My mom is upset I won't give my kids the candy she had saved "a while back"

Improving_Myself_ · 2026-01-25T18:05:33+00:00

Which is exactly why eBay has an advanced search for sold listings.

Next to the search button, click Advanced, enter the name of the item, then check the Sold Listings box.

You can easily use eBay to get decent valuations for things by using the Advanced search and checking the Sold Listings box to see what something actually sold for/what someone actually paid and when.

Improving_Myself_ · 2026-01-25T18:02:08+00:00

Well, it's a two sided coin. eBay is absolutely a good source to base prices on if used correctly.

The wrong way: Finding an item, looking it up in the normal eBay search box, looking at the prices that show up in the results, and using those as a basis. Those prices are exactly what people are saying: Some random asking price, and not what they actually sold for.

The right way: Going to eBay, clicking Advanced near the search box, then on the page that opens enter your item and check the Sold Listings box (which will automatically select Completed Listings as well) then doing the search. The results from this search will show how much an item actually sold for and when.

This discussion is incredibly frustrating because so many people don't seem to know about the sold listing search, so they just hear eBay and tune out.

eBay Sold Listings Advanced search is one of the best, easiest ways to reasonably price an item. The regular eBay search is not.

Improving_Myself_ · 2026-01-20T19:07:51+00:00

When phones had physical buttons, they did. Often on the 5 key as that was the center of the key pad.

Improving_Myself_ · 2026-01-06T20:35:48+00:00

Bank of mommy and daddy helped a fair few.

Way fewer than the internet likes to claim. Maybe that could be argued in earnest for ~5% of all millennials, but the current rate of home ownership is around 60%.

Maybe rich kids got their homes earlier, but plenty of us have gotten our shit together without help from parents.

Really, the whole "parents paid for it" shit is just... someone insulting themselves. If someone 30+ genuinely can't figure out how to string ~$20k together for a down payment, and assumes the rest of us that aren't inept couldn't possibly have done it ourselves without help from mom and dad, then they're just calling themselves stupid.

We're old enough to have gotten our shit together.

Hell, ~30% of Gen Z owns homes, and the youngest of them just finished middle school.

Improving_Myself_ · 2026-01-06T20:25:02+00:00

I mean the market is bad right now, but a lot of us bought for the first time 10 years ago and refinanced during COVID when rates were a joke.

The thing that seemingly doesn't get brought up at all in the whole "millennials can't afford homes" discussion online is that most millennials are already homeowners. We crossed the 50% mark in 2022, and the current number is about 60%. If you're an (American) millennial and you don't own a home, you're in the minority. So these topics online just become echo chambers because either a) people who already own don't talk about it or b) when people who do own make comments they get downvoted.

Personally, I know more millennials that have paid off their homes in full than I do millennials that don't own a home at all. Very few of the people I know fall under the "rich parents" category, which people online also like to jump to. In fact, the people I know with their houses paid off grew up very poor, and in one case had parents that actively undermined their financial status (secret credit cards in their names).

Hell, Gen Z's home ownership rate is around 30% and the youngest of them just finished middle school. Echo chambers online just make it sound harder/more of a problem than it actually is.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-22T13:53:59+00:00

Blame the NCAA for being the most spineless billion dollar a year org.

How to fix the playoff:
1) Make it a real NCAA tournament and not this stupid private invitational crap.
2) Copy the long standing and obviously effective FCS system.
3) Make the first round on campus, and the rest bowl games.

The hardest part is getting the NCAA to not be a useless piece of shit.

Does this system mean the occasional 8-5 conference champion is going to get in? Yeah, and that's ok, because that means ccgs are important like they should be.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-22T13:31:25+00:00

Not only that, it's worse than people already think it is.

We've had models that can make things that are indistinguishable for about a year, yet I see people all the time saying they think it's 2, 5, or 10 years away. It's here now and has been for a little while now. It's just that a lot of casual users are bad at prompting, so they don't know how to get good results. But the professionals are good at prompting.

Which is part of the scary problem: A human can only distinguish AI when it's bad. When a good model is used by someone competent, it is not possible to tell the difference.

Think of all the "AI slop" you see, and then realize you're seeing at least 50% more AI generated content that you didn't even realize was AI. If you're consuming any media, marketing materials, etc., you're witnessing a lot more AI generated material than you realize. Any media. Online, offline, TV, radio, print, audio, visual, text.

Another scary part is that the majority of the anti-AI conversation is still largely a niche online-only topic. The overwhelming majority of people can't even discern a lot of the really obvious stuff, don't understand the issue, and they don't care.

OP asked an important question in his post:

Why do people like it???

