subignition

Socks and shoes. I can’t find anything big enough for my clown feet at retail.

Uh, nope, you’re putting words in my mouth. It’s not realistic to worry about mitigating that kind of stuff when we can’t even prevent ourselves from cooking ourselves, and several of the things you listed don’t even have plausible technical solutions right now. Nice try, though.

a planetary catastrophe out of our control

You’re still describing climate change. Science fiction ideas are fun to think about but our own inability to live harmoniously with nature is going to kill us off before any of those problems become relevant.

Do I think it’s generally useful? No, not at all.

But for very specific purposes it’s worth considering as an option.

Text-to-image generation has been worth it to get a jumping-off point for a sketch, or to get a rough portrait for a D&D character.

Regular old ChatGPT has been good on a couple occasions for humor (again D&D related; I asked it for a “help wanted” ad in the style of newspaper personals and the result was hilariously campy)

In terms of actual problem solving… There have been a couple instances where, when Google or Stack Overflow haven’t helped, I’ve asked it for troubleshooting ideas as a last resort. It did manage to pinpoint the issue once, but usually it just ends up that one of the topics or strategies it floats prove to be useful after further investigation. I would never trust anything factual without verifying, or copy/paste code from it directly though.

I have no idea if it’s an aged sauce. Regardless, I meant it was opened many many years prior

Based on your post, you’re not autistic, you’re just a writer.

It feels like something in the genre of the paradox of tolerance, where the most empathetic and pacifistic people are the people best positioned to remove shitters from the gene pool responsibly

It separated out to half clear vinegar and half… Red

You had to shake it back together but if anything it was even hotter than usual. It was wild

Vinegar based hot sauces are basically immortal; I’ve had Tabasco that was like 10 years old before

I seriously hope you got the job.

That sounds suspiciously like doing actual work for them.

you are probably better off taking it to a computer repair shop to have the issue fixed or replaced, for peace of mind and probably liability reasons

Raspberry Pis and other microcomputers can be had for pretty cheap, and they can be put to a surprising variety of tasks. You need to be a bit of a jack of all trades to fully embrace that DIY element, but I’d bet that showing off a project that you mostly built yourself would be seen as futuristic by most people.

I’ve wanted one of these for decades but I thought they weren’t legal to purchase in my country anymore. I’m living vicariously through you.

That sounds ridiculous?? Ours are on the left…

You’d want to leave a little space in the containers so they don’t burst if they freeze. I think it’s still worth having at least some emergency water even if you might have to figure out thawing it.

it’s a good idea to keep some drinking water in your car as well if you don’t already.

Globally disabling autoplay in my browser brought me so much sanity. It’s worth the small fraction of sites that behave badly because of it

Huh. I never saw that used as an excuse. I always took it as, “normal” people show their true colors when they feel divorced from consequences for their actions/speech

I got a microwave with an inverter magnetron.

When you set your microwave to, let’s say, 20% power, a typical microwave will cycle the magnetron, so that it runs at 100% power for 20% of the cooking time and is off in between. With an inverter, the actual power output of the magnetron can vary, so it’s actual 20% power for the whole time. It does an excellent job of gently reheating things like sandwiches and cooked rice without drying them out or scorching. Also, if something has instructions written for a lower wattage microwave, I can just turn the power down until it’s close to that wattage instead of doing calculations to modify the time.