Oh makeup. I was a wreck early in my transition. My wife helped me pick out some makeup and taught me some basics. She then tolerated my inevitable crying and delays each morning when I would make a mistake and feel like I had to start over. Between trying to learn everything and going through Puberty 2 : Estrogenic Boogaloo, it was kind of rough.
Pretty great on the other side though. Few things have felt as good as my wife asking me for makeup tips!
I think this might want a clean sheet design. At least as I understand it, there are issues with privacy in the fediverse/activitypub vis-a-vis non-public messages. I think it's also an area where, in order to go the most good, you'd want simple signups and easy engagement (to say nothing of being able to trust that your info has been deleted when you delete it).
Clearly, I'm here and I value the philosophical underpinnings of the fediverse, but I think it might not be the best fit for dating.
That said, if you feel like you can solve those problems, you'd be doing a world of good if you're right.
Nonprofit versions of vital social tech. If I had the money sitting around, I'd love to start a nonprofit dating site/app. I met my wife on OKC in 2011 before it got bought up and enshittified. It was great and wasn't geared toward just keeping you engaged (they're soooooo bad now!). You'd probably have to gatekeep it with a small fee to disincentive bots, but with a relatively small investment, you could create something really useful for folks without preying on anyone's desperation.
Signal would be a good model for this sort of thing.
Edit: typos
I'm going to say first off that this is kind of depressing. That said, after my initial knee-jerk reaction of "fuck you, Duolingo," it occurs to me that is might be a better outcome than them pulling out of Russia altogether.
Providing Russian citizens easy access to language learning provides them access to non-Russian media and non-Russian discourse on queer issues.
In my own experience, learning a language as an adult has taken place in ~3 stages: 1. learn from instructional material exclusively, 2. consume foreign language material with native-language support/tools, 3. learn more of the language via context. If having an app available to folks in an oppressive country helps them get through stage 1 and into 2/3, it gives them a chance to escape the hateful discourse of the regime... In theory.
On the other hand, maybe it's just capitalists being capitalists.
I'm a big fan of cheap (as in ~$10/yr vps) and reverse proxy over wireguard. My home ip isn't exposed and I'm able to quickly spin new containers up by updating my reverse proxy config and adding a wireguard peer.
I keep two VPSs- one as reverse proxy for all my miscellaneous services and another solely for email. The latter port forwards raw traffic over wireguard to my email server container. That way, even if the VPS gets compromised, my personal data remains secure.
I end up paying ~ $30/yr (+ whatever I'm paying in electricity) for domain + VPS. It's a bit more involved than tailscale, etc, but I'm willing to put in a little extra work to make sure I'm not at the mercy of some company getting up to some rent-seeking bullshit.
I agree with respect to the low likelihood of changing one's old posts being effective in preventing their being used as training data. I'd assume, however, that those who are motivated to "vandalize" (itself a loaded term to refer to altering one's own words) their old posts have more than one motive; in addition to inconveniencing humans, doing so devalues reddit as a place to find information and, in theory, punishes reddit for their actions, maybe even deters others from behaving similarly.
This a situation where I think that maybe a shared distaste/disdain for "slacktivism" leads to folks discouraging potentially effective collective action in one of the limited contexts where online protest has a chance of having any effect.
It's a hoodie.
If only there had been another widespread, wasteful prior use of expensive and power hungry compute equipment that suddenly became less valuable/effective and could quickly be repurposed to run LLMs...
Same here. There's plenty I might like to change here and there in life, but absolutely nothing on this front. Celebrating 11 years in a few weeks, best decision I ever made.
Now, the first time... Well, second time's the charm, it would seem.
Reason number 5,378 to date/marry someone who's bi. ๐