Nah. It’s not that thick! It’s only 1.6" thick 😃

I like 90’s style chunky and solid. Weight and bulk aren’t really a concern for me. Solid, open-source and repairable are my priorities. That’s what works for me.

They are not. They’re in cell holders.

I own one of these. I have zero issues replacing the cells 😃

Nope. They’re headed straight towards jackboot dictatorship.

If nothing else, Trump and his henchmen are proving day after day that the Americans talking big about their god-given Second Amendment right that keeps the government in check as the reason to own so many firearms and overlook so many deaths by firearm was basically a pretense: this is literally the scenario when they swore right and left they would exercise it and they aren’t.

All a bunch of phoneys, is what they are. And they’re getting the nasty dictatorship they richly deserve.

Altair 8080

I did the practicum before the theory. It helped.

It’s high time open source projects and anything to do with software freedom and privacy relocated outside of the US. It wasn’t great before that a lot of them are hosted in the US, but now it’s urgent. It’s not even a matter of principle anymore.

No, it’s the smell at the pump. Nothing to do with how the engine feeds itself. Yeah, leaded gasoline smelled different. “Sweeter” or something. Maybe it wasn’t the lead, and maybe whatever replaced the lead inside modern gasoline is what smells different, but it definitely isn’t the same.

It’s not like gasoline smelled better, it’s just that I remember smelling that smell when the entire family went on summer holidays and we kids were allowed to stretch our legs while our dad gassed up the car. Good times and good memories!

I’m way past that point.

Missing your youth first hits you when you start having small health issues you didn’t have before. And then it gradually gets worse. There’s no crisis about it.

Nah. I just miss my youth.

Come to think of it, I miss school and I miss the military. They were both godawful, but I was young.

Don’t.

Because what he left out is that for those 5 minutes of peaceful enjoyable smoking, you have to endure the rest of the day craving, smelling like dog shit, getting an earful from your supervisor at work because you’re constantly out for a smoke, spending your life’s savings at the tobacconist, and driving 20 miles in the middle of the night to find a pack of smokes in a convenience store in the middle of the night when all the other stores are closed. Not to mention long term health issues of course.

That’s an expensive 5 minutes of enjoyment, trust me on that one.

The smell of leaded gasoline.
The smell of a fine cigar: I quit smoking 14 years ago but I miss that.

And I’m 200% sure they were awful.

It’s okay if you’re fully in control and it’s built with redundancy.

AI & AGI have me kinda terrified

If you’re young, you should be.

I’m not and I’m nearing the end of my professional career. Even if I get the sack tomorrow, I’ve had a very good run. And I have other skills that simply can’t be replaced by AI or robots, so I’m not really worried. Concerned, yes. But not worried.

But I know I won’t have any retirement, that’s for damn sure. Still, it beats not having any professional prospects from the get-go.

All new technologies eventually displace obsolete jobs. But crucially, they usually do it slowly enough that the workers whose jobs are being obsoleted aren’t all sacked virtually overnight (i.e. society has the time to evolve relatively peacefully) and more of the new and better paying jobs are created for newer generations.

The internet is no different. My Grandpa was a telegraph operator. My Father worked for AT&T installing landlines and I’m a computer guy. Both their jobs are virtually gone and mine will be soon. But I did manage to make a career out of it.

The first real, violent disruption is happening now however: AI is on the verge of obsoleting a MAJORITY of all jobs within a few years, and no new jobs are really created to replace them. Society will be deeply uprooted and won’t have time to prepare for the shift. A lot of people will lose their jobs with no alternatives to put food on the table. That’s a recipe for war.

The saving grace for postal services is the rise of online stores like Amazon. They all shifted from delivering mail to delivering parcels.

Hell, I don’t even have a TV in my living room.

https://www.hhs.gov/

I am doubly pissed off:

• Mozilla opts me into an analytics scheme without requiring my permission. That’s bad.
• Mozilla partners with fucking FACEBOOK to spring this shit on me? Now THAT takes the cake!

But… I would be pissed off if I used straight Firefox, and I don’t: I use LibreWolf, and I have no doubt they’ll strip this latest round of Mozilla nonsense from the LibreWolf browser.

I don’t know… I have a love/hate relationship with Mozilla: on the one hand, they’re pretty much the only thing that stands between the final overrun of the web by the Google monoculture and still having some kind of a choice what you use to hit the internet, and they make one of the only email clients worth its salt in Linux. On the other hand, every time they decide to do something, it’s always a screw-up, and it’s been like that for decades. Surely in their position, they should know what not to do to piss off everybody all the time, and yet… What a weird bunch.