I have to praise Stephanie Meyer

Except the Twilight series glorified toxic relationships, normalized abuse and underage grooming, and hit an uncomfortable number of red flags in DSM-5.

Until the oil pump shaft broke: a 1965 Holder AG3 European vineyard tractor. Centre articulating, 35+ Hp diesel, close to 2 metric tons, and a third the size of a VW Beetle. We used it extensively on our orchards for a good four decades, or just shy of that.

Sucker was stupidly strong for its size, and could out-pull most tractors twice its physical size. Last I was using it for was some pretty extreme landscaping in the front yard. Another story, because it takes some explaining, but yeah.

So apparently the oil pump shaft broke late 2023, and we thought it was just overheating. Nope. Plus, the mechanic also found a rather severe hydraulic leak into the oil system, which was about the only thing that kept the engine from totally seizing.

Unfortunately, we are about three decades too late for most of the required parts. The engine place does a lot of remanufacturing and machining, so I did ask them for their “fuck off” price (gotta have a benchmark in that regard). But they did strongly suggest a Kubota engine as a replacement, primarily because the original oil pump required some pretty unusual maintenance to avoid breaking like it did. Whoops. No-one in my family realized that, least of all my father who had bought the tractor in the 80s.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

Invest the money, and use the after-inflation income to do the work.

That way, you have a constant and near-permanent resource stream with which to do the work. It’s only if the markets crash as a whole that you need to worry, and nothing says you cannot build additional revenue streams along side that wealth.

I would start with the most pressing issues for Canada - housing, and the homeless crisis that arises from shitty wages combined with exploding costs. Buy large tracts of land within each city, then economically force the cities to approve large arcologies that blend residential with business spaces. Make it super-attractive for even the wealthy to want to rent homes there, but turn around and then make assisted living units available in those same areas to low-income families and homeless people who want to get off the street. Have those communities to be tightly integrated across all social strata, so everyone benefits. Plus, actual social support that helps those traumatized by homelessness to get their lives together and return to being contributing members of society.

For the vast majority of flip phones currently available on the market, if they’re not running some version of KiaOS, they’re running stock Android - with all the Google spying that entails - under the hood.

Of the AI that are forced to serve up a response (almost all publicly available AI), they resort to hallucinating gratuitously in order to conform to their mandate. As in, they do everything they can in order to provide some sort of a response/answer, even if it’s wildly wrong.

Other AI that do not have this constraint (medical imaging diagnosis, for example) do not hallucinate in the least, and provide near-100% accurate responses. Because for them, the are not being forced to provide a response, regardless of the viability of the answer.

I don’t avoid AI because it is bad.

I avoid AI because it is so shackled that it has no choice but to hallucinate gratuitously, and make far more work for me than if I just did everything myself the long and hard way.

The shopping cart argument is a great place to start managing the human race. And I don’t mean in a binary manner - let’s just start with those who never bother returning the cart. To a startlingly large majority, they tend to demonstrate traits that are wholly incompatible with a polite and empathetic society.

Vanadium is purely for GrapheneOS, and Trivalent is purely for Linux. Both of which also appear (looking at this on mobile) to require compiling by the user.

Soooo… an appropriate pair of tools for, what, 0.5% of all computer users in aggregate?

Really appropriate suggestions, there. /s

Show me something Windows based that can be as secure as LibreWolf along with the appropriate extensions for blocking ads, fingerprinting, CDNs, and other spyware-like content.

Because Chromium in any variation, it ain’t.

Things must have changed in the last five years, then. The 800 my wife and I got back in 2000 has none of that malarkey.

They’re also not good for the dishwasher. Or the environment.

Agreed. In the IT industry as a tech since 1997, and even now everything except for my iDevices and one wireless bridge to the far side of the house is hardlined. I absolutely despise WiFi, from long experience.

What about them?

Or for low tech bulletproof reliability, a vintage HP 4050DTN. Mine has lasted a quarter century and two degrees on only 3 toner cartridges, a JetDirect module upgrade, and paper. It’s still working with the original fuser and rollers, although they’re beginning to need replacement.

You need to look into something thoroughly classic, like an HP 4050DTN. I’ve had mine since 1999 and it’s lasted me through two degrees with only 3 toner cartridges. I get the ones that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. And while yes, other parts like the fuser are now clamouring for replacement, to date the only things I have ever done are replace the toner cartridges and upgrade the JetDirect module to keep pace with my wired network.

Not bad for a printer that’s a quarter century old.

Edit: JFC I feel old now.

When you have the money, get a Bosch 800 series.

Like, my god it’s practically perfection. Don’t use pods, you need to use HE powder, but otherwise this is the best consumer dishwasher I have ever seen short of an industrial model.

Find an old 70s Amana Radarange on Marketplace or whatever local selling forum is available to you.

I have both 1972 (analog rotary dials) and 1976 (electrostatic push button) models, and they can bring a cup of water to boil in less than 30 seconds. Most any modern microwave I’ve tried this on needed 2-8 minutes to do the same damn thing.

Any Chromium-based browser in anything but the top-most panel is a non-starter with their abandonment of Manifest v2. Manifest v3 seriously cripples any Chromium-based browser’s ability to be secure, as extensions like uBlock Origin are no longer compatible by design.

Google has it’s ad business to protect, after all.

at 54,

What, your body isn’t sounding like Rice Crispies every time you move? 🤣🤣🤣

Yyyyyyup. Baby back ribs, my absolute favourite.

First time I ever had racks outside of home, was at a local restaurant called Kelly O’Bryans. I was in my mid-20s at the time. Decided to “Irish size” the order to two racks, not aware that they were already running a special that doubled the racks. Entire party stared in shock when four f**king racks came out balanced on a single platter. And I ate them all. Including all of the pachos (cross-cut fries with a house dip sauce).

Second time was when Montanas came to town a few years later. At the time they were still doing six bones a refill, instead of the current 3-4. Had the whole initial rack (something they also stopped doing, only half a rack to start these days) and then did 12 refills. So seven full racks of ribs. I still have that receipt somewhere filed away in my bookkeeping.

I had the “hollow leg” of my youth clear into my 40s. But by 45 I could feel it noticeably collapsing, and by the age of 50 it was almost completely gone.

In my late 20s I polished off 7 full racks of ribs in one sitting. These days I have trouble getting completely through one full rack.