The main difference to me is the lack of a profit motive, which is the primary driver of enshittification. The federation helps harden it against things like abusive admins, since it’s dead simple to jump ship to another instance in that case, but honestly that’s pretty secondary to me.

There was this game of dots I played against my 12 year old niece. The game was looking pretty even with two obvious large snakes building up - she ended up making the move that opened up the first, smaller snake for myself, hoping to force me to open the larger one for her. But I purposely didn’t claim the ending squares in the first snake, which let me avoid opening up the second for her. So she was forced to then open up the second snake to me, letting me claim basically the entire board.

The second image explains it better - with the black lines as the setup she left me with, the usual strategy would be on the left, while I played as on the right, with the blue line as my last move.

Completely ignoring your “short enough to finish in a day” instruction, try out Worm

Would the southern shape here also qualify as a triangle?

What if you went the short way instead of the long way, creating the spherical triangle people usually use - then is the “outside” portion of the triangle itself another triangle?

The worst part is that I know the menu calories aren’t precise at most restaurants, but I still won’t let myself be wishy-washy with them. I actively recognize there’s no point in relying on how many calories Outback Steakhouse says are in a Bloomin’ Onion (1900 btw) when the largest bloomin’ onion I’ve had in the past is close to double the size of the smallest I’ve had. But my entire system relies on precise tracking so I still feel I have to make the effort.

Rounding up to the full amount after eating >85% or so is something I do though. I’m much more okay with it if I know I’m overestimating than if I think I might possibly be underestimating.

While that’s true, and while it’s something I’d definitely recommend for others, I can’t honestly say that’s something I’ve mastered doing myself. To me, not finishing just means I have more work to do when it comes to figuring out how many calories I actually ate. While I could just guesstimate that I had 60% of that blizzard, I find that in practice I’m really not okay with being that wishy-washy with the numbers. The days where I have to just guesstimate kill me inside.

And this situation with the blizzard is something I’ve dealt with. I had a mostly finished blizzard but couldn’t finish it. I had to mark the level of ice cream still remaining, empty the cup, then get weight measurements for the empty cup (​c), cup full of water (f), and cup full of water up to the level of remaining ice cream (w) - at which point the total calories eaten were (w-c)/(f-c) * B, where B is the number of calories in the full blizzard. If I could have avoided all of that by finishing the last 28% of that blizzard, you bet I would have.

My own advice:

The diet I’m on, which has lost me 36 pounds (196 to 160) and counting since early April, is simple calorie restriction - I try my best not to go over 1500 calories/day, and if I do go over, I try to make up for it by going under on following days until things average out.

Every time I’ve tried this diet or similar diets, I’ve had great success, as long as I’ve meticulously tracked and wrote down how many calories I ate each day. The times I’ve tried this diet without tracking have all ended up failing, even when I “tried” sticking to it for months. The moment I start writing numbers down, things just fall into place. So for me at least, that’s the key.

Some notes:

• Over the last 127 days my actual average calories/day has been 1472/day
• I try to avoid meals where counting is very difficult or impractical. That means I try to avoid going to restaurants that don’t post calories and I’m not big on “real” cooking. If I do have a meal where a good count isn’t possible I try my best to overestimate - usually with 2500 or 3000 depending on how full I am since it’s really hard to eat more than that at once. I find it very difficult to go to most restaurants without getting more than 1500 calories, also, so I don’t eat at restaurants all that often anymore. Fast food places like McDonald’s are actually some of the easier options to work with, though.
• I’ve made little to no effort to eat healthier - just less. I can have a blizzard from Dairy Queen if I want, but that’s 1100 calories and then I’ve only got 400 left for something else. I have mastered making delicious ice cream that’s just 300 calories/pint though. In practice I usually eat processed foods from a can, box, or bag that you just need to heat up or follow the instructions on the box for.
• A scale is essential for getting accurate calories out of things like butter, milk, ketchup, ice cream ingredients, etc.
• In general meats are a pretty poor choice - compared to other foods they make me a lot less full compared to how many calories they take up. I can eat 8 hotdogs (without buns) and fill up my daily calories in that one meal, and still be hungry - or I can have two cans of spaghettios (580 calories total), and be so full I almost can’t finish.
• For me at least, after the first week or so I just stop feeling hungry in general most of the time. There are occasionally days where I only eat because I know I should, rather than because I got hungry.
• When I’m on this diet, I basically never get heartburn, even after a day where I eat something that would usually have given it to me badly - probably the nicest part of all this.
• Despite what the post says, I eat basically no fruits or vegetables in my day-to-day life.
• In the past, I’ve incorporated extremely heavy daily exercise into my routine as well - I’m talking multiple hours a day, every day, for at least two months. While it did have some noticeable benefits like a very noticeably lower resting heart rate and increased strength, it had basically no visible effect on my rate of weight loss - looking at the graph, you couldn’t even tell which portions of the diet were subject to heavy exercise vs. heavy leisure. The lesson learned is that diet is far, far more important than exercise - you can offset an entire workout with a single cookie.
• When I’m not making any dieting attempts at all, I’m a huge glutton. I’ve never gotten over 200 pounds, because any time I get close I start doing this diet - but if I ate the way I wanted to all the time, I could easily weigh 350+ pounds. I can very easily eat single 1200-2000 calorie meals multiple times a day. I’ve yo-yo’d a lot in the past few years but I’m hoping to more or less keep things permanently under control this time - once I get to 140ish I plan to raise my daily calorie allowance to the point where I maintain, rather than gain or lose, over time.

