Exactly. First scheduled service with my EV was a joke; it amounted to a minor recall and a tire rotation. I was using regenerative breaking so much, they said that the factory brakes didn’t even look worn. The service manager actually looked surprised by this.

This is a literally comically stupid idea, its a B movie plot element from an 80s scifi movie.

if you add in the lack of routine maintenance and moving parts that can wear out, the cost savings multiply.

Time. There’s a “time not spent dicking around with dealerships/mechanics” component here too. This is the reason why I bought an EV a few years go. I got fed up with the gas engine maintenance ecosystem and paid my way out. I was literally buying time.

This has been in the back of my mind ever since I last rented an apartment. Short of dangling an extension cord off your balcony, there’s not much that can be done here. You might luck out and get a job somewhere that has charging stations, but that’s a big “if”.

This also generates a deep concern in my mind for poor folks that can only afford to rent. As they say, “it’s expensive to be poor” and having little alternative but to drive gas-burning cars to/from work is only going to crunch budgets harder as time goes on.

Meanwhile, we can’t count on landlords to install these things. My last one was the sort that couldn’t be bothered to hire painters that understood what masking tape was; moving day was half spent picking paint out of light switches and electrical sockets.

I’m not saying that strippers don’t like you. What I’m saying is that, since money is involved, you’ll never know for sure.

I’m Creole. I’m from the swamp

Y’all have a rich culinary tradition that is world-renowned for its ability to pull amazing flavors out of everything, including the trees! I’m not at all surprised that the Creole rendition of this breakfast dish was top shelf.

I eat spicy-hot boiled hard-shell roaches, and raw mud-snot still in their teetees for flavor, and alligator assholes and rice in pig guts.

If you told me that said dishes were the real deal, prepared in a traditional manner, I’d tell you right then and there that I’ll be having seconds. Hell, I’d beg for cooking lessons.

I’ve actually seen “scrapple” at the grocery store, but that was a sausage-shaped loaf of hydrated corn meal, bacon grease/lard, and the barest whiff of seasoning to make it resemble food. My girlfirend’s mom was from the poor south, and actually craved this meal from time to time.

This rendition was also very lackluster. You couldn’t beat the price, as it was cheapest thing in the breakfast isle by a wide margin, but it sure as hell tasted like it.

This may be from the meme graveyard, but it has never been more appropriate:

Even we humans can withstand 3000°C for a short time.

If we want to be entirely pedantic, everything can withstand any destructive condition for at least one plank time.

Of course Japan decided to use robots. But why not use a big dog instead? Maybe it’s a humanitarian concern since they’d be facing off with bears…

:: looks at image from article ::

Oh. It’s a fucking robot yokai-cyber-demon-dog: pure nightmare fuel. They’re clearly on to something here.

What? Soft power? Negotiation? Breaking bread with our (fr)enemies? Nah, we don’t do that here. Besides, how else are people going to know that we’re big, tough, and strong? /s

“Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face.”

Corollary: Nobody has a plan when punching people in the face doesn’t work.

Gwyn in Dark Souls.

The problem was my biggest success. I managed to score a zweihander, pretty early on in the game. I upgraded the hell out of it and was able to clear most bosses with some grinding and a lot of determination. I did this with a failing PS3 controller that generated spurious inputs, resulting in randomly switching to my alt config (unarmed) if I squeezed the controller too hard. I even learned a new level of personal zen and patience after realizing that getting angry would make me perform worse. I got gud.

Then I arrive at the end boss and get absolutely wrecked.

Why? I never had to parry. Not. A. Single. Time. Strike, juke, medium-roll, retreat, strike again. Don’t be a target, and keep moving. Meanwhile, every guide to beat Gwyn says you have to parry his attacks. I basically had little choice but to retrain how to play my character modifying an entire game’s worth of muscle-memory in the process.

My save file has been in this condition for years at this point.

Nutrition is expensive, and controlling waste is crucial. So yes, if you can get a price break on anything essential, consider freezing and pickling (veggies) what would otherwise spoil. In general, try to learn about how different vegetables and meats will keep.

Rice, beans, and potatoes are great staples that last a while and are good for you.

