I don’t know where you got that idea, but public tap water is federally regulated in the US (at least for now). Bottled water is popular because of marketing, not because tap water is unsafe.

Maybe Pac-Man. Wandering around a maze eating all day isn’t that different from my current life.

Spindrift ruined it for me.

For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.

Stopped eating so damn much.

I read the The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker (who recently died, sadly) and followed his advice.

Leaded gasoline.

This post is basically what the Lemmy community has become, in a nutshell. I thought there would be a mass exodus from Reddit but it seems like the only people who came here and stayed are far out on the fringe. Between this kind of stuff and “I refuse to own a car because the infotainment system is not open source!”, I find myself more and more gravitating back to Reddit for some normality.. which is a hell of a thing to say.

I suppose that's true. Rereading my comment, it's a bit over the top. If I pretend now I don't know anything and start at http://home-assistant.io, it's not that hard to scroll down, see the thing, and buy it. I don't know exactly how I got so off-track when I tried. Probably I knew "a little too much", as in the words "home assistant blue" in the back of my head, Googled for that and got distracted by "I need to understand why there are two boxes and one isn't for sale anymore, so exactly what is the difference is between them?".

Coming back to that naive journey, though, I could see how someone could end up buying Green with no wireless dongle or Yellow with no CM4 (especially since you can't get one).

I still think that for the limited size of this ecosystem, choosing a box shouldn't be confusing. I can now understand where it came from, though, once I realized that HA Yellow was designed around a Raspberry Pi board that became unobtainable, so they had to go with a different architecture.

I have ADHD.

Not at all. This is not a moral judgement about anyone else. Just answering the question.

I guess I've reached a point in my life where I can easily afford to buy something if I want it, especially in the price range of a video game or book. I used to do all that stuff, not to get back at the man, but because it was the only option that was accessible. Eventually the hassle factor of piracy kept going up while just paying for it became an accessible choice.

Nah, you're good.

I've never been happier and more productive than when I was working in Perl. It's a language that, at its apex, had a community of incredibly smart and creative people evolving it and its ecosystem. It's a practical, powerful, multi-paradigm language that let me get work done with a minimum of fuss.

Perl was a language that felt like an extension of my thoughts, like it was working with me and for me. Most other languages feel like I am working for the compiler rather than the other way around. Or at the very least, spending unnecessary effort satisfying some language designer's personal pet peeve, which constantly takes me out of the flow of the job I'm trying to do.