So for context, I’m an asexual guy who had one girl in his classes at high school & went to a 75% male university on a course that was 94% male…

Right after graduating I had the same issues you’re describing, just from “new experiences” more than anything, but when you go out into the world and start interacting with people you’ll be fine - it’s somewhat normal especially if you didn’t have a drive to seek out women previously or even just didn’t have the self confidence to

Also though, that sounds like a bit of a weird interaction as an introvert anyway, I don’t think I’d have been super comfortable either way as I’d be expecting to be robbed or scammed or something, but if someone is expressing interest in something you’re passionate about then they very clearly want to hear about it, so just say things about it even if it’s cringe or not perfect

Most likely a skiing/mountain biking/car/surfing/hiking/tragic boating accident would be my best guess, other than cancer… If you’re not suicidal, a risk taker or into extreme sports it’s most likely going to be cancer though

Threats to the US

A lapdog isn’t a threat except to reputation, even if they’re not on your side. Same reason North Korea isn’t on the list of threats.

Even if they have influence, it’s not exactly domestic policy, otherwise you’d have to add the IRA to the list also.

I did some experimenting - I can’t sleep above 67 at most, 65 comfortably.

Anything above 68 is too hot generally indoors and I begin to lose the ability to focus.

I don’t have AC but my house is from the 1860s when people had fires running pretty much nonstop so is designed to keep cool, so even when it’s 80+ outdoors the indoor temperature rarely goes above 70

The UK manufacturing sector for raw materials and basic products was on the way out anyway due to costs being so low in Asia, so it was more to be able to shut it down and save the government from needing to bail it out while also destroying labour unions while they were at it, hence why the advanced manufacturers (JCB, Rolls Royce, etc.) were largely unaffected

If it’s Hirevue, I stopped bothering after 5 or so, I’d never got through one and yet managed to get through every single HR phone screen etc.

It depends if it’s AI grading it or not I guess, as AI has no understanding of nuance so will just accept a very narrow range of similar candidates

On the /s, I somewhat unironically agree with that more than the case of just obtaining citizenship

woe is me, a news source that wants to remain independent of outside interests is taking steps to avoid having to get funded by big businesses or the government who’ll want to set an agenda…

I’d be more concerned about reading something free and not ad-supported (and like it or not, untargeted ads are next to worthless), as the money has to be coming from somewhere

Be generally aligned with the right

It’s gotta be authoritarian right though… I can’t see a pro-immigration, pro-choice, pro-gun, anti-tariff, anti-corruption (generally pro-freedom, that thing republicans pretend to like) libertarian getting anywhere with trump, it wouldn’t surprise me if a tankie got along better given they’re into most of the things trump likes

No - there’s fuses in the plugs themselves, the switch is largely for convenience and safety - if you want to unplug something broken and potentially live, it’s much safer to switch it off at the wall than risk a shock given the current limit is on the breaker is so high

you could always symlink .Trash to /dev/null if you don’t care about potential accidents

I was 99% sure Finland for the first one though, but somewhat makes sense

No it’s not… it’s purely emphasis/stress via vowel reduction in English?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_and_vowel_reduction_in_English

I think it’s more that a lot of people only think of badly done makeup and see well done makeup as natural beauty, which it enhances rather than contrasting with

Of course someone with clown-face-adjacent levels of makeup is going to look worse, but if done to make the skin look natural but smoother, eyes look natural but bigger and features natural but better defined then yes, I think very few people will find that less attractive

I mean they could go underwater and just come up to breathe and eat dead ants

If it’s everything you do, then no, I struggle a lot with work ethic/just being a lazy pos but even then I do have some things I enjoy and am willing to work for… I think finding more things I enjoy (cycling, dnd & programming mainly) has helped a lot with that, so I feel like just trying new things and being willing to “give up” on them fast if you don’t like them may be good?

Why do supermarkets stupidly pay rent in Manhattan, London, LA or Singapore when they could pay next to nothing to have a store in the Outback or Siberia?

I don’t think you understand how it works… An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that’s because ratios are nonlinear - I can’t recall the mean type but it’s the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn’t matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That’s what I meant by a closed system.

An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.

Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?

I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it’s infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don’t want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I’ll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)

I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that’d be fine, but from my experience most “entry level” private ones don’t, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it’s hard to build up a ratio.

LLMs have a very predictable and consistent approach to grammar, punctuation, style and general cadence which is easily identifiable when compared to human written content. It’s kind of a watermark but it’s one the creators are aware of and are seeking to remove. That means if you want to use LLMs as a writing aid of any sort and want it to read somewhat naturally, you’ll have to either get it to generate bullet points and expand on them yourself, or get it to generate the content then rewrite it word for word in a style you’d write it in.