Agreed. Though I find for someone like myself with.. extra ear wax production foam tips get annoying to clean.
In any case, comply is a decent brand, dekoni I find to be better and more comfortable, except they have trouble staying ON the ear bud, so they end up in my ear. I've heard the same from a reviewer who I found out about dekoni from.
Because of the vagueness of the question (and I understand why you wouldn't want to just throw your business out there) the answers will have to be somewhat vague too but I'll try. Really I have no business offering advice, so keep that in mind.
Let's say it's like your example, beating a wall until you hurt yourself. You'll need to seek professional help. It's not that therapy itself will "fix" you, but a professional could give you tools that you can use to help yourself. You can't remove walls, you can't avoid them, it's not really something you could stop yourself from doing easily, and so I would think you'd need assistance.
If you have to avoid therapy and it's something else, maybe a porn genre that you're not proud of, I think you can try some stuff to help. For one, if it's digital and you have it saved, delete it (files, bookmarks, whatever). Do what you can to raise the barrier of entry to partaking in this hobby or fetish. Similar in my mind to someone fighting an addiction with drugs* or even just shitty food, if it's not in front of you you're less likely to think about it. Really, this is something you don't want to do, but you can't seem to stop yourself, so it is a sort of addiction. So, do some study about how people curb addictions and try that stuff. Same if it involves a physical object, if you can, throw it out. Even if it cost a lot of money, the point is you don't want to do it, so get rid of it.
Replace it with something healthy. Going back to if it's porn, since i don't know, replace it with a "normal" genre. Every time you get the urge to partake, do the other thing instead. This is like that advice when you crave something sweet, to eat fruit instead of candy, so it might be hit or miss. But, the point is to get that "release" through better means.
I also keep hearing this idea that your brain can't "tell" when you lie to yourself, and so the way you talk and think about yourself has a huge impact on how you behave. I've never done the deep dive to figure out how much solid evidence is backing this but it's worth a try. Do the mantra in the mirror in the morning type of shit. Even if it feels stupid, who cares, you're allowed to do stupid things. Tell yourself that's not who you are, this is not what you do, and give it time. Do your best to stop shaming yourself when you fail, because you probably will for a little while yet and that's just part of the process. Lie to yourself long enough, and maybe it will stop being a lie.
If what you're doing involves another person, get them involved in your improvement (if you can trust them). That accountability helps a lot of people. If what you're doing affects another person negatively, we're back to the seek professional help, as soon as possible.
For a little while I was using a Xiaomi 14 pro, and one of the AI features it had was that for phone calls you could have an AI answer the phone and basically ask this question. The problem for me is that this feature was only in Chinese.
All these companies are adding stupid shit like photo generation into their phones.. give me the English version of that!
I don't contribute to open source projects (not talented enough at the moment, I can do basic stuff for myself sometimes) but I wonder if you can implement some kind of requirement to prove that your code worked to avoid this issue.
Like, you're submitting a request that fixes X thing or adds Y feature, show us it doing it before we review it in full.
Crunchyroll raised their prices this month and when they did they emailed me a promotion to upgrade to a yearly plan for quite a bit less than normal.
It didn't work, so I went to their support which is now an ai chat bot. It has to transfer you to a real person for you to get one as far as I can tell. It told me, since I'm subscribed in Google play that's why it didn't work, and I can cancel, wait for it expire, then use the promotion to get the deal.
Ok stupid but hey, it's not working for me now, whatever. I do that, yesterday is when it ended so I go to try it again. Same issue, I talk to the glorious chatbot again and now after describing the issue and confirming a couple of things it offers to get me to an agent. "Son of a bitch".
So i get to the agent and they review a few things. NOW that the subscription is CANCELED... They can't FIX THE PROMOTION. But they could have if i didn't! (I specifically asked that). I'm so GLAD this is customer service now!
I was just thinking last night about life a bit. It's a bit of a tangent on how I got there if you'll allow me.
I was following this little thought experiment about consciousness and uploading your brain to a digital format (for later downloading into a new body, or whatever normally happens in sci-fi) and about teleportation (break down and reassemble in the new location style, or copy and destroy style). In either case, since this new consciousness is a "copy" of the original, rather than a continuing of the original consciousness it's not really YOU. If either of these technologies truly existed in those ways you're really killing your current self in order to create some copy that fully believes it's the original you.
