u/Debster1486

Just got back from a week in Shanghai and my dumb mistake was letting Rednote and Dianping pick my meals for the first three days. Sorted by highest rated, picked whatever had hundreds of glowing reviews. Six meals not counting breakfast, six disappointments. No way 2000 real humans gave five stars to food that tastes like absolutely nothing. Also noticed most of these places had a little sign on every table saying leave a Dianping review and get a free drink or dessert. Waiters would go around halfway through asking tables to review. They never asked us though, probably because they saw we were foreign.

The pretty ones are the worst. Found a few spots on Rednote that looked gorgeous, showed up, massive line. Finally got seated, nobody was eating, everyone was filming or rearranging plates for photos. Took one bite and understood why. Ingredients died for nothing. Whole business model is vibes for content, not food for humans.

The decent meals I had were from restaurants recommended in the trip package I bought. Half the dish names on Dianping and Rednote translate into something completely nonsensical so I never knew what anything tasted like or what was in it, but the trip package actually broke down the flavors and ingredients for each recommended dish which helped a lot. Street stalls with no online presence were also great. And when I really didn't want to gamble again, McDonald's and KFC counted as decent food at that point.

Anyway use the apps but don't trust ratings blindly. If a place looks more like a photo studio than a restaurant your stomach is going to regret it.

The strangeness started six days after my son was born.

I remember because it was his Shashti - the sixth day, an auspicious day to celebrate the birth of a newborn in our household. I was in the kitchen making tea for the ladies who had come to bless the baby, hunched over a bit due to my emergency C-section.

I was pouring the tea through the strainer when I first noticed it.

I could see the handle of the strainer clearly through my fingers. The topmost tips of my right-hand fingers were missing. The part that holds the nails. Just... gone. I put the strainer down and stared at the stubs. There was no pain. No injury. Yet, no fingernails.

I blinked, rubbed my burning, sleep-deprived eyes, and looked again. Still gone.

I know pregnancy does weird things to the body, and obviously to the mind, but this was clearly too much. The terrifying part was that I could still feel things with my phantom fingertips. I could feel the cold granite of the countertop. I could trace patterns in the water droplets. Heck, I could even hold up the tea strainer, effortlessly pour the liquid into the cups, and arrange the saucers and biscuits on the tray.

Then where on earth were my fingertips? Why were they invisible to me?

I wanted to run to somebody—anybody—and ask if they could see it too, but how would that sound? What do I even say? "Hey, I can’t see my fingertips anymore, can you?"

Luckily, my husband entered the kitchen right then. It was a miracle in itself, as he rarely visits the kitchen.

"Is the tea ready? They are waiting," he said.

Now was my chance. I held up my hand near his face. "I spilled some tea on my hand, can you take a look?" I asked. If there was something off about my hand, he would tell me immediately.

Instead, he took a close look and shook his head. "You really must be more careful now. You have to take care of the baby as well. Do your work slowly...with care."

"You really don’t see anything wrong with my hand?" I placed my hand on his, desperately hoping he would notice the lack of physical mass.

He looked at my hand less like a loving husband, and more like a scientist observing a distant meteorite. "No, seems fine. Just pour some water on it and I’ll get you an ointment."

He rushed out as quickly as he’d entered. Needless to say, no ointment ever made its way back to me. A postpartum "mom brain" is just a normal, everyday male brain, I suppose.

I initially brushed it off, thinking the severe lack of sleep was playing cruel tricks on my eyesight. But as the afternoon went on, it remained clear as day: no fingertips on either of my hands. I thought this had to be the weirdest situation I’d ever find myself in.

Boy, was I wrong.

All the ladies were upstairs, discussing their early days of motherhood. Some described having severe brain fog all day, forgetting everyday things. Some described the physical ailments that cropped up after giving birth, like chronic joint pain or liver problems. One aunt in particular described how she almost died while giving birth to her twins.

She described it in such a casual way that I briefly forgot about my own missing fingers.

"There I was, stretched out on the operating table, bleeding out after my first one came out," she said. "The doctor went to fetch some things -I think to stop the blood loss. But then I felt something else. Something was coming out. I had just enough strength to reach down there, catch my second child, and scream... and then everything went black. In those days there were no ultrasounds, and nobody knew there were two. They later told me I was half dead, but my recovery was a miracle."

She then looked at me with a sad, hollow smile. "I think I never really recovered from that trauma."

My mother-in-law couldn’t resist narrating her own tale of bravado, a story I had been forced to hear every single day during my pregnancy. How she walked five kilometers to the nearest hospital while in active labor and delivered my husband.

She added, "Girls these days want the easy way out and go for a C-section... in our days, it was either a normal delivery or death." She laughed out loud, heavily stressing the word 'normal.' According to her, medical advancement to help women survive was abnormal.

I served the ladies their tea, completely ignoring my mother-in-law's boisterous and stupidly insane takes. Apparently, we were only blessed with a son because of her intense prayers and fasting. If praying to random gods and believing in ancient superstitions were an Olympic sport, she would be a gold medalist.

