Did you escalate? I've found that sometimes CS first response is not always satisfactory but escalating and reminding them of the laws does work.

I tried, but they basically said we can't help anymore in this matter and disconnected me and I saw no further way to escalate. This was in the US. In the EU when I had another problem with Amazon and CS was unhelpful I was able to escalate via relevant authorities and it eventually got someone from Executive Customer Relations to send an actual human-written email apologizing for the whole ordeal and resolving my situation

If you still want to try to resolve this, send me an email (link in bio) and I'll give you the emails of the exec team.

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for your work on Waterfox!

Seconded!

You and sersi are both welcome!

Kiwifarms is a forum for harassing people. Famously Near (the developer behind BSNES/Higan emulator) committed suicide in part due to the abuse he received from that forum. And people on kiwifarms celebrated his death.

Only reason I know of it is from the thread at the time on HN.

I think it's also important to note that Near identified as non-binary. This isn't just a "respect their pronouns!" type of thing, but an important aspect of the KiwiFarms propensity to target trans and queer people.

Notably this also isn't the only suicide attributed to the forum, another trans woman by the name of Chloe Sagal also was harassed by them into suicide in 2018, alongside a Canadian woman named Julie Terryberry in 2016.

The forum takes credit for this (though of course, not officially by the admins), with it being basically an explicit goal. I believe they also had a "kill counter" in a thread to count the people they brought to kill themselves. And the fact that they love targeting trans people, autistic people, and basically everyone who's different is a big part of the whole culture they've build.

Note that I prefer to not expose myself to that, so I invite other people to add info or refute something I said.

>KF is a horrible place, but saying that they bullied this person into suicide is an easy scapegoat and a long stretch >You only get a thread on KF by behaving like a lolcow.

The problem with communities like that is that they leave little to no room for redemption and recovery. Once a group of obsessive nutjobs sets their sights on someone mentally vulnerable pretty much the only way is down.

Any chance to improve your life is just going to be met with an increased levels of harassment to get back the entertainment they so desperately crave. I fully believe that a lot of the more famous "lolcows" that committed suicide or spiraled down to really ugly depths weren't actually lost causes until groups like kf got involved. Just people who were a little bit weird or different who if they got off the net and touched grass for better lack of a term and not been discovered by organized gang stalkers could've lived much different lives.

Nobody deserves that level of harassment even if they are a "lolcow"

Making cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.

I was thinking that and feeling rather proud of being European where we rarely use pre-mix (I've seen some in supermarkets but don't know anyone who uses them).

Then I realized that I typically buy my puff pre-made (made with butter) because it's good enough and it's hard to make at home... Most people I know do the same. Now granted, making puff pastry is quite a bit more involved than mixing ingredients like a pre-mix cookie recipe but still...

Puff pastry is also usually not the main part of whatever you're making but rather just something to hold it together. I see it more as buying pasta to go along my self-made stew - sure I could make it myself but for most dishes I wouldn't notice the difference. The cake mix is much more defining of the taste of the resulting cake so I'd want to have a say as to what goes into it instead of just using someone else's design.

I wonder what is the proportion of that according to countries. In France, there's a label "fait maison" that's supposed to limit how much the baker or restaurateur rely on pre made mix. But besides this if a professional baker uses a premade mix, how do they differentiate themselves (but then I guess from my experience in the US some shops mostly compete on decoration and not taste)

And box mix tend to be overly sweet (at least from my limited experience tasting then when I was a student in the us)

> 1 egg, you get exactly one chance to use an egg that's reasonably sized relative to the other ingredients.

I've always had the habit of weighing the eggs I use and adjusting the rest of the recipe for baking. Some recipes also includes weight of eggs in grams for exactly that reason. (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.

> The cost savings has been incredible, at the expense of a lot of discipline and planning

It's also at the cost of taste. A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)

> (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.

How did you arrive at those numbers? I (an American) have always understood one "standard large egg" to be 50g.

> A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)

How you reheat the food makes a huge difference. Freezer => microwave is noob tier. What you want is something like: freezer => thaw 24-48h in fridge => stir fry for 5 minutes. Make some fresh pasta each time. Start preheating the oven right before your 1130 meeting starts. This stuff doesn't take that long. Adding a bit of extra ceremony on the backside can make a huge difference in the final result.

Oh I very rarely use the microwave explicitly because I rarely like the result (it's a useful tool in the kitchen but reheating is rarely what it excels at)

And a sprinkle of MSG to supplement the naturally occurring that which was probably lost during the cook/freeze/reheat cycle

A friend of ours is an old lady who needed to spend a few weeks in the hospital. While she was there, her house was squatted and removing the squatters took a bit more than a year during which time she was effectively homeless. So I am glad that the laws are gradually being tightened against squatters

Yep, a very common story. Or someone whose parents pass away, they take a few months to put affairs in order and start selling the house, only to find out the house is now being squatted and they have a nightmare to deal with.

But somehow people much prefer the “bohemian squatters sticking it to greedy capitalistic landlords who don’t use their property” narrative.

Apparently in France it’s common enough that you can hire people, effectively goons, to harass and intimidate them into leaving.

I think it was in Andy Mcnab's autobiography, where there was a story of a British SAS (Elite special forces) soldier who came home from an overseas tour to find squatters in his house. Apparently he sent flowers to them while they were in hospital.

Yup that was in France. Now with the law of 2023, it's significantly easier to deal with squatters.

Be careful though when hiring goons, you might get involved with the wrong kind of people.

What's the point of what you wrote here?

Think about that a little more.

It's not uncommon to be able to illegally do something very quickly that would take longer to do legally. I'm sure most of us are already aware of that.

I remember meeting a lot of people by just talking to them in the subway during y daily commute. That happened both in France and Japan. Nowadays with phones it happens a lot less..

I commuted by public transit for around two decades before the ubiquity of smartphones and never experienced or witnessed this.

You spoke with "a lot" of people in Japan on the subway during your daily commute? I am stunned here. Can you provide more details? (Years / location / line?) I find this very hard to believe. Metro trains in Tokyo and Osaka (and suburbs) are basically silent except very late when people are drunk, talking with their friends.

Kyoto 2005 to 2008. Mostly Kintetsu and subway (mostly between Kyoto and Nara). Later keihan from demachiyanagi to shijo kawaramachi. I am the one who often initiated the conversation (apart from some osaka bachans who did initiate. I'm using that term of endearment not criticism despite their fearful reputation Osaka bachans are great). There were also significantly less tourists back then. Made a few friends with whom I still stay in touch. Also met my first wife like this.

I had the same experience of meeting people in the same way in Shanghai in 2004 (bus and subway). And before that, in France，the bus line I took near my university was filled with students.

I spoke with Japanese people on the subway. They were very friendly to this gaijin.

> talking to them [...] Japan

Really struggling to imagine people talking on the subway during their morning commute in Japan!! Culture changes.