Yellow Mountain Imports is great.

Yes, unfortunately, and it’s healthy to recognize that. Good on ya.

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

My big thing is a new TV. We have a 46” LCD from 2009 that often refuses to fully power on. I’ve been dragging my feet on replacing it, just cuz I know the research is gonna be demoralizing, with how dystopian a lot of the “smart TVs” are. But now there’s some real time pressure, so I guess I have to.

Coincidentally, I was already planning on upgrading my personal dev machine (to an M4 Mac Mini) and my retro handheld (to a Retroid Pocket 5), as well as my first dip into XR glasses with the Viture Pro. So I’m kinda ahead of the game there.

I’ve been (im)patiently waiting for the next version of the Orange Pi 800, but if tariffs hit before then I’ll probably just skip it. Analogue 3D is also likely to exit my wish list.

I’ll probably move up the timeline on adding storage to my home server if I can afford to. And some microSD cards, since I seem to always need yet another one.

I’ve got a few friends who were looking at upgrading their PCs this year, so I’ll probably be helping them shop and seal the deal before things get weird.

I wouldn’t expect many outrageous Cyber Monday deals this year. Most mfgs probably wanna stretch their inventory so they can delay price increases and stay competitive. That said, there’s also bound to be companies that are poised to strike early because they have already de-China-fied their supply chains. But even they are bound to be cautious.

People also drink coffee while driving. It’s a depraved world out there.

I used to pride myself on my tea snobbery, sampling green tea varieties from the farmers market and using a ceramic infuser.

Then one day I stopped having time for all that and found that Constant Comment was actually quite lovely and available everywhere.

Black tea with orange zest and spices. Simple, but everything I really want from a tea. Lady Grey is good too.

“Done is better than perfect.”

That sounds…

Easier to get almost right than actually learning the subject.

Much, much harder to get completely right than actually learning the subject.

So yes, basically the archetypal use case for LLMs.

If you complain about a technical thing, you’ll end up having to justify every square inch of your existence in order to prove your complaint isn’t just user error.

Two examples from yesterday:

• https://midwest.social/post/18665175/13205738
• https://midwest.social/post/18685199/13213335

Rocko’s Modern Life was a helluva ride

The only thing I hate about Winter is not Winter’s fault, and it’s basically what you said:

Work is somehow perfectly scheduled so that you’re inside, staring at a brick wall for 90-100% of the daylight hours for 5 out of every 7 days.

Winter is beautiful in ways that are completely unlike the other seasons, but unless you’re very fortunate you only get a few glimpses of it.

I feel like if you were designing a society to make people suffer, that’s how you would do it.

Extraneous apostrophe’s

I think they accidentally a word

Inflatio

Killing brown people. Incredibly skilled at it.

That video was a mess. Miller trying his best to not allow an actual question.

To be fair though, that reporter’s gotta step it up. You can’t give these guys an inch of wiggle room.

A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an “artificial pancreas.” -eff.org

We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we’re basically already there.

An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.

Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will

Should I give that show another try?

I remember really enjoying it when it was first airing, but I fell off cuz my living situation got all messed up and I think it’s one of those where I’d have to start over from S1E1.

I thought Menard’s slogan was “save big bunny at Menard’s”.

The first time I went to one was around Easter, so they had bunny-themed stuff around. And the store’s speakers were shit, so it was hard to understand the ad spots playing over them.

I wasn’t sure why Big Bunny was in trouble, or what it would take to save him, but I wasn’t too worried.

Eventually, I saw a commercial for it and figured out I had misheard it. I still like my version better though.

There’s no such thing as a hard-coded script if you have write access.