In order to not do that thing, obviously for teleportation it'd need to be the bending space or worm hole type thing but for the brain you'd probably have to do some sort of gradual synthetic replacement while maintaining consciousness and even then there's no way to 100% prove that the person is still their original self. Nevermind that this all hinges on the idea that you're even yourself every morning when you wake up. Are you actually that same consciousness or just a new one that wakes up each morning. Either way, that thought took me down the road of how it would probably start which is in the medical field for repairing brain damage and whatnot. Rather than full brain replacement it'd be something like, oh the part of your brain that's responsible for memory is damaged, here's a surgery where we replace that part with some kind of synthetic neuron shenanigan which can restore your ability to create new memories or whatever. THAT thought took me to the idea that, sure for something like that you're still you, just maybe with better memory - but what if we're talking about the parts of your brain that are related to your emotions. Maybe you know, logically, that you love your wife (or whoever) but you don't FEEL that love anymore. Or maybe your joy and happiness and anger are all dulled. When does that stop being YOU. I also had the side tangent thought that when this technology does ever exist, it's probably going to be used to treat mental disorders and probably not be done very ethically, at least at first.
Either way, the point of that is this tangent eventually brought me to the idea that this technology is likely only going to be in it's infancy during my lifetime and that's with an optimistic projection. At my age, and frankly my lifestyle, I'm not likely to survive to the point where there's some runaway longevity, where each year we're extending our lifespan by more than that year. I'm also probably not going to survive to a time where we CAN upload a consciousness, or replace our meat brain with a long lasting synthetic brain. Meaning, I AM going to die. I probably have another 30-60 years if I'm lucky and then I'm returning to the nothingness that I came from. I've already missed out on a ton of life, things I won't be able to ever do (and I'm not even old). I may spend that time working jobs I hate, never getting to some point of "financial freedom" where I can finally do the things I never had the means to do. Hell, I may never find the love of my life, or raise children, or have anyone remember me after I'm gone. Eventually I'm just going to run up against the unbreakable, immovable wall that is my own mortality, and for what?
So then I thought about how people cope with this idea. Eventually a lot of your hopes kind of go away as each thing becomes impossible. Some people find meaning in the finite life, that if you were to live forever then every day becomes meaningless, but that thought just doesn't do it for me. Some people seem to find comfort in just being a ripple in the cosmic ocean. I guess that's the point of something like stoicism, you know you can't control that this happens, you only control your reaction to it. No wonder people have created religions since the dawn of our existence, it becomes quite a scary thought as you get older and start facing the reality of it and the idea that there is some eternal happiness in the afterlife could be comforting. Or, at the least, that you're facing this wall with a bunch of other people. Of course this has also been used to control people. Sure, you're spending your life toiling away now for me, but don't worry! after this lifetime it's eternal happiness!
Anyway, I think I'm coming around to the idea that I'll have to drop some expectations I had about my life and just focus on enjoying the time I have left.
(By the way, despite this sounding depressing, I'm doing fine mentally. It was just a coincidence I was thinking about this last night, at 3am of course lol, and then saw this post the next day.)
Matrix has the same issue as Mastodon did with Twitter/X. People do not want to think about servers, can they talk to their friends, who's running this one, is their data safe (keep in mind that's why they'd be leaving in this case), will it last more than a week, does it have the same features, does it even have content, etc. They just want an alternative that does the exact same things as well without the thing that caused them to leave.
Bluesky worked out, and even then most people are on X still, because even though it's technically something that can federate, it's just something you sign up for normally and use. Plus it had enough of an algorithm that people just have content when they open the app.
Lemmy worked out (less successfully in terms of numbers) because reddit actively spat in your face and said fuck you, you don't get to use this the way you always have, and then strong armed all the communities to keep them from "protesting" anymore. So people who cared enough left, and the community that came up to host enough instances and deal with all the growing pains (RIP lemm.ee) made for a very usable replacement for reddit.
I believe stoat (revolt previously) is an application that's just a clone of discord from a different company, so if my bets were anywhere, it'd be that they take off. For matrix to take off, I would think you need a specific server pushing themselves as the discord replacement, like bluesky basically did and then you'd need a single do everything client that people can use. At least then you'd have the ability to use another server or host your own and still chat with your friends who don't care about all that. Thing is, other than matrix.org i don't know if that exists, and I'm pretty sure a client like that doesn't exist (though I'm not that experienced with it). I have element, element x, and fluffychat on my phone all with different experiences, and it's sort of the same on my desktop.
Agreed. Though I find for someone like myself with.. extra ear wax production foam tips get annoying to clean.
In any case, comply is a decent brand, dekoni I find to be better and more comfortable, except they have trouble staying ON the ear bud, so they end up in my ear. I've heard the same from a reviewer who I found out about dekoni from.