Chattanooga!

Don’t tell my wife that. And honestly I knew that. I just wanted an excuse to buy a matching socket set.

My last one was a “task force” mechanic set that my parents got me nearly over 20 years ago when I got my license.

Bison are better mammals than humans. Especially American humans.

Also they were here first.

The Odyssey just had a dead battery yesterday. Thats permissible, it’s cold out, she’s taking a lot of short trips (out getting last minute gifts on the big retail stroad), and the battery is 5 years old.

The battery died in the movie theater parking lot (getting gift cards), and that’s how we found out that the only way to get it into neutral was to turn a little knob under the air filter with a pair of pliers, and hold it in place while moving the car.

Otherwise, the car must be running to shift into neutral. Who the fuck came up with that idea. Like, I understand the brake-shift-interlock. This was a push button shifter, and this was the override they chose.

So it was either wait for everybody to finish the Sunday matinee of Wicked so someone can move their car and I could slip in to jump it from mine…or buy a battery and get tools and replace it there in the parking lot.

I chose the latter. Didn’t want to drive all the way home, though, and I “knew” I was missing all my 10mm sockets…fortunately BJs had a nice DeWalt mechanics toolset on clearance, and that plus the battery cost less than just a battery at the parts store.

I know it’s anecdotal…but my 2019 Odyssey has so far needed a lot more work than my 2013 Passat. Considering I got both of them at 1 year old.

This is completely counter to most expectations.

No carrot. Only stick.

A company’s purpose is to be profitable, ethics side is largely irrelevant.

Maybe so, but companies such as Proton’s biggest asset is their reputation…a reputation of being privacy-focussed. Without that they are nothing, and they know that. As a result, they try to live up to that reputation as well as possible.

Being as it was started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (among some of CERN’s other founding fathers of the web) is just icing on the cake.

You say unconscious. I say overt.

This but essentially just build SMRs or microreactors into colo plans.

Maybe not so great for the ones that are in the middle of cities, where space is at a premium…but a lot of colo’s are in unassuming spaces in suburbs or BFE.

Nah what we need is good privacy-focussed companies getting into the public IAM space.

You know how you can sign into stuff with your Google or Facebook account? And get a 2FA push to your phone?

Like that. Except by a company with a shred of ethics and morality. Like Proton.

I do also think that we all should have a cryptographically secure federally issued identity for official uses such as signing documents or signing into financial accounts and other things that must use your official identity, and not an online pseudonym. Like SSN but on a smartcard. Basically CAC or ECA but for general civilian use.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I’m saying this to counter the Steve Jobs anecdote above me. He exploited a loophole to avoid some fines because of his exorbitant wealth. Obviously that’s a bad thing and he should’ve paid, and exploiting the loophole to park in handicap spaces, even at Apple (where he could just reserve a spot for himself), is just a sign of his narcissistic psychosis. But to point it at him as an example of why it wouldn’t work is missing the forest for the trees.

I feel the same way about UBI. Who gives a shit if Musk gets a check for $2000 every month or whatever. He doesn’t, and that’s a drop in the bucket of the whole thing, especially considering he (should/would) be paying way, way, way more in funding such a program. He’s a distraction. I care way more about everybody else getting it.

The ultra rich don’t matter in this equation. You could charge Elon Musk $10 or $10 million…it’s practically the same to him.

They are anomalies. There are plenty of just-as-entitled, less-filthy-rich people.

No Grass, it has 3.

It’s a delicate topic. TikTok collects a ton of data from devices and infers a ton of data from watching patterns. This is really true of most of the modern web apps, but especially true of TikTok because the short-form means more content to churn through, and the algorithm is practically an IV drip of dopamine.

The much, much more important issues are user privacy and truth-in-media, and is something that just as well needs to be pointed at Meta and Twitter and Reddit and Google. TikTok is probably more critical at the present moment, because it’s run by a country our president-elect wants to start a trade-war with, and they’ve got quite an upper hand with all the data that we, the users, give them for free, via a propaganda machine under their control.

I bet the wave of stupid correlates to the popularity of yellow journalism or the prevalence of its practices.

Okay, so we’re roughly in the middle…Are we on the left or the right of Fermi’s bell curve?

This is for cold and archival storage right?

I couldn’t imagine seek times on any disk that large. Or rebuild times…yikes.

Google knows me too well.

My kids now get Infoblox commercials in the middle of their Minecraft YouTube videos.

Well dog, at least I have nuts, ya eunuch.

Just keep the bug-reporting bots pre-occupied by having them talk to the CI Bot. Problem solved b