Lower-end “potted meat product” and similar canned meats may be less expensive per ounce than full cuts. That said, it’s usually full of sodium and is usually only good on sandwiches and things like that.

Some grocery stores sell cooked rotisserie chicken as a loss-leader (discount). That said, cost-compare against whole birds in the freezer section just in case. Besides, you can’t beat home-made roast chicken, and it’s fairly easy to do.

I was broke-as-a-joke back in the 2000’s. So the following advice may have aged like the milk I bought back then:

• Obviously, go down-market on your grocery store chain. Cost-compare if your time/energy budget allows it.
• Learn how to cook what’s cheap. What’s not imported and in season is usually (not always) in this category.
• Avoid box-mixes (e.g. hamburger helper). Buy raw ingredients and consider seasoning packets or bulk seasoning to make the same dishes.
• Bologna, souise loaf, and pickle loaf (if they even still make that) can be cheaper than non-processed cuts
• Bananas and corn are subsidized as fuck. There are likely others. As a result, they’re artificially cheap.
• Regularly check the store circular (those newspaper things nobody reads) and jump on limited store specials and BOGOs.
• Tofu can be pretty cheap IF you buy it at an asian grocery store; there may even be bulk options. Making these can be a chore, but a huge bargain if you buy soybeans in bulk. It also freezes okay too, but it does change the texture (some recipes use this).

Experiencing interruptions?

Just the sheer irony of that. Adblock is there to solve that exact problem.

thats_why_im_here.png

(X) Doubt

As a Sr. Engineer, I completely get that my situation may be wildly different from what’s cited in the article.

Right now, I’m using AI “in the loop” rather than “as the loop”. That’s a big difference. And I’m getting my ass kicked routinely on review for dumb-ass things that I’m letting slide from AI generated output. And rightly so. Plus, models routinely lead me down sub-optimal blind alleys while dreaming up really stupid ways to fix problems. The level of (re)prompting I have to provide to suggest to get decent quality results converges on a post-grad that has encyclopedic knowledge of software engineering as it exists online, but with zero real-world experience. It’s both impressive and dangerous as a replacement for software engineering.

In the mode I describe above, I’m not losing the ability to do anything. I can see how one could surrender some coding chops or familiarity with a whole language or stack, in favor of automation. But all you have to do is not do that.

I will say that as a rapid-prototyping technology, It’s nothing short of miraculous. I’ve watched junior engineers knock together medium-weight applications, complete with browser UI/UX and decent workflow, in less than a week. This is great for showing value or putting something semi-functional in front of management and/or customers. But pivoting those prototypes into something maintainable is an utter nightmare. Depending on how beholden to AI and forever prompt-looping with “skills” and MCPs you want to be, I suppose it’s possible to just keep mashing the AI button. But at some point, you’re going to need to get inside there to fix security problems or bugs that elude this workflow. What then?

This always happens.

A company that acts without empathy for their customers will invariably act the same towards their employees. This is because the behavior is usually driven by personalities in leadership that (dis)function this way rather universally. Add the fact that empathy limits one’s ability to make money (in this economy), and that psychological modeling is a thing in the workplace, and it’s easy to see how we keep getting into trouble like this.

There really isn’t an “at the right hand of the devil” scenario. Everyone is in his path, especially if you’re close.

That’s hilarious.

But also, who the hell trades in a car with barely four years of payments on it?

Exactly. Everyone also forgets what a civil war looks like these days. It wouldn’t be North vs South, it would be in every direction, everywhere. Nobody wants this.

For comparison, here’s Myanmar. This started back in 2021: https://myanmar.iiss.org/introduction

before they put coin machines on the weight systems.

WAT. I’ve never heard of this. Is that like a deposit akin to an Aldi shopping-cart, or like an arcade machine?

melting pot

To them, it’s not a melting pot. They see a caste-system of suckitude where every different group exists on the levels beneath wealthy white people. Every reaction, every lie, every diversion, it’s all in service of that one design. The funny part is: the coded speech and dogwhistles mean that they don’t exactly have enough social sway to be full-throated racists about it.