I have the perfect story for this.

About a decade ago I attended a week-long reliability training held by ASQ (the American Society for Quality). One day heading back to my hotel room I shared an elevator with the then-president-chairman of ASQ.

He was chatting about airliner safety, and how the engineers would do things like test/measure/calculate to find the necessary thickness of a part, and then just triple it for safety because they could. He said he’d never hesitate to ride a commercial airliner.

He then said he would never ride in a helicopter as long as he lived, lol.

It’s fun to imagine an opposite world where everybody has EVs and other more efficient forms of transit, and then industry wants to introduce ICE vehicles to the market.

You fill it with flammable liquid poison and it shoots gaseous poison out the back while it’s running, and nobody can refuel at home, and it’s immensely more mechanically complex, but at least it’s quick to fill with fuel at the fuel store! Just try not to inhale the poisonous explosive fumes or spill the poisonous volatile liquid on yourself while you do it.

Price aside, as somebody who has gotten pretty good at ignoring my old normal slab smart phone, this might only make sense for nostalgia and conversation starter reasons.

Now if I could force this thing upon other people in my life who cannot separate their eyes from their doom-screen, we’d be on to something!

Hopefully the human first responders are automatically dispatched when one of the drones responders to something, so that they will be there to patch up the people slashed repeatedly by the blades on that drone. Which, given the world we live in, is guaranteed to happen.

The admins have decided that most of us can take so much more absurdity before we break. This experiment is sick, I tell you.

thanks!

Just think of the CoSt SaViNgS when 3 years from now and all that shiny new hardware is obsolete compared with the nvidia Orphan Crusher 3000, and instead of paying for a silly decommissioning and responsible recycling project you can just cover your eyes for 30 seconds and let the meth heads scour the site.

iirc, apt-get is the version to use in scripts. They keep the input & output consistent so that it won’t break things.

Regular old apt is for humans to use at the command prompt, and that’s what I use all the time.

Here’s my personal anecdote that supports this.

I live in Pennsylvania, which is considered a swing state, but it did vote for Trump both of the times he won. Pretty humiliating.

AGDQ this year was in Pittsburgh so I got to attend a couple days. It is by far the most inclusive crowd I’ve been in locally, where people can just let their true colors out without constant fear. I think it’s the only crowd where I’ve heard “trans rights” exclaimed and met with cheers. And it’s truly inclusive in both directions. I’m a big old bearded straight cis white guy and nothing made me feel out of place either.

Between gaming communities and FOSS/linux communities, I think it’s we nerds who are so inclusive!

This feels like such a double edged sword living in the US where Israel-supporting police-loving rich capitalists are widely labeled as the radical left if they dare to suggest that people should get healthcare or maybe we shouldn’t spend trillions blowing up brown people on the other side of the globe.

You know, the land of fucking geniuses where the batshit crazy pedo Nazi choice won the popular vote in 2024 against the Israel-supporting actual-cop capitalist who is right-wing to most of the rest of the world.

I’m not even sure what my point is here, maybe just expressing frustration. The overton window here is so far to the right, and people so passively absorb propaganda every day, that it feels like the entire spectrum of people from leftists to liberals need to form a coalition to at least slow & reverse the movement to the right, even if their end goals are all very different.

What it feels like is that the Republican party was actually supposed to be the controlled opposition to scare people into being comfortable voting for liberals, but then the propaganda worked too well and the mustache twirling evil caricatures got to be in charge instead. At this point I can only hope the level of ridiculousness knocks some sense into more people.

I’ve pretty much gone back to my 2000s era mindset of “I don’t need a smart phone when I have PCs in front of me at work and at home.”

But really it’s more like I already have an old smart phone but hate using it and never want to have to upgrade. We’ll see what Motorola can make happen.

Tech idea #8545764 that sounds like it could maybe do some good if only the entire industry and those responsible for regulating them weren’t malicious actors.

When the race starts at the Salt & Pepper 500, they blast “What’s New Pussycat” and leave it on repeat until a winner is crowned.

That jar reminds me of the end result of the sand ceremony that some people do at weddings. Several years ago I photographed a wedding for a middle aged couple who each already had kids, so with their Brady Bunch situation I think they had even more colors than this.

So uh, are any of you lovely gay Lemmings planning on getting hitched with your partner any time soon? I know the perfect container for a sand ceremony that you would display in your home for decades to celebrate your love AND your sense of humor.

That is wild.

Well there’s another sensor to add to my wish list!

Although, we have a lot of HVAC flow into the bedroom so maybe the difference wouldn’t be huge.

One foot in each world here!

I still have my tech job (embedded systems) and in the next few days I am literally going to be building a chicken coop and finishing a filter upgrade on my pond.

I’ve referred to this meme several times in the past few months to describe myself, lol.

I tried that in Morrowind years ago. I’m not sure if it was the same mod, or some version of the game with lots of graphics settings, but yeah.

I loved Morrowind so much. I played it so much that I took over a house and turned it into a museum for all my hoarded items and ridiculously valuable concoctions and trinkets.

Having unlimited view distance and seeing how freaking small the world really was completely blew my mind.

Along with the fog, the walking speed must have been even slower than I remember!

🤌

Skyrim came out closer to the Dreamcast (9/9/99) than today.

And yet, if you paint the steamroller a gaudy fake gold color and have it being driven by every conservative you’ve heard about in the last year, it gets way more true!

I’m an old straight white guy with a pretty normie-looking family, and I know damn well that almost every LGBT+ person out there shares more of my values and gives more of a shit about my marriage than the conservative grifters out there.