I was never a coffee drinker for unrelated reasons, and also never acquired the taste for it even though the smell is generally nice.

But now I’m in my 40s and have multiple medical conditions (i.e., more than just the AuDHD, lol) that are treated with stimulants, so I will usually supplement my adderall with a cup of coffee in the morning and one at lunch time.

The nice thing is that I don’t have decades of tolerance and habit around the stuff, so it is still nice and potent. Instead of adding a bunch of junk to it, I just let it cool off then drink it quickly or add a chocolate protein shake to it for a few breakfast calories if I didn’t eat.

Plus even though I don’t like the taste I think the coffee at work is decent because it’s a machine that grinds whole beans, and the operations manager for our location fills the hopper with the beans himself. Some Starbucks somebody gave me recently tasted rotten in comparison. And that’s not “mischievous child” rotten, that’s carcass rotten.

I dont care if the person field strips it in front of me, the first thing im doing after they hand it to me is clearing it myself.

This kind of attitude is the exact right way to do it when safety is involved. You make it automatic, not a decision. It’s like wearing your seatbelt. It saves you time and energy while producing the best results.

Put another way: Crazy shit happens every day. You make it automatic not because you distrust the person unloading it in front of you. You do it because you shouldn’t trust yourself to be perfectly flawless in life and death situations. You do it 100% of the times that you rationally know for certain that it’s empty, so that you skip the check 0.00000% of the time that some crazy sequence of events quietly creates a dangerous situation.

That usb-c connector with side screw locks looks like a future I want to live in.

It’s futuristic, but it’s open and not corporate. It’s miniaturized and sleek, yet still mechanically rugged.

I take exception with the mixing of the stone cold fact that we’re all stardust with all that other crap.

It is good to be able to vape some weed and watch beautiful videos about amazing mind-blowing shit that actually exists, and not automatically entertain whatever magical/religious/supernatural idea is making the rounds in your neck of the woods.

I don’t keep up on the appliance world very much, but for many years I have been under the impression that when replacing one it’s always a good call to NOT get the Samsung.

I have literally never seen reason to doubt that rule.

I’m actually pretty happy with my current appliances, but I don’t stick all to one brand and I stick with the simpler cheaper designs. If paying for the next higher tier brings higher build quality or upgrades the core function’s power/capacity, then I’ll probably go for it.

From Wikipedia, here is the article snippet that originated the term.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

The entire developed world is on the path to the population stabilizing then gradually decreasing. I’ve pointed this out multiple times for exactly the reason you state. Policy in the US is horribly backwards even before we get to the immediate damage done to real humans.

Alright fine, I can tolerate the little ✨AI ✨ sparkles in my M365 webpages a while longer if it means more kaboom at the end.

Yes, please.

I’m a big bearded white guy and look like I should drive a stupid truck, or at least I would look that way with some shades and a baseball cap. Where I live is pretty white, surrounded by rural areas, so the trucks are everyyywhere. I doubt I need to convince anybody on here that these vehicles are bad, but I have a couple of observations from my perspective here in real america(/s).

I have a couple of friends who are those rare truck owners due to legitimate need because they are literal farmers, in addition to their day jobs (this is the USA, after all). Not only are their pastures on steep hillsides, but they only have huge animals like horses and cattle so that comes with pulling trailers and hauling bales of hay, etc. The trucks LOOK like they are farm trucks, their back seat areas in the cabs are dedicated to dogs, and the drivers are… petite women. 🤣 They are super nice and generous too, so I get to do the “have a friend with a truck” thing.

But, since I live close to a Home Depot, I don’t borrow one of the trucks unless I am buying 12+ foot (3.66+ meter) lumber or an appliance.

Every time I’m at Home Depot in old clothes with cuts on my arms and legs, loading standard 8’ (2.44m) lumber into my decade-old economy sedan, I’m surrounded by people who look like me demographically but are dressed much more cleanly and getting into shiny clean late model luxury SUVs or the hulking pickup trucks that cost even more.

In the US at least, if you look at the entire TOP 30% of earners, the majority of that group would have five-figure incomes. Not destitute, but the exact kind of middle/working class incomes where people are getting beat down by prices.

I didn’t exactly say I was innocent. 👌😎 👍

I do read what they say though.

Wow, this is really impressive y’all!

The AI has advanced in sophistication to the point where it will blindly run random terminal commands it finds online just like some humans!

I wonder if it knows how to remove the french language package.

You just aren’t thinking like a billionaire, man. What you do is get the two people anyway, and still force the 70 hour work week.

Your job is not to find a reasonable steady state of operation. Your job is to exploit the resources before you (even the ones with emotions and families) to extract value for the shareholders in the most efficient way possible, before somebody even more evil and clever than you figures out a better way and we direct future fresh meat to his meat grinder instead of yours.

Your comment just made me realize I did a kind of GOG holiday sale shopping spree this year after having not done a steam holiday sale purchase in like a decade.

And the majority of it was having cheap easy drm-free access to some very good and very old games. Like yeah I know I have my ISO of the TIE Fighter collector’s cd-rom somewhere around here, but if I can permanently have legit drm-free access to all versions of the game for just a few dollars, then supporting the business enabling that is a no brainer.

Thank you, GiantChickDicks, for making this Thanksgiving even more wholesome.

And I completely agree. I could see myself as that person getting immense fulfillment from creating a feast for my loved ones. I love cooking even for myself. Unfortunately(/s) I have long held the position of the fun dad and uncle, and that is where my fulfillment lies. I’m the one that keeps all the kids in the other room playing games so they leave the other adults alone.

But when my mom calls down that it’s time for certain kids to help with certain dishes, they go running out of the room to help!

So the space obsessed man-child generated his own stupid encyclopedia, and for this generous all-giving knowledge resource he chooses a stylized BLACK HOLE for the logo.

It feels like the nerd equivalent to that quote about how the anti-semite arguing in bad faith enjoys seeing others frustrated by their hypocrisy. Here lemme just find that pasta…

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Jean-Paul Sartre

As somebody who (1) loves the beauty of the natural world and (2) lives in the USA, I’m hearing that NZ might be a most excellent place to retire, or even move to earlier.

Yeah the “shopping around” aspect isn’t even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.

Today the situation is flipped. It isn’t difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you’ll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.

The problem is that right now the “good” prices are crazy.

I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.

I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.

And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.

I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.

In many cases I don’t think they are even intentionally tailgating. They just suck at driving and they’re used to following way too close at all speeds.