Somewhat ironically, both of those things would actually require a license as opposed to ownership

In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.

Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.

In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.

So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.

The one I loved was a pancake machine at a hotel breakfast buffet. You pressed the pancake button and batter was dispensed onto a slowly rolling large heated cylinder. When your pancake made it to the edge of the cylinder, it peeled off and flipped onto another counter-rotating cylinder. Then it was peeled off and slid down a chute onto a plate. Perfectly round, perfectly cooked.

I ate a few more pancakes than I should have just to see it work. Then against the protests of my wife I lifted the hinged side panel to see how the batter was loaded and dispensed (it was squeezed out of a bag by a screw jack)

The girl at the buffet asked if I was a process engineer (yup) and assured me that I was far from the first to peek under the hood 😅

There is this thing that I feel is most prevalent in the USA, to call any attraction to a girl under the age of 18 pedophilia. Because that’s the age to star in porn. The term should truly be used for attraction to children. I think it’s an extension of the “pedo panic” where every man is assumed for some reason to be a child rapist now.

As such almost every young man could at some point be caught as a “pedophile”- 17 year olds sneak into clubs all the time, for example. 20 year old hooked up with one? Now he is considered a pedophile even if the actual age of consent is lower.

Meanwhile the porn industry glorifies “barely 18” girls as something highly desirable. It’s a little messed up to say the least.

Actual pedos who are into kids should be put in mental institutions. But I would strongly suspect that 15% stated just includes honest young men and creepy old men, none of which are truly pedophiles. That number is way too high.

Don’t forget classics like Fuck_this_shit1! Fuck_this_shit2!

Hopefully you don’t do much driving in the dark, the backlight on our new work truck’s console display glows so brightly even with the display “off” that it ruins your night vision.

Modern would be fine if even half a moment of thought went into non-typical situations, but it’s always some stupid oversight like this. Or the 5000k LED dome lights with a visible PWM frequency. Literally painful.

I prefer to drive with old incandescent dash lights dimmed to nearly nothing, yes I live in a very dark area with no lighting and many road hazards. On a moonless night, the area lit by the headlights is literally all you can see. We run extra lightbars, turning lights etc.

More light outside the truck, not inside. That’s my rant

For the readers that don’t realize exactly how old school, Sam & Fuzzy has been around since the dialup era.

It’s been through just about every phase a comic can go through, he used to write decade-long story arcs, lately he seems to be enjoying drawing simple cute dog comics. I suppose a guy needs a break sometimes from a career like that!

I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn’t know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.

Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends

If he follows through he’ll be in on round 2 of the rapture I guess

That’s practically all my cats eat! I only put cat food out in the winter or if they start to look slim. All summer they eat mice and sparrows and get fat. (Note that sparrows are a terrible invasive pest and removing them has a positive impact on the local ecosystem)

They are barn cats though and that’s their job so it’s a little different from the pet cat situation.

Same place as ever, impressions and click-through. The theoretical goal here would be to offload all the processing to the user’s PC, making delivery of this customized ad content close to free.

However the largest advertising targets are now mobile by far, and those platforms don’t have GPU to speak of, especially from an AI perspective. So so far not feasible.

Likewise Dunlop makes everything even slightly rubbery, from tires to tennis racquets, golf balls and hydraulic hose

If you live in the right area you may already have one!

This is a pretty good idea, my wife dual boots and I’ll suggest it to her as Windows keeps trashing the EFI partition.

This would work but assumes the primary use of the machine is Windows and derates your performance under Linux significantly due to USB speeds. Even if you’re storing your data on the Windows HDD, NTFS drivers are dog slow compared to EXT4 and other *nix filesystems.

Also some BIOSes are a pain to get to boot off removable drives reliably so it really depends on what your machine is.

I’ve used Linux as a primary dev system for well over a decade now, and with the current state of Windows I’d really recommend just taking the leap, keep your Windows box if you need Windows software and build a dedicated Linux workstation.

You’re missing one:

• dedicated, air-gapped Windows box used for legacy industrial software

Aside from “lightweight apps in VM” this is the only solution I use now. (Unless you count Proton, but having Steam games Just Work barely feels like a “solution” as it requires zero effort on my part)

I don’t even trust Windows to dual boot off a separate disk without trying to break something anymore.

I play a lot of couch coop with my kid but adults would enjoy all these too. Most can be found under $20 on Steam and a lot are fairly lightweight games but have good coop mechanics and can be a lot of fun to sit down for an hour or two with.

• Overcooked 1 + 2 (but 2 really is better) you will love or hate it depending on your personalities, nothing in between. We loved it
• Ship of Fools
• Enter the Gungeon
• Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
• Moving Out

On Switch

• Cadence of Hyrule
• Don’t starve together (only split screen on console not PC… Wtf)
• Pikmin

Your local janitorial supply is better than Amazon.

Honestly every household should have an account at one, everything there is practical and works well unlike most modern consumer products. Dirt cheap too.

Stuff like broom and dustpan, mop and bucket, spray bottles, squeegees, concentrated cleaning products, paper towel… Buy commercial grade, buy it for life.

It’s even referenced in the Bible, showing that the writers had a good idea of the maximum human lifespan even back then.

[Genesis 6:3] Then the LORD said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”

That’s a valid point, the dev cycle is compressed now and customer expectations are low.

So instead of putting in the long term effort to deliver and support a quality product, something that should have been considered a beta is just shipped and called “good enough”.

A good example I guess would be a long term embedded OSS project like Tasmota, compared to the barely functional firmware that comes stock on the devices that people buy to reflash to Tasmota.

Still there are few things that frustrate me like some Bluetooth device that really shouldn’t have been a Bluetooth device, and has non-deterministic behaviour due to lack of initialization or some other trivial fault. Why did the tractor work lights turn on as purple today? Nobody knows!