I love being able to post this yet again:

I have a lifetime Plex pass I got during a big sale like a decade ago, at 1/10 the price they are raising it to. I haven’t used it in about 6 months and never plan to even log into it again. Jellyfin 4 life!

I mean, I also have a whole bunch of windows keys from old MSDN accounts and stuff, but I am sure as shit not going to install Windows on my machines just because I can!

Yeah sure, give me whatever cookies aren’t already blocked. I love cookies. Is that all of them?

(closes LibreWolf, which nukes everything except whitelisted sites)

…pathetic.

I have the fun privilege at work these days of being the guy who sometimes makes things work just by walking in the room.

It feels like a tale as old as time. I’m one of the few software engineers working on the embedded code in our new product, and occasionally a technician or V&V tester or different discipline engineer will ask me to look at something acting funny. And I fully believe them, not just because they have no reason to lie but because “acting funny” is exactly the lifestyle our system is living!

Sometimes I get to lean on my experience with the code, then glare at something on the screen and say I don’t trust it, and that leads us to the fix. But about half the time, just sensing that somebody called daddy into the room makes it stand up straight and stop fucking around, lol.

Wow, you really DO have abnormally good insurance, to only pay a grand in a year.

For anybody else confused by this because you live in a civilized country, let me translate: The standard offering from employers nowadays is called a high deductible health plan. The deductible is the amount you have to pay* for healthcare before your insurance pays anything, and it is typically several thousand dollars.

(* There are a few preventive services that are 100% covered, so if you have no health issues whatsoever you can still get a yearly checkup and a flu shot without paying extra)

It literally depends on how nice your employer wants to be.

I have a great job now, but I lost two jobs during the covid years. For one of them, my insurance lasted until the end of the next month or something like that, in addition to some severance pay.

For the other, it ended immediately. Like if you have a doctor appointment tomorrow morning that shit will not be paid for. If you wake up sick, maybe call a bankruptcy attorney because we won’t be answering your calls.

Because the police are mercenaries, not wild animals. They generally don’t bite the hand that feeds. Besides, they still have 99% of the population to target.

Polluted waterways make me sad.

Yeah! I alternate between using Dr. Bronner’s and simply reading the ramblings on the bottle if using some old shampoo/conditioner my wife moved on from.

Have you tried Double Commander or Superfile?

I get the inertia against switching when you have a setup you like, but the idea of going the other direction – if I could get the best file manager in the universe but I have to switch to Windows to use it – I just cannot imagine anything that would make it worth it.

Ah, well thanks for the correction! That number just attached to the wrong variable in my brain I guess.

It should be minimum wage plus standard mileage cost at minimum, perhaps. In the US the IRS rate is 72.5 cents per mile right now, so if you figure that in for the 19 mile trip that’s over $13 just to break even.

It’s Forbin’ time!?

Torvalds of Film vibes.

Bro can you IMAGINE how many bayou boats and pickup trucks you can buy with the bribes from saving billions of dollars for a trillions of dollars legal-entity-person?

You know that line from game of thrones: A Datacenter always pays his debts!

The world’s best troll will be when this project gains a critical mass of publicity and Obama himself agrees to play the role of trump. Then several voice coaches would volunteer to help Obama perfectly reproduce Trump’s slurred speeches and memorable lines.

Or maybe it goes in the opposite direction, where he emphasizes his own trademark mannerisms in order to erase any similarity to Trump. He’d be wearing a tan suit, a blue tie, and be all "Look. Uhhh… Nothing bad… can happen! It uh, it can only good happen. But with Tylenol, don’t take it. Don’t take it!”

I think the answer to the question she asks is that an unholy alliance of focus groups, market analysts, and accountants have calculated that the Path to Most Money ™ goes over in the opposite direction, away from the fun stuff.

I’m sure there’s usually good low budget feature-length stuff out there being made, but in today’s media landscape it’s up to the viewer to find interesting and unique content. It isn’t going to be blasted into the faces of all the passive viewers like Avengers 37 will be.

I think we would flip it around, like:

Oh no, the BEST code ever written is the stuff that’s never written.

Well, maybe that’s second best only to deleting code. Why stop at zero when your amount written can go negative?

Eh, unless you disqualify the latter because it’s actual work making the project or product better. I leave that up to the reader.

I had to go find that onion post. Most of it is funny stuff about wanting prices to be higher for no particular reason, but this got me at the end:

"I figure anyone who sells oil knows better than I do what to do with my money. As my grandmother used to say, the higher the gas price, the closer to God.”

The absurdity is still there, yeah, but it’s just too close to reality. I’m an old white guy born in the Trumpian Farmlands of Pennsyltucky, and it shook me a bit. That first line especially… They wouldn’t say it out loud because they have to maintain the iamverybadass facade, but they live to be a cog in the machine, to serve the higher life form that will be their salvation. It’s almost like their god, their cult leader, and their president can be the same person. And that’s before we address the part where they chose one of the worst humans possible.

Unfortunately if there is any difference between these two takes it’s that the real-life person says the quiet part out loud.

1980s: Please do not use drugs. They seem great at first but you don’t want to get hooked.

2020s: Please DO use the AIs. They seem like shit at first, but you DO want to get hooked because we have about a trillion dollars in new mortgages to keep up with.

Another tech headline, another thing that would have sounded pretty cool 20-30 years ago but today sounds like an absolute nightmare to stay FAR away from. And this one more than most!