I feel this too. I could only guess at the cause. Maybe it's just the demographics of social media swinging younger, or those struggling simply being more vocal online. Both? Neither?

I'm an older millennial, but do own a home and have kids. I have friends and acquaintances, - some who didn't go to college - that also own homes and have kids. Sure, the houses might be modest (and include PMI payments for some), and nobody's taking lavish vacations every year, but it's certainly not as bleak as my social feeds always make it out to be.

Same the normal ads aren't much of an issue for me, especially since some are skippabke. But about a year or so ago, I was getting 30 minute ads. They were skippable, but if I was just playing the shows in the living room while making dinner in the kitchen or whatever, I had to constantly go hit the button on the remote or be stuck watching 30 minute infomercial for a product I'd never even consider buying. Are they still allowing these long ads?

You're absolutely right, which is exactly why it's just a marketing term now (imo). There's amazing games that stay in early access for years and years with near monthly content updates, but at the same time, some early access games are complete garbage and the devs never intend to complete the game. They leave it as ea to sell copies to people who hope it will one day get better.... But never does.

Sometimes it's obvious it's abandonware that hasn't had an update in two years, but sometimes not so obvious.

People can form strong psychological associations with alcohol too. Get blackout drunk a few times on tequila in college? That person is more likely to tell you that tequila hits them harder than other liquors, or that they can't drink it because it makes them sick.

Early Access is just a marketing strategy these days anyway. I have a couple of games in my library that have been "early access" for nearly a decade. For all intents and purposes, the games are complete, but the devs just keep adding new features. Outside of the major AAA companies, games these days seem to just be ever-evolving, so long as sales are enough to keep the dev interested in adding new features.

I agree with you here. There may be a better service out there, but I certainly haven't found it yet. I use Spotify in my car (via USB to my phone), in my kitchen, master bath, living room and kids rooms on Google mini's or Amazon Echos... And I don't have to go out and download anything, it just plays what I want when I want it.

A laser pen is another random thing from which to salvage a lens. They typically habe a plastic lens to focus the beam of light. With care, it can be removed from the laser pen and used for macro shots.

Really curious what the dead giveaway was for using chatGPT. I feel like most cover letters are already written to sound super flowery and exaggerated.

It's shown right there in the thumbnail. The text reads "Sponsored recommendation". After some initial conditioning, it seems easy to ignore it after a while, just like the first few Google results or other ads seen across the web.

I've been getting a lot of these. It was obviously low effort on LinkedIn's part, so I've been giving the same amount of effort by using chatGPT to write my contributions. Garbage in, garbage out.

I write a lot of emails for work, but I'm not the most eloquent writer, so I get wordy.

I sometimes feed my email into chatgpt and ask it rewrite it to be more concise, but remain in a friendly but professional tone. Boom, done.

You may enjoy the YouTube channel, Road Guy Rob. He covers a lot of these issues and more. It's a niche channel for sure, but can be fascinating if you're into that kind of thing.