Elsewhere in this thread, you mentioned that Immich has great documentation. Are there any other FOSS projects that stand out to you as having great user documentation?

Memes that are autistic memes without explicitly mentioning autism

I haven’t self harmed for a long time

Your comment has made me understand this better than anything I’ve previously read has. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Oh yeah, Bluey is pretty great. I have a couple friends who don’t have kids who put it on when they need soft, warm, background noise. It’s better than a lot of stuff for the same age range — I have a brother who is significantly younger than me, so I’ve seen my fair share of children’s TV trash and Bluey is a freshing contrast

Ask her what her favourite episode is. Once you get small kids talking, it’s actually great, they tell such great stories.

Share (age appropriate of course) opinions of your own along the way. Like, don’t just say “have you seen [episode with pots and pans]”, expand it by saying stuff like you’ve not seen much Bluey, but you have seen the one with the pots and pans — does she know the one you mean? I suggest this because kids are actually pretty socially adept and I’ve found myself in analogous situations where I caused confusion by mentioning something I barely knew and the kid reasonably interpreted this as “this person wants to talk about this thing”, and then when I didn’t seem to know anything about the topic I had suggested, the kid seemed pretty thrown off and uncertain how to respond.

Or completely open ended questions, like “I know you like Bluey, but I’ve never seen it before. What’s your favourite episode?”, which could lead into asking for more details on what happened in that particular episode and why she likes it.

The thing about small talk is that I’ve found there’s a distinction between being good at it, and enjoying it. I used to think I was awful at smalltalk, before I realised that actually, I just didn’t find it enjoyable. I think to some extent, the point isn’t to enjoy it, but to build a conversational back and forth rally which builds initial rapport to figure out what common ground exists between two people (which can lead to more enjoyable proper conversation). Some people do enjoy small talk though. The rally model was useful for me because it underscored how I need to serve the other person options to hit back with.

For example, most kids go to school, so that’s a decent enough topic for if you’re running out of ideas. With kids, you can get away with clunky conversation starters like “What’s your favourite subject at school?”. Better than that though is something like “My favourite subject at school is science, what’s yours?” because it gives your conversation partner the option of responding either to your statement (such as with “ugh, I hate science, [teacher] is so mean!”), or your question, and having multiple options to hit back with allows for flow to help. Once you hit on a topic the kid is excited to talk about, you’re golden: just keep being interested in their perspective and give bits of your own perspective so they don’t feel like they’re being interrogated.

Edit: This was a great question, btw OP — It’s led to a lot of interesting discussion, thanks for asking it

Oh my gosh, that’s incredible. It’s so cool to compare it to This one from 12 years ago

Oh no, now I’m going to have to search for an old floppy disc

Okay, I think you win on the “insignificant decision” part of this question. That’s hilariously butterfly-effect. You tell the story well; I bet you’ve told it before.

I really like Firefox Relay. I think they have a paid version, but the free version allows 5 different emails masks, and you can set masks to either forward emails, or to just block them. I find this latter function useful for things that make you put in your email address to get past a wall (which doesn’t necessarily involve signing up).

I’ve not got anything online yet, but Andy Matuschak’s framing of “working with the garage door up” has been pretty influential on how I think about this. Matuschak’s approach is also interesting because he has a regular website, but the page I’ve linked is on his notes subsection.

Once upon a time, a thing happened. And then there was a facsimile of narrative conflict, but everything worked out in the end, because that’s how all the short stories by LLMs seem to work.

It’ll probably be something super obvious and I’ll feel silly for asking, but “IS”?

As a gamer, I was anxious about switching to Linux as my daily driver, but I needed to fully immerse myself to improve at Linux, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how few gaming related problems I’ve had.

A somewhat cheesy quote that helped me a lot is “you can be the juiciest, ripest peach in the world, but some people just don’t like peaches”. I used to try way too hard to be likeable and I agonised over people who didn’t like me.

There was an instance of a colleague being rude and unprofessional to me, and under the framework of “they don’t like me and that’s why they’re being unkind”, it put the onus on me to change, which wasn’t reasonable. It should be possible for people to not like each other in a working relationship while still being respectful and productive.

Okay, well this is actually super cool, thanks for driving my attention there. It seems that the word for this particular behaviour is "Nyctinasty

I think the short answer to your question appears to be “we don’t know”, because nyctinasty has been observed for millennia but there isn’t a clear, conclusive answer. In some plants that are open at night, it may be that they are pollinated by bats or nocturnal insects, but one of the open questions here is “does nocturnal nyctinasty happen via the same mechanism as diurnal nyctinasty?”. By that, I mean “does a nocturnal plant (like moonflower) use the same ‘muscles’ as a plant that’s open during day, like water lily?”.

I don’t recall it mentioning water lilies, but a book that you’d probably enjoy if you’re curious about this stuff is What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz. I remember there is some really interesting stuff in there about plant circadian rhythms, and the information is presented in an accessible and entertaining manner

A food-for-thought question from a biochemist who doesn’t know much about water lilies specifically: your question assumes that it’s the opening/closing that requires energy, but another possible mechanism might be if the default, relaxed position was closed, and energy needed to be expended during the day to keep the flower open (or the inverse, where the open position is the default, relaxed position, but then at night, energy is continually expended to keep it closed). I suggest this based on how I know many of the molecular mechanisms of plants rely on turgidity (swollenness from water) to evoke structural changes.

It doesn’t change the question materially, it just involves looking at the question from different angles. I don’t know much about water lilies though, I didn’t even know that they close at night. I might report back here if I find anything interesting.

I think Larian’s response is them leaning into joke — by replying at all, they’re boosting the original query, but they’re also drawing a line on how far they’re willing to indulge that side of things (officially). I refuse to believe that Larian are actually shocked or perturbed by this question, as their reply suggests, because bear sex is within the game itself, so they’ve definitely fed the fire. Pretending to be confused is part of the joke, I reckon

Lollipop was my first Android (I miss my Nexus 6), so I’ll always have a soft spot for it

I’ve been thinking of starting a blog to help motivate me to do more writing. For a while I felt burnt out because I knew I’d have no hope in hell of being able to do a bunch of SEO stuff to enable people to actually see if anything I write, but I’ve concluded that people based networks are the only way something like this will work for me. After all, most of my favourite blogs or blog posts are ones I’ve heard of through word of mouth.

I’ve not heard of gopher protocol though, that sounds interesting