"Finally, our tea is here?" she announced as she saw me enter the room. Typical of her not to notice me, but only what I brought to the table. Anyway, I don’t think I need to go into detail about our relationship. There is no love there. Only convenience.

And besides, this post isn’t about my mother-in-law, no matter how much she tries to make everything about herself.

That was also the day another weird thing happened. And I really want to ask the other new moms on here if you have ever experienced anything like this.

I noticed a weird smudge in the room that day.

I don’t know if calling it a "smudge" is the most apt way to describe it. It was roughly the size of a person, and just... I don’t know, the air just felt entirely wrong in that specific spot. It moved around the room like a living person. It was kind of like a dust devil, but without the dust, the wind, or the noise.

Nobody else seemed to mind it. People moved around it seamlessly, as if it were just a piece of familiar furniture.

I am writing this down right now so I don’t forget. Of late, I have been forgetting a lot. My brain seems to be in a state of constant, suffocating fogginess.

But I know what I saw. And something I saw made my blood go completely cold before I left the room.

As the blurry, distortion of air drifted past the couch, my mother-in-law looked right at it.

And she smiled at it, a big wide unmistakable grin.

Post is pretty much the title - I have a 50k voucher from Helios and I have the Tissot PRX on my list. Anything else? I have a super tiny wrist and if possible I wanted an automatic in this budget.

Thanks.

Tengo un portátil algo antiguo con Windows 10 y Office 2019 todavía va bastante bien.

Quería probar Office 2024, pero no sé si consume más recursos o si realmente cambia algo importante para uso básico.

También he visto que mucha gente compra activaciones en páginas alternativas porque la diferencia de precio es enorme comparada con la oficial. ¿Qué tal os ha ido?

CH : https://weidian.com/item.html?itemID=7513788178

BLCG : https://weidian.com/item.html?itemID=7691631028

Long-time lurker, first time posting because I need a sanity check from people who've been here.

Three weeks ago I picked up a new req. Comp was tight but the client said it was "flexible." Gut told me something was off, but the brief looked clean enough so I went for it.

Today: I've gone through pretty much every active candidate I can find in this metro, ran dozens of intro calls, sent three rounds of comp data to the client — and they still won't move on salary. I'm watching the clock run out and I already know how this ends. The worst part isn't the lost time. It's that I felt it on day one and talked myself into it anyway.

Two things I'd genuinely love to hear from this sub:

Has anyone else taken on a req that turned out to be impossible? What were the signals you wish you hadn't ignored — comp gap, JD red flags, hiring manager behavior, something else?

How do you actually evaluate whether a req is fillable before committing? Is it pure pattern-matching from years in the seat, or do you have something more concrete — a checklist, market data you pull, questions you ask the client upfront?

Not looking for "you should've pushed back harder," I'm already there. Just trying to figure out if there's a better way to make this call earlier, or if every recruiter just learns it the hard way over and over.

I used to be the person who defended paying for multiple AI tools at the same time.ChatGPT for general work，Claude for long writing and structure，Gemini for search-adjacent tasks，Perplexity for quick research. Midjourney or image tools when I needed visuals. A few coding assistants on top of that. Each tool had a slightly different strength, I thought building a “proper AI workflow” meant keeping whole stack active.Now I’m starting to think stack itself has become part of the problem.

The productivity gain is no longer as clean as people make it sound. Every tool has its own limits, personality, failure modes, model changes, usage caps, pricing changes, and weird moments where something that worked perfectly last month suddenly feels worse.

So instead of simply “using AI,” I end up managing AI.

I have to remember which model is better for what kind of task. I have to move context between tools. I have to double-check outputs ，rebuild prompts when a model update changes the tone or behavior ，decide whether a tool is actually worth keeping active this month or whether I’m just afraid of losing access to something I might need later.

This last point is easily overlooked. Many AI subscription expenditures are not based on the real value of each day, but on anxiety. Maybe I will need it for my next project. Maybe this model will get better next week. Maybe I'll fall behind after cancellation. Maybe others will use it better than me.But when I look at my real usage frequency, the situation is actually very confusing. I use an AI tool every day in some months. I hardly touch it in some months. Sometimes Claude is very important in a week of intensive writing, and then he doesn't need it at all in the next two weeks. Sometimes ChatGPT takes on most of the work. Sometimes the image tool is only useful in a short project, and then it is put there to eat ash. Value is real, but it doesn't happen on average every month.This makes the current AI subscription model a bit strange. The whole industry has always packaged AI as an always-on working layer, but for many people, it is more like a project-based tool. It is very useful when it is needed, and it is easy to spend more money when it is not needed.

I don’t think the future problem is “AI bad” or “AI good.” I think the real issue is that AI tools are becoming another subscription ecosystem where the user has to constantly calculate access, cost, reliability, and trust.

At some point, the question stops being “Which AI tool is the smartest?” and becomes “Which tools actually deserve to stay active in my life every month?”

And honestly, I’m not sure the answer is as many as the industry wants us to believe.

