Nobody called me names when I went. Then again, I wasn’t throwing rocks at seals or doing other stupid shit.

Don’t act like a jackass when you’re an outsider and most people will not give you a hard time. Tends to be true most places.

Hawaii is literal paradise and a bunch of jackoffs bought most of it and pushed the natives to the margins. They have every right to not want anyone there. If you go, just remember, you are a guest in a place that you do not belong. Be respectful and be kind, but don’t be shocked when a Toyota Tacoma comes flying up past you and rips past as you’re staring off into the trees doing 24.5 MPH on the road that they use to go home.

Us outsiders are tolerated, but we do not belong.

Most people cannot discern at bitrates higher than 128kbps. Most people don’t own equipment where the difference would even be noticed.

If all you’re doing is listening to music on airpods using AAC, getting all wound up about Losless is silly.

See how well you do: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

As long as you don’t mind them harvesting every tiny bit of data you feed it.

I don’t like the big US players, but at least they’re doing a tiny bit to keep out of your shit. Deepseek is not pretending at all. I suppose it’s at least honest and the price point is REALLY tempting. Openclaw gets expensive fast with the number of tokens it consumes. I burned through $30 in two days with it using Claude Haiku/Sonnet. Plugging it into cheap LLM is a nice idea, but no thanks.

That is the point. Search is free. You will be paying for ai soon. If you don’t then you’ll get the low-quality results. This is nothing more than greed. They were making lots of money with search, but like everything in the modern world, businesses only exist now to extinguish what was free or a good value and sell the same thing back at an extreme markup.

Furniture was made of wood. Now it’s mostly disposable composite junk. Wood, now commands a high premium.

Household goods like toasters, irons, lamps, sofas were all at one point made to be durable. Many people would buy these things and maybe replace them every 15-20 years. Now the same stuff lasts five if you’re lucky.

Bain and/or PWC. Sometimes both.

Always same clowns.

I am hopeful that after the orange piece of shit eventually goes tits up, I’m really hoping that there will be a hard correction in the other direction.

Huh?

I think people just need to reset their expectations.

I asked one for help to interpret PCI policy application (credit card regulatory stuff). I gave it the situation and it provided me with a good answer that, when I asked our compliance team about, they agreed.

That saved me a lot of time. I don’t see how that’s a dead end. Then I had it draft a response to the person asking questions; I tuned it a little to my liking and sent it. What might have taken me an hour before took 10 minutes. This seems like a helpful thing, not a bad thing. I’m not sure what other technology would have done that.

Anger is a composite emotion that is the combination of several emotions, a blend of a brief period of time and social conditioning. It is not pure.

The root of all anger is typically sadness, or fear. It’s been well studied that in the US, boys are taught from an early age to “man up”, “quit being a sissy” and other silly things after they show an emotional response. Boys don’t cry, boys are tough. Showing sadness or fear is a sign of weakness. So boys (and girls also) are taught and the lesson is reinforced when they are made fun of for being sad or fearful. They are also taught that where sadness is weakness, anger is strength. If something bad happens to you, crying is passive, submissive and everyone hates a pussy. When you get angry, you take action, you hit things, break things, hit people, lash out verbally, curse, call them mean things. Now others are scared of you or at least unwilling to engage–this is now control and control is a means to taking power.

Anger is learned, it is taught. It is not an instinct. Anger is not required to respond under duress. In a fight or flight situation, neither require anger. You can be scared and still fight. Anger is just what we are taught by a culture that prizes power and strength to be required in order to fight.

Anger notifies you that you’re sad, but also that you are too afraid to show weakness by expressing sadness so you express anger as it trades weakness for strength (perceptually).

OpenStack on our own hardware.

Sir, I’m a dork. I have used neither Windows nor Edge in, well ever. I switched before Edge was even created.

Really?

No.

It’s been this way for a while. At best, you can use some techniques to provide plausible deniability from a legal perspective.

Not that laws matter anymore.

The best you can do is try to blend in.

This is the truth. I got a free Oura ring and I would love to try it, but they’re in bed with palantir. Fuck that.

So many interesting developments, but I’m unwilling to sell my soul to the devil to try them. What a dream it would be to use them without worrying that they’re going to sell every possible bit of data about me to the lowest bidder.

I went years ago and when we entered the park, the fucking fingerprinted everyone. Kids, adults, it ddin’t matter. I was so pissed, I had no idea.

Fuck that place, their rides are ass and it’s overpriced soulless bullshit.

The only thing that seemed to carry the whimsy of the I presume is the original park was some weird thing where there were talking and singing birds. It seemed silly, fun and felt like what the place was supposed to be.

That’s the magic of fingerprinting. They don’t need what we would consider are the “real” signals like IP address anymore.

They can create a composite value based on boring stuff like the things you mentioned, plus a few others. They can pull fun stuff like the details of your TLS handshake OS, browser, versions of various plugins/addons, etc. Given 20+ signals they can fingerprint you pretty well. They store it and just profile you, follow you around.

VPNs, privacy addons are just more signals to use to fingerprint you. You stand out even more when you try to hide. It’s been this way for a while now.

I really hate the idea that any car I buy in the future is going to come stuffed with fucky software that I don’t want. Software defined car my fucking brown asshole.

I don’t want some old jalopy with a carburetor and crank windows, but there’s so little benefit to the individual for all the shit that I can’t imagine wanting it.

I do my own repairs and I hate that half the time I need to get my laptop out to reset a thing, clear a code, re-initiate some shit. Pulling the battery cable off used to work for most things, but not anymore and for a long time.

I bought the car, but they own the software? So if I want do change or repair something, I have to pay them, but if the software shits the bed, I have to pay them? Everything ends with me paying them for something I already paid for.

Fuck that.

People will do just about anything but use Firefox. Whatever, I love Firefox + Ublock Origin. I cannot imagine being a chump and rawdogging the internet will all the ads and bullshit.

I work for a large retailer that you’ve definitely heard of. We are pulling away from our cloud hosted presence and are building out a self-managed virtual data center in one of our own physical data centers.

Even enterprise knows that paying a monthly uncontrolled cost is shit.

Said something about how an ambulance was blocked for quite a while waitng for one of these stupid things to move.

Um, push it out of the way. Not like an ambulance is small. Get them all push bars and move those fucking pieces of shit with a good shove. Tell the people in the Waymo to GTFO and then push the fucking thing over.

Then send Waymo a bill for any damages to the ambulance, cop car, fire truck, etc.

Why is this so hard? I’m not normally a fan of brute force and ignorance, but it does have it’s uses. Waymo isn’t doing anything because there are no consequences. They don’t come to meetings, they don’t fix the problem and they issue bullshit public statements that mean nothing. Fine, you want to choose the “do nothing” option, we’ll choose the “shove your stupid piece of shit high-school science project into a ditch” option.

WTF is playboy?