color temperature, which at least is pretty straightforward. I've been a 2700K man since day one.

But there's the dimmer situation which is the complete wild west. Not all bulbs work with all dimmers, not all dimmers do a good job for all bulbs, and if you choose wrong you'll either get a dimmer that doesn't dim all the way, or you'll get flickers or random cutouts (think 6 recessed lights of which 2 cut out early as you dim).

Companies publish spreadsheets to tell you which bulbs dim with their dimmers and how well. SPREADSHEETS

And, seemingly, the only dimmer switches that function well are cheap plastic shit. There are no good dimmers that also look or feel high quality.

Line all this up against Prior Era where I would go to Home Depot, pick out any fucking random bulb I wanted, and it would look great, work great, and dim great.

Someone please tell me that the end-to-end carbon cost of making LED bulbs vastly outweighs the energy savings so I can be even more validly self-righteous?

People are doing a lot more talking about cold temperatures using the "feels like" number. This has happened a lot more in the past few years, probably because apps are highlighting this number more. Using feels-like is narcissism-driven, because the feels-like number is always lower, so it sounds like the weather is worse than it really is.

People argue that the feels-like number better reflects how cold it actually is, but of course that's wrong because if it's windy, you dress for the wind, and if possible you stand where you're out of it.

The feels-like numbers also don't factor in the sun. 20F, cloudy, and windy feels a lot different than 20F, sunny, and windy.

So basically this is all just a way for people to dramatize the daily weather more and narcissistically increase their victimhood and suffering.

Obviously, wind chill serves a useful scientific purpose.