I thought I was “bad at visual ideas,” Midjourney made me realize it wasn’t really the problem. Problem was that I had feelings, references, and vague images in my head, but almost no vocabulary . I could say “make it cinematic” or “make it look expensive,” but I didn’t really know what I meant . Was it lighting? The lens? The texture? The color palette? The framing? The mood?

After using Midjourney for a while, I started using words I never used before: soft backlight, shallow depth of field, brutalist concrete, overcast daylight, symmetrical composition, editorial fashion lighting, warm film grain, negative space, rim light, wide-angle distortion.

It feels more like it is forcing me to become better at explaining what I actually see in my head.

29 M Rent: $1900/month (+$50 from last update,+$100 from first diary) in the same apartment

renters insurance:$7/month through Lemonade (+$1)

savings contribution: $250/month, although I see it as spendable (-$250/month)

investment contribution: None actively

Donations:$15 monthly to Planned Parenthood

Electric: Varies throughout the year. Past 6 months average to be about $50/month(no change)

Gas: Varies throughout the year. About $65 in the summer and $200 in the winter (no change although this winter has been COLD and pricier as a result)

Wifi: $89 (+$16hmm, I really should negotiate that!)

Phone: $25 for the plan and $34.58 for my iphone payment plan(24 month payment plan with no interest)Subscriptions

Monthly:

accio work: $20/month

Podcasts: $7/month

NY Time Sunday newspaper: $20

Dashpass: free through my credit card

looking for advice on monthly expenses....

I've had my eye on these two for a while but kept going back and forth — honestly they look a bit boring to stick with long-term. Then I recently stumbled across another one called Focusaur. The dino hatching thing while you focus is pretty cute, and I really like the anti-phone-pickup feature.

So if anyone here actually backed Flow Timer or Zone Timer (or better yet, tried all three), I'd love to hear your thoughts. How do they compare? Which one would you actually recommend sticking with?

Appreciate any input 🙏

My kids have just started play group. I have twins - a boy and girl. Me and my husband work from home and so have no issues in dropping the kids off and picking them up.

But apparently that's a huge deal...for the other moms. And I mean that in a really sad way.

Out of the 15 - 20 moms I meet, there is only one dad that comes to drop and pick up.

Two moms are heavily pregnant, come in a stuffed toto and have to do all the housework themselves inspite of living in a joint family.

At least six moms come with infants who need feeding.

They all wake up in the morning, finish the household chores, prepare tiffin for husbands and kids, iron uniforms and clothes. Obviously the husbands have to go to work, so that's all they do.

And here is the kicker...there was a school holiday and these husbands have the nerve to tell their wives, "tumhara toh accha hai, Aaj aaram karogi'...as if the wives will be sleeping all day. You leave these sperm donors with their kids for a couple of hours and the dad will be drowning cluelessly.

Rant over. Happy Mother's Day.

I've seen a lot of mixed reviews about Chongqing online but I just got back and I think those people got it wrong. There's way more to this city than people give it credit for.

I booked everything through Trip.com ahead of time and grabbed an itinerary package from EasyGo China to save time on planning. Ended up visiting Hongya Cave and Qiansimen Bridge at night, saw the monorail go through a building at Liziba Station, walked around Ciqikou for the old architecture, and checked out Kuixing Pavilion where you think you're on the ground but you're actually dozens of floors up. The locals I met were really friendly.Even with the language barrier people would pull out their phones and use translators to help.

The real surprise though was a hotpot place hidden inside a residential building. I'd heard that Chongqing hotpot comes with a lot of ingredients you won't find anywhere else, so I followed the itinerary's recommendations and ordered pig brain, duck intestine, duck blood, beef tripe, and a whole bunch of other organ meats I'd never tried before. Not gonna lie, I was genuinely a little scared before digging in. But the taste completely caught me off guard. The pig brain and duck blood had a texture kind of like tofu but slightly different, and not weird at all. The duck intestine and tripe were nice and crunchy. I'm writing this now and I can still taste it. If you go to Chongqing, definitely check out one of those local spots and give it a try.

One last tip. Do not use Google Maps in Chongqing. The city is built on layers and Google can't handle it. Use map and follow the photos in the itinerary, or you will get lost.

I work in real estate sales and deal with a lot of client calls and property viewings every day.

The main issue is I often miss details — budget ranges, preferences, small requirements — especially when I have multiple clients in a day. Writing everything down manually just doesn’t keep up.

I’m thinking of getting a simple AI recorder that can transcribe conversations so I can review later instead of relying on memory.

What I need is pretty basic:

Affordable (don’t want to spend a few hundred just to test)

Can handle long conversations (30–90 mins)

Decent transcription accuracy for everyday conversations

Easy to use during calls or meetings

I’ve seen some cheaper options around $70–$120, but not sure how reliable they actually are. Some people say budget ones cut costs but rely heavily on subscriptions or have inconsistent accuracy

Curious if anyone here is using something like this in sales or client-facing roles.

What’s actually worth it without overspending?