If it’s like a pleasant tingling through your head, it might be ASMR. It can be triggered by sounds (hence the bajillion YouTube channels), but for me it’s more often when I’m really enjoying thinking about something. It’s a weird sensation for sure.
“Mirroring” isn’t an insult, or necessarily manipulative. It is literally built in to us humans! Our brains have specific portions dedicated to imitation and empathy called “mirror neurons”.
These neurons help us feel what others around us are feeling. It’s why you feel sad when you see someone else being sad. Or why it can make us smile to see someone else having a great day!
The behavior of mirroring someone is a form of social bonding (“See! I’m like you!”) which is the basis of building human relationships.
Having in-jokes and picking up particular quirks of people around us probably has a special jargon to psychologists.
Eating super refined sugar like candy causes a chain raccoon of events in your body to occur:
Your blood sugar spikes. Even in non-diabetic people, eating a sugary treat can cause a spike above 150mg/dL (healthy levels are usually below 100 when fasting and below 130 after eating)
Your body ramps up insulin production to help use the sugar.
Because your levels have (probably) spiked so high, your body produces a lot of insulin, but your digestion isn’t sending any more sugar - you already finished digesting it and got the whole load at once.
Your body burns through all the excess sugar in your system and your blood sugar levels fall… precipitously because there’s still a lot of insulin floating around.
Your blood sugar levels fall low enough that your system decides it must be time to eat.
You get the munchies. And since your blood sugar is now lower than your body wants it to be, you crave something extra carby. …Like more candy.
Repeat this process long enough and your pancreas (which makes insulin) burns out. Congratulations! You now (like me) have Type 2 Diabetes! 🎉✨💫
So… To not eat all your candy at once, do a few things to keep your blood sugar from spiking, triggering cravings for more.
Eat fibrous veggies. And eat them at the start of a meal. Getting the fiber into your digestion first slows down processing the rest, keeping your blood sugars from spiking.
Eat carby treats as dessert to a meal, not on an empty stomach. Same reason as above.
If you’ve really gotta indulge, try to drink a Tbsp of vinegar (diluted in a glass of water, so you don’t melt your teeth) just beforehand. The acetic acid in vinegar interferes with digesting carbs. It’s not as good as broccoli, but it helps. (Citric acid does not work like this.)
In addition to the other tips here (Especially keeping treats out of sight), keeping your sugar levels from spiking and crashing helps a lot to curb carb craving.
I mean, yeah, sure. …but I’m still conflicted about the local heroin addicts standing in the frozen aisle scarfing a bucket of ice cream.
I mean, I don’t really give a shit about the theft, but they tend to stand there with the door open and thaw the rest of the ice cream while they’re at it. It’s enough of an issue locally that a couple of local chains have literally started chaining up their ice cream like it’s the goddamn crown jewels. I just want non-crystallized ice cream!
Also… In my experience, people mostly don’t steal food outside of cases like having the heroin hungries. Food banks do an okay job at keeping people fed at least. (Aside: When you donate to your local food bank, donate money, not food! They can buy much more food in bulk - your dollars will go farther that way!) Mostly, I see people stealing things like resaleable electronics or OTC drugs that have useful precursor chems.
Don’t get me wrong - I know fuckin’ Krogers can take it. I just see this meme about seeing people stealing food and like… That’s mostly not a thing. Food banks and food stamps work okay. They aren’t great, the food often sucks - but generally speaking, you don’t have to steal food to survive when you’re poor in America. You might need to steal drugs and airpods though.
I got the earwax but good. I usually abuse qtips too.
But.
If you want to really know what a clean ear canal is like, get a squeeze bulb. You fill it with hot water (hot like tap, not like boiled) and then hydroblast your ear holes until all the wax melts and runs out.
When you get rid of a real bad wax ball… Aww man, it’s amazing. It’s like you just removed earplugs. The world is suddenly so much louder.
