> Once I started commuting, it happened a lot less as I built up immunity.
To give another anecdotal evidence: before COVID I used to catch 3 to 4 colds per year. Winter was basically a nightmare season where I was always living in fear of when I would get sick next. After COVID I started wearing an N95 in populated places. As a result, I went to 0 cold per years instead of getting sick even more often because of the additional virus in town. Now I feel I can live normally in winter without always worrying of getting sick and I always feel healthy.
I tried switching to a regular surgical mask (and in general being less careful) to try to find a good middle ground between cost, appearance and protection; while I did not catch colds I did get COVID at the same time as unmasked people around me, so I'm back to N95s (this was likely following something like hours and hours of continuous exposure so makes sense a leaky surgical mask did not prevent it). (my bout of covid was quite mild fortunately; but first time being mild does not mean future ones will be or won't lead to long-term symptoms).
Some people told me that wearing masks will "weaken" my immune system, I still need to see that; after two/three years I just feel healthy and this is refreshing after decades of getting sick all the time.
Plus, instead of the advice of "cook your own food to eat well, sleep well, do sports" that probably requires something like 28 hours per day with a standard-issue job while likely not being as effective as respiratory protection, putting a mask on takes only 30 seconds per day. That's probably good general advice anyway, but not the shortest path to solving the "getting sick often" problem.
Plus, a big part of an engineer's job is understanding what the system is doing and how. And correctness. Letting LLMs write everything without a deep review that would take at least half the time it would take to design and write the thing manually does not seem to meet that goal.
I think the point is not that one should not look at RAM use, but be careful when looking at it since total RAM use may include the amount that is used for disk cache which will fill to use whatever is available (and will be freed back if necessary).
It makes sense to watch memory use but one should make sure to discount the amount used for disk caching from the total.
Somewhat related: more than half of my Firefox extensions are to fix YouTube (no shorts, no autoplay in playlists, more videos on the home page, no AI dubs or title translation (plus sponsorblock)). I don't hate it but I hate its progressive enshittification.
Though that's quite different from X; while the issues with YouTube are mostly plain old enshittification, the issues I have with X are more political (thus, I do hate it).
> Your software may gain a reputation of being crash-prone
Hopefully crashing on unexpected state rather than silently running on invalid state leads to more bugs being found and fixed during development and testing and less crash-prone software.
I guess people really don't like putting something on their face. Nobody advices only washing hands and being generally healthy against getting STIs; the advice is blocking the pathogens in the first place, I'm not sure why our lungs don't deserve as much protection.
(plus masking makes the air more humid which helps with the dry air I feel)
In-flight is quite risky: long-haul flights have much more covid transmission than short flights, which should not happen if transmission only occurred during takeoff and landing.
Interesting, although it's worth noting that the study specifically calls out that “Third, we cannot exclude other risks in air travel beyond in-flight risks, e.g., queuing for security or customs or boarding the plane, as well as the waiting time on the runway or transfers to terminals in public buses”.
(To the people who downvoted that comment: shame on you)
Not everyone is the same. My teeth and gums are not that good and I definitely feel much better brushing them after every meal (though I'm aware I should wait after acidic food).
(time-wise, I started increasing brushing after the situation got worse. The root cause for the worsening was not seeing a dentist for two years. Don't do that, definitely see a dentist periodically. And the dentist seems happy with my brushing decision, need to do as much as I can to prevent plaque formation)
For airplanes, I buy three small bottles of water before flight (15hr flight). And I use that for drinking, rinsing and washing my toothbrush. While we cannot bring bottled water from outside the airport to the embarking area, there are usually shops in that area that sell small bottles.
To give another anecdotal evidence: before COVID I used to catch 3 to 4 colds per year. Winter was basically a nightmare season where I was always living in fear of when I would get sick next. After COVID I started wearing an N95 in populated places. As a result, I went to 0 cold per years instead of getting sick even more often because of the additional virus in town. Now I feel I can live normally in winter without always worrying of getting sick and I always feel healthy.
I tried switching to a regular surgical mask (and in general being less careful) to try to find a good middle ground between cost, appearance and protection; while I did not catch colds I did get COVID at the same time as unmasked people around me, so I'm back to N95s (this was likely following something like hours and hours of continuous exposure so makes sense a leaky surgical mask did not prevent it). (my bout of covid was quite mild fortunately; but first time being mild does not mean future ones will be or won't lead to long-term symptoms).
Some people told me that wearing masks will "weaken" my immune system, I still need to see that; after two/three years I just feel healthy and this is refreshing after decades of getting sick all the time.
Plus, instead of the advice of "cook your own food to eat well, sleep well, do sports" that probably requires something like 28 hours per day with a standard-issue job while likely not being as effective as respiratory protection, putting a mask on takes only 30 seconds per day. That's probably good general advice anyway, but not the shortest path to solving the "getting sick often" problem.
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