Thanks! The garage is nice. It has some real advantages. When it’s all set up, I’ll be able to back the pickup truck to the garage door and take a full sheet of plywood directly from the truck bed to the workbench. When the weather is nice, I like to open the doors and just work in the fresh air. Finally, while I do sweep and vacuum up, there’s always a little bit of dust left over. For that little bit of dust, I can grab the leaf blower and just blow the last bit of really fine dust out the garage door.

I’m working to set up my new workshop. We moved into a new house a few months ago, and I’m finally getting to setting up the shop in earnest.

I’m setting up the shop in a 3 car garage. The garage has a one car bay and a two car bay. I want to be able to actually park a car in the one car bay. So I built a large wall separating the two bays. The wall covers probably 2/3 of the width. The rest will be covered by a curtain. The two car bay will be the actual woodshop area. The one car bay will be a place to park a car and will serve as a finishing space. The wall and curtain will keep sawdust contained within the two car bay. The wall also serves as a tool wall. Here’s what the wall currently looks like:

From the other side:

The wall is about 10’ wide and 12’ high.

In my old shop I had even more on the wall. But I’m trying out moving most of my bladed tools into a tool chest. I was going to build one, but I found this old steamer trunk by the side of the road. From the manifest glued to the back it looks like it was used by an air force airman in the 1980s to ship things home from Japan. I’ll be using it as a tool chest. I wanted to put wheels on it. But as it’s a bit of an artifact I didn’t want to actually modify the trunk itself or drill into. Instead I built a little cart for it to roll around on.

After I finish here, the last big step in setting up the shop will be installing the dust collection system. And I went overboard on this. This is very much a dream shop setup I’m building out. Currently in a bunch of boxes strewn about the shop is an entire Oneida Dust Gorilla and a network of piping to service the various machines.

Thanks!

They’re fine…until you see the monolithic concrete dome home!

https://www.monolithic.org/

I want a house that laughs at tornadoes, earthquakes, and the rare simultaneous tornadoquake.

I’m going to enjoy torturing my 14-year-old self. My 14-year-old self was a shithead. But I was raised in a conservative Catholic house, and at that age I firmly embraced the version of reality common among the Fox News set. I was that annoying conservative high schooler. Sure I was repping hard, but I was still an idiot.

Now I’m a late-30s trans woman, about to celebrate 8 years of marriage to my wonderful husband.

The things I can say. I’m going to haunt this kid’s dreams.

Pass a new law. Make “it was an AI datacenter” an affirmative criminal defense against charges of arson. An affirmative defense is when you go to court and say, “yes, I did the act, but it was necessary because reason X.” “Yes, I shot and killed the guy, but I did so because he broke into my house and was trying to kill me.” That’s an affirmative defense.

Fuck it. Ultimately the law is subordinate to the will of the people. If they’re going to just ignore the voters, the voters should make it so people can’t be prosecuted for burning down AI data centers. It just won’t be illegal.

The real issue is that since any fingerprint that can be mandated for AI content must be algorithmically implemented, then that fingerprint can be algorithmically removed.

For example, let’s say companies voluntarily choose or are forced to integrate text fingerprinting into LLM output. Automated AI writing detection tools already exist, but they’re not reliable. But in principle we could make the output of LLMs easy to identify. Maybe we force them to adopt subtle but highly unique patterns of word choice, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. Then if any student attempted to upload an LLM-generated essay to their course website, the system could with high accuracy flag it as AI generated.

But…if those patterns are so clear and unambiguous, it also means they can be easily detected by third party tools. If one person can code ChatGPT to add special fingerprinting to the text ChatGPT creates, another person can create a program that you can paste ChatGPT text into that will remove that fingerprinting.

Long term, I predict a violent revolution of the young overthrowing the tyranny of the old.

