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Wellness Wednesday for September 25, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Oh, they're finally rolling that out to more people?

I've noticed that selective rollouts mute opposition to anti-customer policies, and I'm sure they have too. A/B testing+user data gives you a lot of tools to boil the frog slowly by never hitting a critical mass of resistance.

As an annoying side effect, it also slows down helping people affected by updates. When YouTube rolled out forced AV1 encoding to 1% of people and their old laptops started roasting from the strain, 99% of people told them "what? I'm not seeing any problem. It's probably on your end".
I've had to walk several people through forcing vp9 who are tech-savvy enough that they could have googled/reddited a solution themselves if the change had been sudden enough to hit popular awareness.