“A little copying is better than a little dependency.”

Wish I could, believe me.

The Nokia brick reminds me of another story. This was just an interaction with a coworker. I wasn’t trying to get anything from him nor him from me, but phones came up in conversation. At the time I was running some old candy-bar phone. Don’t remember the model or anything. But I showed it off and the coworker (who was a bit younger than me) said “where did you even get that?” I said I’d gotten it from the place in the mall that repairs phones and resells used phones. He said “did they have you rifle around in like a bin of used phones to pick out that one?” That was probably… 2013 or so?

(It was a good-natured joke, and I laughed along. Not an awkward or shitty interaction. Just funny.)

Ooo! A gentleman and a scholar. Thanks kind sir! I’ll have to look more deeply into what “partial” means on the “features” section, but that’s extremely promising.

I actually have another funny story about the stock firmware I’m running now. I got a notification that said “need time to focus? Use Focus to pause distracting apps. Tap to set up.” My phone gave me a notification to ask me if I was getting too many annoying notifications. 😐 So I’m definitely interested in getting off of the stock firmware hopefully quickly.

I want another column: “Shit, why’d you have to cast…”

I have a friend who literally doesn’t get it. He identifies very strongly as a “leftist”. I don’t know that he identifies with any more specific label, but he’s got a big primitivist streak. (As do I, really.) He’s the one who inspired me to read Ishmael. No way he could be considered a Tankie in the slightest.

We were talking about politics in the U.S. and about how right-wingers, despite major ideological differences, tend to band together to… for instance… elect people like Trump. Just by virtue of being right-wing, they can work to accomplish common goals. The left, meanwhile, cancels each other and themselves constantly and can’t really manage to get any kind of momentum as a result.

He kindof implied that the ideological differences between leftists aren’t consequential and we should all be working together.

And I was like “well… tankies, though, right?” And he’s like “what’s a tankie?”

We’ve been talking about it a lot. I’ve shared lots of examples of tankies defending DPRK and Stalin and stuff. And I think he’s still skeptical that such people even exist, somehow.

It’s not that he’s a tankie who doesn’t get why authoritarianism is a losing strategy. He’s an anarchist who so can’t understand or identify with the tankie mindset that he thinks they’re some tiny group of inconsequential nuts so worthy of being ignored as to not even require a footnote in any discussion of left-wing solidarity.

I envy him, sometimes.

It especially applies to Paw Patrol.

Reddit’s the best marketing for Lemmy.

I’d think if your dog is too hot, you’d be better off making it a chili dog.

In my efficient capitalism?

(/s)

I was on a trip as a kid (probably… I dunno, 9 or 10 years old?) with my family. The hotel had a pool and the family brought me to have a swim. (They didn’t swim, just sat around the pool while I swam.)

It was just us at first, but soon another kid about my age showed up with no parents/supervision. He sat down on the edge of the pool at the deep end and dangled his feet. He conversed a little with me and my family, but otherwise was just there hanging out. He mentioned in passing that he couldn’t swim.

But then suddenly he was in the pool, thrashing and struggling.

My parents honestly had no idea what to do. One ran to grab the life buoy. I don’t remember quite what the other did.

But my swim lessons training kicked in and I did the thing. Jumped out of the pool, ran around to the side of the pool right where the kid was struggling, laid down on the ground next to the pool, and stuck one arm into the pool for him to grab. Worked just as well as my old swim instructor indicated it would.

Once he had me to hold him up out of the water, he was fine, of course. The rest was just a matter of helping him out of the pool.

It was after that that he revealed he had an ostomy bag and wasn’t supposed to be swimming at all, deep end or otherwise. (It was a hospital town and I got the impression he was in town to get some kind of treatment.)

We made sure he got back to his room safely and all.

That’s pretty much the whole story. I don’t know that he’d have died had nobody been there. And my bumbling parents probably would have figured a way to help him even if I wasn’t there. But he had a better chance of walking away from that by virtue of my (admittedly very rudimentary) swim lesson training.

And it was really dramatic being part of it.

Posting conspiracy theories in a community about science? Bold move, Cotton.

I love when I idly wonder something about a post, click into the comments, and the top comment is exactly, specifically the answer to my idle curiosity. Cheers.

Reddit gonna Redd.

Poop where?

If it just makes spaghetti randomly somewhere not on the build plate, a) it’ll leave quite a mess that would need cleaned up and b) it can end up where it shouldn’t be. In a belt gear or incorporated into the print in a way that sticks out and looks bad or stuck to the hot end in a big gob that causes it to not extrude right and blob up in the print or some such.

I suppose, depending on the other print settings, it might make sense use purged plastic to make up infill. That said, I don’t have any direct experience with multiple extrusion, so maybe that is a thing. Maybe slicers already do that to some extent but infill doesn’t typically take enough filament to fully purge and the tower is still necessary.

All that said, I don’t think just making spaghetti would work out very well.

Sometimes the babies eat the mom too. Yes I speak from… I guess second-hand experience. First-hand would imply I was a matricidal cannibal hamster.

LLMs aren’t capable of doing any better. The only reason you or anyone might think they are is because of aggressive marketinggrifting by the very few people in a position to profit by convincing the world LLMs are basically the main ship computer from Star Trek when in fact they’re more like ELIZA.

3.75 pounds.

Oh wait. “Dose.” Thought you said something else.

And then they all combined into a megazord.

• screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan