Philip McGarvey

I'm sorry that's happened.  

I don't really have an answer for how to get around what they're trying to make you do.  If you really do need to use facebook, you could install their app briefly to confirm your identity, and then immediately uninstall it.  You could perhaps do this on some old phone you don't use anymore.  

If you're concerned more with "It would be too easy for me to use it" than "it will spy on me", you could install their messenger app, which lets you do direct messaging but doesn't have the feeds etc.

Better would be to open direct text chats or group chats with the people you want to stay in contact with.  My family all use a few group chats to stay in touch, we never interact with each other through social media.  This is definitely superior, because the big tech company doesn't get to decide who sees what and when - we all see everything that gets said or shared in there, and don't have to see any distractions or ads.

I think everyone would be well served to move toward group chats.  I am in local community group chats too on Signal which are superior to facebook groups for all the same reasons.  

I imagine some governments can still get all our messages from Signal if they want to through someone's compromised phone or through hardware backdoors, but at least the tech companies theoretically don't get to mine them for data.

Also related, I recommend adblock plus and/or ublock origin, and the socialfocus browser extensions that can hide ads and feeds and short videos etc from your internet experience.

Pete Podurgiel wrote:I like to eat some variety of mushroom every day, but wondering if it might not be a bad idea to give it a rest once in a while.

Agreed.  I don't worry about it too much but I imagine there is a benefit to taking a break from almost any category of food occasionally.  It seems natural to have seasonal changes in diet which effectively would do this, and also humans have always done various kinds of fasting which is known to allow the body to do things it doesn't get to do while digesting food, including some aspects of healing.  

Who knows what the "optimal" rhythm would be, but it might be wise when I notice I've eaten the same thing every day for weeks to take a break from it for a couple days.  Fasting would be the simple (but not easy ;) way.

If you have a conventional wood stove where a lot of the heat goes right out the chimney, and with less or little mass around it, larger logs can be better because they spread the heating out over a longer time rather than having a brief very hot fire where much of heat goes out very quickly.  That's the only advantage of larger logs - a slower cooler burn.  With a RMH or otherwise a long enough chimney and/or enough mass to absorb the heat, it's ideal for the burn to be hot enough to maximize efficiency by burning off all the smoke, and for that, thinner splits are better.

For what it's worth, I have ate various kinds of wild mushrooms every day for long strings of days and in varying large quantities, with no obvious issues so far.  

I haven't had wine caps though.

I'd rather LLMs didn't exist but while they do they can be useful for finding information.  Some kinds of information are hard to find with a normal google search but LLMs can find them easily.  (Google often gives lots of fluff websites rather than original sources)

Still, take care not to replace human connections with LLMs.  I respect anyone who chooses to stay off the internet and learn from real people, or goes in that direction in some way.  Meanwhile, to the degree we do use the internet to find information, LLMs are useful, and there are a variety of ways to use them.  Getting them to give direct links to original sources is the most useful I think.

For anything that's likely been discussed on permies I'd start by googling "site:permies.com blah blah".

For example, I recently successfully convinced a friend to put in a wood floor instead of vinyl floor.  I Googled site:permies.com vinyl floor and read all the discussions that seemed relevant.  I also queried an LLM with "how long does vinyl flooring last, and does it shed toxic compounds into the room?  give direct links to sources for all the information you give"

Other example LLM queries:

"give me five direct links to pdf of the manual for ______"   And then I have the manual.  For a quick follow up I can give the pdf of the manual back to the LLM and say "give me exact quotes with page numbers for everything this manual says about ____"

Or e.g. troubleshooting a chainsaw there's a lot of information out there that won't be in manuals and the LLM can be very handy for giving next steps for what to try.  I could have made a post somewhere like arboristsite but it might take some time for useful replies to come in, and they might be mixed with people mocking me for not intuitively knowing what to do without asking.  I troubleshoot a lot of mechanical/tech things and I don't want to invest the time to become a thorough expert on all of them, LLMs are really useful here.

Or "are there people out there who think ____, and what do they say about it?  (even if they're kooky that's OK)   Give direct links to places where they're talking about it"

Or "give me direct links to pdfs of five scientific papers that discuss _____"  And again, give the pdf of the paper back with "give exact quotes and page numbers where this paper explains or shows data on _____"

At the moment, LLMs are not yet completely full of ads and stuff.  I imagine this will change rapidly and they might become far less useful.  But at the moment it's a relatively distraction-free way to find info from the internet in a simple text format with links to relevant original sources.

r ransom wrote:I'm happy to hear these things.

Do you guys worry about sunlight or other things when choosing a spot for the guitar to live.  Or is convince most important?

This is a good point - I wouldn't hang an instrument somewhere where it would get direct sunshine.

Hanging them on the wall is the way to go, so you don't accidentally set things on them or knock them off something, and so they're always accessible to play.

Tip:
If you want to never see these short videos from any source (youtube/facebook/instagram/etc) do this:

On Android or on a computer:
Use Firefox as your browser, with the SocialFocus browser extension.  Ideally, use Firefox to access youtube and facebook.  If you must use the youtube or facebook app for some reason, the "StayFree" app can block short videos inside those other apps too.  

On iPhone use SocialFocus in safari, and there are other apps that might be able to block videos inside apps.

I set this up for myself over a year ago and have not had to watch any of these short videos.  I've now helped set it up for several other friends and family.  If you or someone you know is being preyed upon by this stuff and doesn't want it, it's worth doing.  

The SocialFocus extension can also entirely block all social media feeds as well, not just short videos.  I use certain facebook groups and marketplace, but I don't want to ever see a feed of random crap.

Note that this is a sort of arms race similar to ad-blocking, where the social media companies are trying to push this stuff at us despite our trying to block it, so the specifics of how to block them may change over time.

I despise social media and the way that these algorithms and the people that control them now decide most of most people's conception of the world.  They are so good at finding whatever media will captivate one's attention, and they so pervasively thrust themselves at me in apps/websites that I am using for other reasons, that I was sometimes falling prey to it myself even though I knew how bad it is and don't want it.

Christopher Weeks wrote:We bought a disposable can of spray oil four years ago when we got our first air fryer but we haven't used it up yet. Thirty years ago we had a refillable stainless steel and plastic can that you could pressurize by hand-pumping but it kept getting clogged with sticky olive oil so we got rid of it. Mostly we use brushes for the kind of thing you're talking about though we don't really use the waffle iron very often.

FWIW, I would bet that four year old oil is rancid.  It might not smell terrible if it's refined oil because the stuff that would start smelling off was removed in the refining, but the oil itself will be rancid aka oxidized, and not good to eat.

If you do use some kind of spray bottle make sure you're using it up and replacing the oil frequently.  Olive oil typically goes rancid 3-6 months after opening.  

But again, there aren't really any natural liquid oils that are good for cooking with.

I suppose if it's a really small amount and just for lubricating the surface, maybe a little rancid refined oil isn't so terrible.  I wouldn't want to eat it, but quantitatively in terms of how much rancid oil you're consuming, spraying the surface of the waffle iron with rancid refined oil might be equivalent to eating a couple of conventional tortilla chips.