The Dread Pirate Roberts reference is from the movie Princess Bride.

Wesley spends years building up an immunity to a fictional substance called “iocaine powder”, the most deadly substance known to man. He tricks a foe into drinking wine laced with it, killing his foe while he survives.

https://princessbride.fandom.com/wiki/Iocaine_powder

OpenSCAD has its uses, but would hardly classify it as full CAD software. Prusa, I believe, used OpenSCAD for a while but they even moved to Fusion360. FreeCAD would be great if the devs would stop trying to reinvent the wheel in their UI. There is a ton of potential, but it simply isn’t where it needs to be yet.

Fusion360 or SolidWorks are very well established in that space and their shitty license models reflect that.

Still, as a free alternative, FreeCAD is where it’s at. You just really need to understand if it will suit all of your needs and for me, it doesn’t.

Byproducts of burning PET (soda bottle plastic): hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals

No, you can’t go all Dread Pirate Roberts and slowly build up an immunity to those over several years. Try as you might to impress that lady friend, it won’t work.

I think there should be an option (unless there is) for mods to turn off (or hide) voting as needed. That might be an effective way to cancel any downvote brigades. Lemmy really doesn’t have the population for mass vote manipulation now, but it will soon enough.

Hiding all votes can also help mitigate some superficial bias, but not all. I believe that if a person sees a comment with a few dozen downvotes first, they tend not to read the post objectively. After being on Reddit for such a long time (12 years or so), I found that it was super easy to manipulate voting trends if I caught a post or comment at just the right time.

Hiding only downvotes is just silly though. Some register of public opinion, positive or negative, still has its uses, IMHO.

The “midlife crisis” is real. For me, it’s looking for new things to do, cutting out bad habits (drinking) and am trying not to think about how life is actually all downhill from here. I am not going to buy a sports car or anything, but some healthy experimentation with psychedelics does seem to scratch that itch.

I think I rationalized my fear by understanding just how much shit I have seen and I still have another 30 to 40 years left, which is a good thing.

That is why I fell in love with shrooms, TBH. Psilocybin has resurrected a curiosity in me that I haven’t felt in years. I just seemed that at 40 years, there aren’t many situations that I haven’t seen or experienced in daily life. As a side benefit, I have learned how to grow mushrooms.

Edit: haven’t

Ecosystems are fine as long as they aren’t fully locked and limited. That is super rare, I know.

If common protocols are used so that interoperability can happen, that is OK. ZigBee and ZWave would be quick examples off the top of my head.

I am sad about RIF. It blocked all the ads, didn’t show all the shitty awards, was super clean, the video player worked well and the mod tools were awesome.

On a side note, its sad demise led me to Lemmy, so all is well.

Yeah, there is a ton of room for Lemmy to grow. With time, it should get easier for newer people to use it as the apps mature.