Aging societies tend to divert resources from the young to the old. People vote for their own interests. When retirees outnumber parents, more money goes to retirees and less to kids. This lowers the birth rate even more and continues the spiral. In increasingly aging societies, young people face the prospect of having to pay a lifetime of ruinously high taxes (far higher than their elders did) to pay for the retirements of the old that outnumber them. And they’ll do this knowing that they themselves will never have a retirement of anywhere near the quality of the retirements they’re being taxed to death to fund.

Long term, we’re entering a very dangerous situation in developed countries. We have a trifecta of three dangerous conditions:

1. The young will be ruinously taxed to fund retirements of existing elderly, a retirement far more generous than they will ever receive.
2. The young will be completely shut out of political power due to being outnumbered by the old.
3. The young are the only ones actually capable of fighting in a war.

These are the conditions that historically brew revolutions. People take up arms typically when they see no hope for the future or feel they have nothing to lose. The young may not be able to outvote the old. But they certainly can outshoot the old.

Yeah that’s what I figured. I was just really baked last night. This thought came into my head based on a conversation I was having with someone, and I just thought the idea hilarious. Just imagining some guard getting sentenced and going, “wait…I still get to keep my job, right?”

Holy shit. It’s a real life concrete puppy.

I always remember the classic Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the pre-9/11 days, the game had a helicopter that you could take off from the roof of the World Trade Center. You could only access that takeoff location via a helicopter. However, once the map was loaded, you could switch your aircraft. Our favorite thing to do was to start with a helicopter on top of the WTC, then swap it out for a jumbo jet. All of a sudden you’re piloting a 747 trying to take off from a dead stop off the roof of the WTC.

In a just world, you’d have been bumped up a grade, moved into an advanced track, or given time in advanced sessions with other gifted students. That said, your teacher would have been responsible for making those recommendations.

Oh that did end up happening eventually. I did go down that track. Ended up taking calculus freshman year of high school.

Google:

“No need to sue us. Mr Maclsaac was listed in Google search as a sex offender, but wasn’t actually on the sex offender registry. But no worry, we’ve fixed the problem! We have several government records contracts. Our LLM simply corrected the record and added Ashley to the sex offender registry. The error has been resolved.”

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Adobe Acrobat will grind it to a halt. Fucking how.

“Today Microsoft and Adobe are announcing further AI integration of their products. This AI will tune software performance in an attempt to counteract the slowing effects of previous rounds of AI integration.”

This is Paul Harvey…Good Day!

When I was a child, I was told that Communism failed because it gave no incentive for people to work hard and better themselves and their society. After all, if everyone is paid the same and has a guaranteed job, why worker harder than than anyone else? As an adult, I learned the same thing applies to workers in capitalist societies. In most companies, there is little reason to do more than the bare minimum needed to keep from getting fired. Promotions never happen as companies prefer to hire externally. Real raises and bonuses don’t happen; you have to move companies to get a real raise. And of course, workers don’t get any direct reward for working more. The owners just pocket all the profits and tell you to work harder.

I turns out both American Capitalism and Soviet Communism wasted colossal amounts of human potential.

“How do bird’s fly?”

Mostly horizontally, a bit vertically. 😂

My worst version of this was in third grade where we learned our multiplication tables. Our teacher had us all make multiplication flashcards. 1x1 up through 12x12. She then assigned us to spend a certain amount of hours practicing the flashcards, including some log and parental sign-off IIRC. A card might have “3x8” written on one side, “24” on the other. Practice and drill until you memorize them all.

Well, the problem I had was that I memorized my times tables in a fraction of the time we were required to practice. I ended up getting in trouble for not having enough practice hours - even though I was acing the quizzes we were getting. This wasn’t even about showing your work, as this was a rote exercise in memorization!

But the teacher thought that it took X number of hours of practice to learn your times tables. That’s what she assigned, and nothing was going to change her mind. So I sat at home pointlessly practicing the times tables I had already memorized, instead of doing something fun or even moving ahead to more advanced math concepts.

“I attended there for four years. Well, I lived nearby and attended many campus parties in that period…”