Interest, meet conflict.

Yes, yes it is.

I recently had the opportunity to drive from Tennessee to Alabama. I’d never been to this region before. I was amazed at how lush everything was!

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m trying to find ways to resist what’s coming. They want to fuck us over. Don’t make it easy!

…and nothing of value was lost.

It’s almost pointless to try to go to concerts anymore. Deftones is coming in a few months. I tried to buy tickets about 5 minutes after they went on sale. Already at that point, half of the arena was up for ‘resale’.

I chose a couple of seats that hadn’t yet been touched. In the few seconds it took me to decide, it let me know they were no longer available. I refreshed, and saw they were now up for resale for +50% or so.

Don’t count on Ticketmaster to stop this. Why would they, when they get a cut of the resale? Regulation is needed, and fast.

My desire to distance myself from Copilot led me to start using Libre. It was a surprisingly easy transition.

While it doesn’t feel as polished as MS Office, I find that it has everything I need. It also allows more control for customisations. Now, a few months later, I prefer using Libre over MS.

I honestly haven’t noticed a difference.

Me too. I have a Brother printer. When I first set it up, Windows printed everything in inverse black and white until I hunted down the correct driver. Windows also never figured out how to wake it up, so I always had to manually wake it up. And it simply never worked with the scanner.

Linux got everything right without me having to fuss with anything.

I installed Graphene OS. Loving it so far.

I think LLM’s are incredibly useful in limited circumstances. But it needs to be on-demand, NOT omnipresent.

For example, I’m learning a bit of C#. I was following a tutorial a few weeks ago that had some code I didn’t understand. I spent an hour googling and reading documentation, but found nothing. I headed to ChatGPT and asked it what it meant. It gave a clear, easy to understand explanation.

Unfortunately, the industry is going about this all wrong. Google wants to force Gemini on my Pixel. So I nuked Android. Microsoft silently installed Copilot on my laptop without consent. That laptop is now happily running Linux.

Forcing these tools on people will just alienate people like me. In a way, I’m glad it happened. I’m much more satisfied now that these companies are minimized in my life.

Consider grabbing a bar normally. You’d probably have 4 fingers on one side, and your thumb on the other. Now move the thumb so it’s on the same side of the bar as your fingers. That’s a thumbless grip. Not really thumbless, but your thumb is doing much less than it normally would.

The grip is popular for the low bar squat because it puts your wrists in a better position. It’s also a popular bench press grip for folks who want a caved-in face.

I’ve been using Graphene for a few weeks now. I’m really happy with it. That said, I’m a pretty minimal smartphone user. I don’t use NFC or any AI or Assistant features.

My only hiccup was my banking app didn’t work at first. Luckily their documentation is informative and easy to read. This is a common problem with a simple solution… You just need to change a toggle in the app control setting.

Installation is super easy if you use their web installer - just read through the procedure first, follow it exactly, and be patient. There are a few places where you think it’s done, but if you interrupt it, the install can go sideways.

It’s also easy to revert back to stock if you want to. And it doesn’t void your warranty - I just RMAd my pixel 8 after it developed the pink stripe syndrome.

This was the push I needed to switch to Graphene. The Gemini offer popped up for me a couple of weeks ago. The only options were something like ‘Yes’ or ‘Not now’. No option to say never, which of course means they would bug me again and again.

So I reported it as Spam and made the jump.

I came here to say pretty much the same thing, but found your post instead. I just made the jump this week. I’m running a Legion 5 Pro with 2 SSD’s, so I left Win11 on its drive and installed Mint on the other. They seem to be playing well together - no conflicts so far.

I’m pumped on how simple it actually was! I wish I’d have done it sooner…MS has been really irritating me lately so I finally went for it. Loving it so far!

I can relate to coming back from a long layoff. I was out pretty much all of last year due to a persistent back tweak. The programs I use taper up the volume over the first 3 or 4 weeks. As I got back into it this year, I just repeated the first week of a program over and over, gradually increasing the weights as my fitness returned.

When I felt like I was stalling, I moved on to the next week, repeating it until the next stall. And so on. This is a pretty conservative approach that makes sure I’m ready for the added volume.

Absolutely. 4 movements in a workout is plenty, IMO. Depending on your rep/set scheme, you may be over doing it if you’re coming back from a long layoff.

Start tapering in some accessory work as you acclimate to your routine.

If you’re feeling completely wiped workout after workout, take a closer look at your volume and intensity. Too much of that can be a problem. Head over to Barbell Medicine and see what they have to say about session RPE (sRPE).

To me, this is its biggest flaw. You can’t scroll back in chats very far, but you can search for lines further back. However in a truly spectacular display of uselessness, the search only returns the chat bubble you searched for, with no surrounding context.

When I had it, my only symptoms were in my nose, too. Not nearly as bad as you, but I constantly felt like I had a bunch of water up my nose… The same feeling you get when you swim on your back underwater. It was a really weird sensation.

Funny - my guess is they don’t have easy access to 1/4" stock, so they just machined the thickness down from whatever metric stock is common in China.