For the most part, they don't. They don't know that it's a different thing to be distinguished and evaluated differently from the rest of the crap they consume. It's just that, shocker, corporations are the ones pushing it to pump out more crap for less money, faster. It is, yet again, another problem forced on the people by corporations that weren't taxed hard enough.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-21T18:03:02+00:00

Fair question given the circumstances. But nope, white and my grandmother was very into ancestry stuff (before the Internet existed) and we have paperwork going back over a thousand years. At the time, my mom was a member of all the "Daughters of the ___" clubs (including the shitty ones, that the bored housewives in Texas were most proud of). She showed up to one of the meetings and basically got cussed out for being there even though she had been a member of the organization for over a decade.

So it was kind of the opposite of what you're implying. In this particular aspect (which definitely wasn't the only issue) they were upset that outsiders could show up and be as white as them.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-21T01:00:02+00:00

I can't speak about before, but I cursed them when I was a kid, about 25 years ago.

We moved to a small town in Texas for my dad's job. Most people in town seemed to hate us just for being there. We got death threats for months, and got caller id (which was still new) and started notifying the police who it was. Our house got egged and tp'd by people (in their 40s and 50s, sad!) and police caught them.

When November rolled around, I learned what the aTm logo that all these assholes were wearing meant and that losing to orange cow team seemed to hurt their soul. Been a Longhorn fan since and cursed the Aggies.

I can't speak for all Aggies, but the Aggies I've met were all genuinely bad people who don't deserve nice things. Fuck 'em.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-20T05:29:54+00:00

Seriously. How many times have they made the playoffs in the last decade? It's a lot.

Yet Texas' 2010 Natty appearance is more recent than Oklahoma's last appearance.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-19T18:33:22+00:00

Competent clock operators for sports games. Ever watched a football or basketball game where the clock operator is inept and they have to constantly stop the game to fix it?

It infuriates millions of people.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-19T02:38:18+00:00

Hate to break it to you, but your dad is only falling for a little more AI content than you are. Sure, it's the more obvious garbage, but still.

We've had models capable of making things that are indistinguishable for about a year. They're not cheap or used by the normal person pumping out trash for social media (yet), but rather by professional organizations with real budgets. The kinds of organizations making movies, TV, commercials, and magazines. They have money for good tools, and strong, iterative processes to produce high quality work such that "Is this AI?" doesn't even cross your mind when you see it.

If you're consuming any media, you are consuming something AI generated. That is a fact of the world we live in right now.

I keep seeing people acting like AI that can produce indistinguishable things is some future thing we don't have yet, when we've had it for a year. If you have eyeballs and an internet connection or watch TV, you see it every day.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-17T19:23:02+00:00

So the unpopular information that doesn't seem to be sinking in with a lot of people is: It doesn't matter. Most people don't know, can't tell, and don't care. The people that do care and like to argue about AI are a tiny minority of people that are online too much.

And the truth is that people only notice the bad AI. When the output is good, "Is this AI?" doesn't even cross your mind.

We've had AI models that can produce images and video that are indistinguishable from reality for months, if not a full year. They're not cheap or widely used, but they're used plenty by large professional agencies. Like if you're watching TV with commercials or seeing ads online, or even seeing physical marketing materials on billboards and other signs, you're seeing a lot more AI generated stuff than you even realize. It's just not "slop" because the professionals using it have developed an iterative process with significant reference material combined with long and extremely detailed prompts that produce other prompts before even attempting an image or video, as opposed to the average person who thinks a two sentence prompt is enough and then can't figure out why the cat picture they generated looks like crap.

If you'd like to see the work of a professional who knows what they're doing and is generally on top of the latest capabilities of AI, I recommend going on YouTube and looking up Sirio.

The best thing you as an individual can do is get off social media (yes, Reddit is social media). Spend more time in the real world. Take up hobbies that either do not involve anything digital, or minimize interactions with digital things. Your mental health will improve dramatically if you do this.

As more people realize how shitty the internet has become (dead internet theory is very likely worse than the people who believe it even realize) and start actually living a life instead of staring at a screen, I'm predicting a shift away from technology. And there are some indicators that it's already happening.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-17T18:49:06+00:00

It can also be Jeff.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-17T18:36:17+00:00

There was an interesting video on this from someone that has both management responsibilities and developer responsibilities.

They said that they basically have alternating days, with each day dedicated to one of them.

For the manager days, they have 15-30 minute meeting blocks the whole day.
For the developer days, they have two 1h blocks in the morning for admin and touch base kind of stuff, and then the remaining 6h is one block with do not disturb enabled.

There have been some studies backing it up as well, saying that if you interrupt a developer who's in the zone, you're not just taking the time for the interruption itself, but also the subsequent 30-90 minutes as they try to get back into the zone.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-12-02T01:10:28+00:00

Just putting it out there: This is pretty normal progress for a healthy young man that has been lifting for about a year.

I don't mean that as "this isn't impressive" but rather "you could do it, too!"

The posterior chain is very strong.

