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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • I understand. I don’t instantly block someone, but if the choice is between arguing pointlessly and blocking them or the community, I’ll block and move on. This does impact how useful the site can be for me, but I don’t think using it less is a bad thing.

    I’ve come to the conclusion that social media is simply bad for a person, because I think it amplifies negativity. I’m not sure if it’s because we can’t see each other, or if it’s the asynchrony preserving what might have been a fleeting nasty thought and echoing it undiminished into the future, or that and more. I can’t think of a way to fix it - at least, not a way other than being the change I want to see, but it’s hard (as you’ve found) and takes a heavy toll on my emotionally-dysregulated ass. And sometimes I’m not the change I want to see - said emotional dysregulation is a bitch to manage.

    Maybe that’s what community is, a constant struggle to communicate effectively with other people. Or maybe platforms like lemmy and reddit only claim to offer community, but don’t really. Maybe they can’t, with all the pseudonymity. Maybe nowhere can, nowadays, with so many bad-faith actors seemingly infiltrating every online space that exists.

    I’m sorry you feel beaten down by it, bud. I don’t have answers, but you’re not alone. As a maker, remember: everything you build will outlast the negativity. The blizzard of shit takes will wash away with time, posts being deleted to save space and so on. Your creations will be shared and preserved by the people that like them and find them useful. I take solace in that, personally; maybe you can find some too.

    Edit: top lel. I haven’t read this yet but the headline jumped out at me after having just posted the above: https://english.elpais.com/lifestyle/2025-01-07/the-internet-hasnt-made-us-bad-we-were-already-like-that-the-mistake-of-yearning-for-the-friendly-online-world-of-20-years-ago.html




  • The brick was probably just citric acid. Buy a bag from your local supermarket, you’ll find it in the kitchen section probably as a crystalline powder, and dump some of that in the humidifier water to also prevent buildup.

    Fun fact, you can also run a larger amount of it through your empty dishwasher instead of those dishwasher cleaner packs; those are mostly citric acid too. Cheaper, and no horrible fake lavender scent or whatever it is they like to put in the packs.

    Edit: the bricks could also have been hypochlorous acid which is available from various vendors:

    • https://berkshireezbleach.com/
    • https://efchlor.com/water-purification/
    • https://effersan.com


  • That is simply not correct in any way, shape, or form.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/ni.3069

    In addition to housing an extensive retinue of cells of the adaptive immune system, the lungs have other critical defensive abilities provided by the respiratory epithelial cells. Whitsett and Alenghat describe how the respiratory epithelium juggles its role as the surface of gaseous exchange with its ability to actively combat infectious agents and harmful particulate matter. On its most basic level, the epithelium represents a physical barrier that produces mucus, which entangles and sweeps away damaging agents via the action of the mucus ‘escalator’. However, even surfactant proteins, which are involved mainly in diminishing surface tension, ‘moonlight’ as antimicrobial molecules and are able to opsonise bacteria. The respiratory epithelium is also able to directly sense pathogens and respond via the release of antimicrobial peptides or signal escalation of the immune response through their production of the cytokines TSLP, IL-25 and IL-33. Collectively, these innate processes are usually able to maintain near-sterility of the lungs without the intervention of ‘conventional’ cells of the immune system.

    It’s not necessarily “more dangerous” to breathe pathogens than consume them, the issue with evaporative humidifiers is that they don’t get cleaned as much as they should so the bacteria keep growing and growing and spraying more and more into the air until they overwhelm your immune system and make you sick. By contrast, you eat something bad and it’s one and done and out of your system (usually, assuming it’s not really nasty).