An added bonus of writing things down is getting to graph things too!

Note that I’m not claiming this is healthy. Just effective. Anyone can lose weight eating nothing but chocolate cake, as long as they eat sufficiently little. It doesn’t mean you won’t die from it.

Sure, but it’s still a lot more reliable than something like the amazon review section, or a lengthy AI-generated article comparing the two products you just happened to google together that somehow manages to say nothing at all.

Honestly, I still just google for relevant reddit threads. Lemmy’s the only place I actively participate in, but this is one of the use cases it hasn’t been able to replace reddit for for me either yet.

Removed by mod

For those looking for the amazon link

Do you have a good example of a story which doesn’t fall into this trope at all? One which perfectly encapsulates not doing this?

Bringing Harry Potter into this, the fact that they showed they do know how to do this, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in the 5th movie, makes it all the more annoying that almost every other fight in the series was just shooting blasts and energy beams at each other

Fixing that bug where if you do something like upvote someone while typing a comment, your comment gets deleted.

Stop making “Undetermined” the default language for posts and comments, so my feed stops getting spammed by foreign language posts that didn’t bother to correctly tag themselves.

Allow blocking entire instances (I think this might be in the latest update which my instance hasn’t yet migrated to?).

Beyond that, the only thing I really miss from reddit is being able to open the comment thread for a post and read literally hundreds of comments. Gets a bit underwhelming seeing so many front-page posts with 1 or 2 comments.

The word incel has evolved beyond its literal meaning to refer to a specific subset of people.

Also I may be wrong here - but I think the term originated as a self-designation by a group of openly misogynist men?

Either way, there’s a big difference between someone who can’t get laid an an incel, even if the terms don’t reflect that difference.

Is this actually true? Rowling herself aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an openly transphobic Harry Potter fan - granted I also don’t spend a huge amount of time in Harry Potter forums and stuff.

Thanks for the speculation. It still seems a bit odd, especially considering he’s asked the board to give him a 25% stake in the company recently.

I wonder if he did anything like back loans with those options, and if he did, what the consequences would be now that he’s not going to have them anymore?

Thanks. Do you happen to know why he wouldn’t have executed the options before this suit? Like you mention they expire - surely he never had any intention of letting them expire though? Was there some benefit to waiting them out?

So since he hasn’t executed on the options, there’s nothing he has to actually pay back, but he also won’t be allowed to exercise those options and purchase what would have been $56 billion worth of dirt cheap stocks?

I also assume that calculations of his net worth did take the options into account, so assuming the order stands, it’s effectively an immediate $56 billion hit to those calculations?

Your article says:

As part of a compensation package Tesla finalized in 2018, Mr. Musk received options to buy 304 million shares that are now worth more than $50 billion. While he has met the goals needed to receive those options, Mr. Musk does not appear to have converted them into shares of Tesla. If he had, he would be barred from selling them for five years.

What are options? Does this mean he didn’t receive this compensation yet, and now he simply won’t receive it, assuming the company doesn’t appeal or move states like the article mentions? It says he had the option to buy 304 million shares - I assume he can buy them at a deep, deep discount compared to their current price?