Gentoo is the og, “Linux from scratch” distro, where you compile everything yourself. Arch is kinda like that, except everything is compiled already. 😁
You still select all the parts of your Linux system, from the desktop environment (if any) all the way down to which initialization system you want to use. Along the way, you’ll dive into a lot of the various text files Linux uses for configuration and learn which files live where.
It’s a very thorough dive!
If you’re looking for reading material about Linux though, I don’t really have any books to recommend offhand… I will say that the basic tooling in Linux, the POSIX-standard stuff, like grep, vi, sed, and so forth remains mostly unchanged (at least in all the important ways) from year to year. Some of it has remained essentially the same since the seventies, so even a six year old book will still be able to cover all of that just fine.
The things that it would not be good for would be some of the more recent developments in, say, UI tech, like the slow, but ongoing migration from X to Wayland.
Command line scripts and config files are likely to largely be the same (though a few files have a tendency to move around depending on the distro).
Tools for administration outside of the venerable POSIX tooling is gonna be a crapshoot in book-form. Still, it’ll give you a place to start from!
Honestly, it depends on what you’re trying to do with your machines. If you are looking for a stable desktop environment, you don’t need to dive that deep. (At least, to start.) Just install the defaults, and read a basic tutorial on using the Bash shell. (Even if you move away from bash, lots of scripts and such use it by default, so a passing familiarity is highly recommended.) Especially learn about installing programs with the package manager. (‘apt-get’ for Mint and other Debian-based distros.) The defaults are gonna be generally sane, especially in Mint. If you want to get into deeper waters from there, you’ll have a stable base to start from.
But. If you want to configure your machine, top to bottom and really understand how Linux works… Install Arch. Not even joking. Arch installation docs are very detailed and walk you through setting up every part of your Linux system. Be prepared for your first time to take a few days to complete. It’s a lot to take in. Start with a computer you can leave offline for awhile.
I learned a ton by installing Arch. And then I went back to Debian-based distros because there was less active maintenance. (Note that this was over a decade ago, so things may be better now. YMMV). This is definitely Learning The Hard Way, but it’s honestly the most effective thing I can think of.
Linux is insanely customizable. You can swap out and/or customize pretty much every aspect of it. It can be overwhelming. I recommend taking things on a bit at a time, but I’ve rarely used software that’s as easy to find free support for.
I built myself a HUD using a VuFine LCD and a raspi Zero W. It runs a custom TUI I wrote for myself that provides an interactive terminal session surrounded by configurable text widgets.
Currently, I have widgets configured to display the date/time, the weather (near-term and week), and CPU/Mem utilization. With the main display running my combined to-do/calendar app to help keep me organized.
It’s tacky as hell, bulky and exposed wires, but I love it.
In fact, I made my own. It’s fugly and dorky as hell, but it’s everything I want and nothing I don’t.
I used a VuFine LCD eyepiece and hooked a raspi Zero W to it. Input via Bluetooth keyboard. Not a lot of screen real estate, so I went full CLI and wrote my own TUI with widget support so I can have an “active” app, plus a bunch of passive data widgets.
As others have mentioned, it’s not quite that simple.
For starters, you can absolutely remove the word “fuck” from all the training data. Now it’s literally impossible for the AI to “know” the word. But what do you do with the training data? Do you replace “fuck” with a different token? “****” perhaps? Or do you just drop the data entirely?
Giving “offense” is much more complex than just a single word. See, if we just replace the token, the AI may still decide that “Go **** yourself” is a perfectly valid response to a query. On the other hand, if you drop all instances of "fuck"from the data, your AI will just learn offensive euphemisms instead: “You can shove your request where the sun don’t shine”
Worse, there are plenty of sexual / offensive phrases that are built up from perfectly innocuous tokens. “Prone bone”, for instance.
The goal with these (and really almost all) AI models is for them to be “helpful, honest, and harmless”. Simply alerting or replacing a single token (or even combination of tokens) doesn’t really help, because the AI is modeling concepts, not just individual words.
All of this to say that the problem being solved is not to stop an AI from saying “fuck” - it’s to build an AI that doesn’t want to.