Yeah. I wasn’t disagreeing with you.

If anything, I was bolstering your statements against the person who said republicans would love this.

They also want the part where a woman can be controlled by unwanted pregnancy.

I accidentally brought handcuffs into a flight on August 2001. The TSA agent who found them asked what I planned to do with them.

Being a teenager, the answer was obviously that I kept them in my jacket to pull them out and show my high-school friends how quirky and cool I was. But being a teenager, I didn’t realize how endearing that response would be, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, which was somehow better and worse.

“I’m visiting my girlfriend!”

She gave me a slow blink and said “Well, alright then, go get your freak on!” (Or something of a similar sentiment - time has robbed me of the exact phasing.)

‘Iran could develop time travel and kill Milton Friedman!’ JD Vance

‘Iran could develop zero point energy and antigravity tech to leave the planet to die in the hellscape we’ve gleefully created while they travel the cosmos!’ JD Vance

‘Iran could develop couches that chop off dicks!’ JD Vance

Hey, no! You’re supposed to be so upset that I’m wrong that you do significant research for me for free!

I’m posting this wild postulation in the hopes that someone corrects me.

Okay, so a billion years ago a volcanic plume tried to fuck up Michigan and failed, causing the Midcontinent rift system. Then it chilled out for awhile before getting squished by glaciers into going east and making the Adirondack mountains about 20 million years ago. Then it went west due to daylight savings time and made Yellowstone about 2 million years ago.

Not buy their products. Drag them on social media. Give interest to news stories about the product’s users, not the figurehead of one of the vendors, so the news media focuses on them rather than the distraction. Reach out to your politicians and your friends to discuss how product failures are the result of the company embracing AI and don’t forget to highlight the greed that brought us to this fascist economic system. Use, donate to, or even offer your skills to non-LLM FOSS alternatives. Spend your dollars on companies with scruples. Build your own home lab, give up on all technology, get really into self-sufficiency, and go live in the woods to escape the whole system.

I don’t know… something other than giving in. Literally anything other than that.

For all the focus on Scam Altman, we should probably be focusing on the companies that are so quick to abandon their workers on the promise of saving a few bucks.

Until I saw your comment, my (flippant) response to the person you replied was going to be “Because Congress hasn’t figured out how to use Polymarket.”

Which is a far less eloquent corollary to your comment.

It also causes ass cancer, dick cancer, and vulvular cancer!

In my research, I’ve found that most humans have at least one of the following: Mouth, ass, uterus, vulva, or dick. Many of them have 3 (or more!) of those things. A special few have collected the whole set!

Definitely a vaccine worth getting. If your doctor tells you that you’re too old, tell them their knowledge is too old. More importantly, ask them to note in your chart that they have refused preventative medicine against your wishes.

Horner also said Epstein made a $10,000 donation for his research and that he visited the ranch a second time in 2016 with a graduate student “as part of a geology tour”.

Has anyone heard from this student? I would not trust a word of his version of the narrative.

Very probable. I was also not the most economically secure back then. I was trying to save money on a $20 can opener!

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

I wish the article had more details about why they’re convinced it’s a black hole and not a neutron star.

They do say it could be either (once), but then only refer to it as having turned into a black hole through the rest of the article.

That’s the dream. After years I finally got serious about learning/implementing VLANs and have begun to isolate everything out/properly firewall them. Most of the smart home stuff is already Z-Wave/Zigbee, but the few devices that aren’t are mostly already migrated onto a dedicated IOT network, as is the hubs, where only devices that have business talking to each other can even see one another.

I have yet to play with tailscale, but it’s on the list.

I like smart home stuff. I hate my privacy being invaded. It’s a very thin line to walk.

A company recently released a product that promises to be Matter compatible. By the time the product arrived, they edited their product description to say it worked with Matter if you bought their always online hub, created an account, let their hub talk to the internet, and then installed their internet-connected plugin to Home Assistant. (So it’s not that HA talks to these devices, or that it talks to their hub. It logs into the company’s servers to get the current state of the device.)

I wrote a review outlining this. An AI bot sent me a message offering me additional products from this company. (Ha!) And included the line “We strictly adhere to data protection regulations” … in the U.S?

Laughably misleading.

I have (had?) an arms length friend that is prone to making bad choices.
He aspires to be a decent guy, but struggles with making the right choices. He made some pretty bad choices last year.

Cheated on his wife with a coworker that was, er, not someone I’d trust. Got caught. Coworker then got pregnant. A few months later he called me to ask if he could crash in our guest bedroom for ‘no more than three days’ while he cut things off with the coworker and worked on reconciling with the wife. While he was still that coworker’s supervisor and baby daddy, unbeknownst to his supervisors.
Seeing nothing but red flags there, I offered to pay for a hotel room for him for a week, and he never took me up on the offer. My wife’s eyebrows were almost at the ceiling when we got off the phone. She very much appreciated not inviting that mess into our lives. I haven’t heard from him since.

I’m in IT, but not that kind of IT.

Last week I afflicted myself with the Location Services are turned off bug by installing the 23H2 update to duplicate an issue a user in my work area was having.

When I called desktop support, we could not replicate the issue after he remoted in.
He closed the Remote Desktop connection, and the issue reoccurred.
He remoted in. The popup vanished as soon as he connected. We couldn’t replicate the issue. He seemed dubious now. He disconnected. It occurred. I got a screenshot. He reconnected. We looked at the remote connection settings. Remote connections were set to override location. Disabled that. Issue presented. We both had a good laugh.

I made a joke recently that if I were desperate for a job I’d get hired as ICE and quit right after training. But then I realized I might spend more time filling out some of the application, failing the drug test, and attending a 6-minute long interview than I would spend in training before they tried to make me do evil shit. I’d have to quit before I got my ROI.

I hear you, but I would imagine that Musk would retaliate by counter-suing the city and/or state, if for no other reason than spite. And would drag the whole thing out for at least as long as the AI infatuation lasts before abandoning the building for officials to deal with.

A single citizen with a drone and a bunch of glass bottles full of petrol dropped onto the generators, however, would shut down operations immediately.