Sorry, no can do. All we’ve got are pills that make your dick stop working and your mind numb.

No, just little attachment (metaphorically and soon to be literally, by the sound of your workplace) to your genitalia and a love of pain, I assume. I can think of a lot of people who fit that profile.

Also,

thousand plus degree metal

What kind of metal? I can think of at least one gentleman who canonically would be in the market for an unfortunate schmelting accshident if you had the right kind.

Visit national parks while you can.

today, I am instead playing Steam games for hours and wishing death would hurry up already.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I poop on company time.

A fate worse than death.

yup. at the moment if you want a truly private, properly useful local AI agent you basically have to set one up correctly, manually, yourself. Having one come as part of the OS already largely set up for the user would be a massive W.

but yeah, If.

yes I’m sure this decision will have lots of well-reasoned and civilized debate around it.

Don’t mind me, just here to watch.

[wistful sigh]

oh good someone else remembers he went this way, too, I’m not just imagining it.

Personally I’m quite a fan of Peter Brown, Styropyro, Chronova Engineering, Attoparsec, and Robert Dunn’s channels (the woodworking/maker channel Under Dunn, the car channel Aging Wheels, they’re both fantastic), to name just a few of the better ones. I do genuinely miss AvE’s storytelling abilities and Red Green style humor, but there are still lots of people who are enjoyable to watch who I don’t think support fascists, or at least have the good sense to keep it to themselves.

I knew someone was gonna ask me about this, so allow me to clarify: I don’t know that for a fact, but I picked up on bits and pieces and you would too if you watched him long enough. The thing that made me say “yeah this dude’s politics are probably problematic” was when he put out a video in support of the Freedom Convoy. He never came out and straight up said he loved Trump or Poilievre or whatever – at least not up until then, but that was the point I stopped watching. But it was enough altogether that made me go “yeah nah I don’t need to watch this dude I’ve got other ‘make/do cool things’ youtubers I can enjoy”.

you mean, someone else found a way to do the exact same job but cheaper? According to capitalism, all is as it should be and you should rest easy buying the knockoffs.

More pragmatically speaking, from what I recall when I watched AvE (before he revealed himself as a canadian maga), the performance of knockoff batteries was in general adequate as long as you didn’t expect the same low temperature performance. That’s apparently where knockoffs and the legitimate batteries tend to differ, is when you’ve got to use them in freezing temperatures. So if you’re planning on using your power tools in a frozen shithole, stick to buying legit batteries – I know you were asking about the ethical concerns, but that’s something else to keep in mind. but imo fuck DeWalt, they’ve already got their pound of flesh out of you buying the legit tools in the first place.

the fact the world functions at all while running on matryoshka doll levels of bullshit and duplicity is equal parts impressive, terrifying, and depressing.

Think about this for a moment.

We made bullshit generators that ingest all the actual knowledge we feed them and manage to vomit out bullshit that’s so close to perfect most of the time that we now need a second bullshit generator to re-bullshit that output into a more palatable form of consumption for us. And it’s being sold to us for an additional $4.99 a month.

Fuck me.

Ahhh, and like that, the motive becomes clearer.

you know what’s really gonna chap your ass?

when you realize that this cycle of the rich and powerful being assholes, becoming rich and powerful specifically through being the biggest asshole in the room, and setting the rest of us fighting against each other; has always happened and presumably will continue to happen for as long as we’re around. It’s never getting better. It’s never going away. It ebbs and flows with time, and society frequently course-corrects (often with much bloodshed), but barring a hostile alien invasion I simply do not see a future in which all mankind is enlightened and united to do better than tribalism and hierarchy; as we should do when we are literally incredibly lucky walking, talking, thinking, loving, feeling stardust that can cure diseases and travel to other planets when we work together.

We are, instead, in this latest of shitshows; going to use the gift of our own genius to create the Torment Nexus and hand the keys to it to Sam Altman and Peter Thiel (among others), while killing the planet and bombing brown people; because that is better for making made-up numbers go up, and/or because we find those people over there (whoever they are) distasteful in some fashion and they will suffer more for this. This is not defeatism or doomerism or whatever you’d prefer to dismiss it as; this is reality knocking, it is already happening, it is already here and it isn’t going to get better in our lifetimes unless something happens that hasn’t happened in the past however many thousands of years of this bullshit. When it gets better – and the world will recover from the likes of Trump and Netanyahu and Putin, that much is true, I freely grant you – the reprieve will only ever be temporary and fleeting barring the most extraordinary of circumstances.

yeah, that gets me salty nowadays. Not just Israel getting free bombs. The entire system that puts psychopathic despots in charge of WMDs in the first place, and will almost certainly keep putting them there through sheer inertia.

It’d be quicker to list the ones who haven’t.

it is safest to assume that any and every communication you have on the open internet that is not end to end encrypted has been ingested, identified, catalogued, and stored in an NSA data center and can be called up at any time for future reference – and even the encrypted communications may not be secure for much longer, if quantum computing keeps progressing the way it is. Conduct yourself accordingly.

Yeah, we’re considered contractors legally, not employees, so we should be able to set contract rates. We don’t set the rates, though, Lyft or Uber does.

There are some apps that allow drivers to set their own rates (Empower seems to be one), but they don’t serve my area, and even if they did they’re probably vastly less popular to use exclusively right now until they pick up traction.

maybe it’s just what I tell myself to cope, but I feel like Lyft fucks the driver and the passenger slightly less than Uber. I don’t drive for Uber at all now, I can usually get 100% of my rides from Lyft without much downtime, and when I did drive for both Lyft was never as keen on offering me dogshit rides as Uber was, especially after I started declining the bad offers. Uber, on the other hand, seems to want to punish you if you don’t want to take every <$25/hr ride they offer.

Don’t get me wrong, Lyft will still try to screw with you, but they do it less frequently. I get paid for all my wait times, I check. It’s not much for the shorter ones (a minute late is like a couple bucks, maybe) but the longer delays on meant-to-be-shorter rides (fiasco at the checkout, an argument has begun, etc.) can sometimes double the ride profit.