• When my house guests text “#wifi” to me, they get an auto reply with the WiFi password.

• NFC tag stuck to my medication pouch. When I boop my phone to it (or tap a shortcut on homescreen), I can select what medication I have taken. The medication and the time gets added to the bottom of a Google sheets spreadsheet, that I, or someone supporting me can check to get an overview of how frequently I’ve been taking medication (especially useful for spotting high pain chunks of time due to more frequent usage of PRN pain meds).

• Another aspect of the medication tracking above is that it also can tell me the last time I took medication. For example, if I take ADHD meds at 12pm, then my next dose would be 4pm. If I tap the shortcut at 3pm, it’ll tell me I last took meds at 12pm and I’m next due at 4pm. Alarms tend to either startle me or not be noticed, but when I had smart lights and a notification light on my phone, I could make a colour gradient where “you have just taken meds” = red and “you are due to take meds” = blue, and as time progresses, the colour slowly becomes more blue. This works well for me, because I like visual reminders

A helpful “rule” I set for myself to encourage myself to cook more was to allow myself to indulge if it was a proper, homecooked meal. Stuff like splurging on fancied ingredients (I’m fond of salmon), or having an extra cheesy lasagne. It was a useful carrot to dangle in front of myself, and a useful stepping stone to better habits. I also would sometimes cook for friends, like informal dinner parties (I always found it easier to cook for 4 than for 1)

On the cost side of things, even my fancier meals were still cheaper than takeout. Plus it’s easier to eat healthier if you’re already cooking for yourself often (and I even broke that down into smaller chunks too — I first focussed on adding more veg and general nutrition, then I reduced the proportion of healthy stuff)

I like to use Hypothes.is for annotating stuff I read in depth

This isn’t mine, but a comment from an old university tutors, about a non-teaching administrator.

“She’s an organisational terminator. When she retires, they’ll have to replace her with two people”.

He was wrong — she was replaced by three people. As well as being highly effective at her job, she was really lovely and knew so many students’ names.

I got the impression from the summary that “broadly welcomed” may include opinions like “there’s a lot of work to do on the implementation front, but this sounds like a step in the right direction”, as is common when there’s a big and complex problem. Unions are used to being given loads of assurances at the beginning when policies are declared, and then gradually over time, the concessions in a bill get eroded. “Broadly welcomed” could mean that 27 of the unions have sentiments that are roughly 65% positive on this, and 1 of them (the quoted one) is 60% negative. In this case, maybe including a quote from the mostly negative union also captures some of the sentiments of the 35% negatives from the main bulk. If this is the only quote included, it is weird, but I imagine the full article has more perspectives.

Edit: Reading the full article deepened this impression — apparently this is a big enough endeavour that it’s expected to be on the drawing board for at least 2 years? Another union (TUC) said that “this bill highlights Labour’s commitment to upgrade rights and protections for millions” — language like “highlights Labour’s commitment” is fairly fluffy, which suggests to me an angle of “starting this early in your elected window bodes well for your intentions, hopefully we can keep this up for long enough that we get a practical change”

In addition, the union who gave the negative quote are a small businesses union, and whilst I’m definitely on the side of the workers over businesses, I also think it’s important to recognise that legislation like this tends to put a disproportionate burden on small businesses compared to the mega-corporations (who can lobby more and also absorb impacts easier).

This announcement is good news, but Starmer has moved the goalposts on past promises so many times that any optimism I might feel is tempered by a “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Time will tell, I suppose. !Remindme 2 years (this is a joke, I don’t think Lemmy has a RemindMe bot)

This is a great step-by-step. If I were having a root canal, this would make me feel immensely reassured

To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post

I’m a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like “is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?”. My answer is “Yes.”

Eh, there’s a reason that Mildly infuriating exists as a community — sometimes the best way to exorcise one’s aggravation is to give space to the annoyance by sharing it with other persnickety people.

I have seen it in a few instances where the baby changing facilities were only in the women’s bathroom, and a father needed to access them. I wish that bathroom discourse could involve structural inequities like this, but the bigots are overly concerned about what is in people’s pants

Tangentially related: I really enjoyed the EULA of Baldur’s Gate 3:

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).

Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.

“In Sweden, having drugs in the bloodstream is punishable with prison”

Oh wow, I didn’t know that

What do you expect her to do instead?

What’s your favourite scent/scent note? (Either scent to work with if you make perfumes, or just something you personally enjoy for your own use)

I know of Chappell Roan because she’s recently been ruffling people’s feathers by asserting boundaries against fans’ parasocial weirdness; I’ve never heard any of her music, but this alone is enough to make me a fan.

When I find myself becoming irked by someone offering help I don’t need, it helps me to think of things in terms of people who slip through the gaps: the system that the social worker is a part of strives to help those who need it, and you not needing that help makes you a false positive. You were likely flagged because sometimes when someone is living in their vehicle, this is a symptom (and reinforcing factor) of their life being in disarray. That is to say that some people who superficially look a lot like you are in need of support, and not catching these people would be false negatives. Bonus complication is that many people who do need this help may also be resistant to support (for a variety of reasons).

Given that no system is perfect, and the error rate will always be greater than zero, we can ask the hypothetical “is it better to have fewer false positives and more false negatives, or more false positives and fewer false negatives?”. Put a different way, when you’re bothered, that’s you slipping through the gaps in a system that has opted for more false positives with the goal of helping as many people who need it as possible.

Unrelated to everything else I said, I’m glad you’ve been able to find a way of living that you’re happy in — it is a challenge when the life that is best suited for us is one that society considers “abnormal”, so I’m happy to hear about anyone who has broken into what works.

I can’t help but wonder whether some people are aiming to scapegoat her. Like, this is a huge trial, with many defendants (I’m unsure whether anyone else besides her was sentenced to death at the first trial), but maybe pinning more stuff on her will make others (who may be more culpable for some of the charges than she is) less likely to get the death penalty.

Seconding this book recommendation. I started skim reading it a few months ago, and it was so entertaining it pulled me in.

“helping” seems like an odd word to use for “threatened at gunpoint”.