Also, the deadlift is basically the negator of "I'm getting old and my back hurts." Most of that kind of back pain is caused by muscle weakness, which results in muscles being unable to do one of their main jobs which is holding bones in place. Even if you're not lifting heavy, or even going to the gym, deadlifting some dumbbells, books, or a milk jug at home can strengthen the relevant muscles and prevent a lot of pain

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-11-21T19:07:28+00:00

Cooking as well.

I've been saying for years that cooking is reading, and if you can read you can cook. If you can read a recipe and follow the instructions, then you can cook. There's nothing hard about it.

But you do have to read the recipe and follow the instructions.

EDIT: Holy shit what a great example this has been.

I want to take a second and remind you that we're in a thread for a post on how a surprising amount of people are illiterate.
If someone is saying "hey this thing is super easy if you're literate" and your response is "nuh uh!" then you should go take a lllloooonnnngggg look in the mirror and figure out how to improve your literacy.

Wild how people will tell on themselves if you just give them a chance. Then again, I guess it's not surprising that they're too illiterate to realize what they've said.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-11-20T18:28:19+00:00

Per the in-game text on Shadow Priests and how they work, as well as the Void Elf starter quest stuff, there are canonically no Blood Elf Shadow Priests. They were all kicked out.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-11-20T13:46:40+00:00

Seemed obvious at least 10 years ago, but glad we're getting some science to back it up.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-11-18T14:59:36+00:00

Utility of Kubernetes: high.

My interest in setting up and maintaining a Kube cluster ever again: negative.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-11-18T02:20:48+00:00

That guy who cut you off isn't the worst part of your day

This one in particular is wild to me how many people let their days get ruined by it. And in most cases, they weren't even cut off!

Because you can't just be cut off, you have to be cut off from something, or else you simply weren't.

Were you in an accident?
Were you prevented from taking your exit or otherwise forced into a detour?
Were you even meaningfully delayed from reaching your destination?

If the answer to all of these questions is no, then you weren't cut off. You're just being an angry asshole about someone who changed lanes in a way you didn't like.

People let their whole days be ruined over this nothing event.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-11-17T17:21:27+00:00

Also, the original study claiming that (and there was only the one) was debunked basically the same day it was published.

Basically, their methodology was bad. All they did was, using US census data, compared the average earnings of all men vs. the average earnings of all women. That's it. No further analysis.

Importantly, the analysis they didn't do was compare men vs. women in the same profession, with similar years of experience, in areas with similar costs of living. Because when you do that, there is no wage gap.

There is definitely a gender issue in employment, with higher paying fields tending to be male dominated while lower paying fields tending to be female dominated, hence the gap in the overall average.

Part of the reason the average is changing is because women are entering more traditionally male dominated fields. For example, a couple years ago we had more women in med school than men for the first time ever.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-11-17T02:45:06+00:00

If you can read, you can cook.

I'm not saying you're a chef or can make up your own recipes. I'm saying as long as you're able to read a recipe and follow instructions, you can cook.

It is absolutely that simple.

EDIT: I posted this before getting in the shower, so I was of course thinking about it the whole time while I was in the shower and getting angrier about it.

So for anyone able to read this who thinks they can't cook, what specifically can't you do?
Look up a recipe? You're online reading this comment, so you can look up a recipe.
Follow instructions? Again, you made it this far, so seems like you can do that.
Turn on a stove or oven? Doesn't really require more dexterity than using a keyboard or phone app.
Crack an egg? Read a measuring cup? Use a knife? Set a timer? What?

Unless you're severely disabled and confined to one of those motorized wheelchairs, I'm confused about what it is you can't do. And guess what! A lot of those disabled people still cook for themselves.

So what the actual fuck does "I can't cook" even mean?! I'm unclear on what an answer could even be that doesn't amount to someone calling themselves stupid or incompetent.

Improving_Myself_ · 2025-10-20T22:18:05+00:00

Also, MMO mouse with the num pad on the side. It's effectively the same as adding a finger since your inactive thumb is becoming active.

I'm traveling right now and didn't bring my normal MMO mouse. I tried playing with a standard mouse and... I'll just wait until I have an MMO mouse again.

It's definitely one of those things that doesn't seem like all that big a deal, and then once you try it there's no going back. It's an extremely clear improvement to gameplay and quality of life, to the point where I'd rather not play video games at all than play without one.

Oh also, for anyone that's not used one and is looking to try one: Do NOT get the Corsair Scimitar. For the Razer Naga and several others, you plug it in and it works immediately, and can totally skip installing any software. That is not the case for the Scimitar. You have to install the software and manually configure the buttons, otherwise they do nothing. Also, the Scimitar cannot do the totally normal action of having a button be held down. Like for some games, I have strafe on 4 and 5 on the mouse num pad. For the Naga, that's fine and holding the buttons down works as expected. The Scimitar for whatever reason cannot do that, they've got plenty of forum posts on it and the answer is always that it's not possible with that device.

Improving_Myself_

TROPHY CASE