I read these websites because I’m also a human and I enjoy experiencing the ideas of my fellow humans first-hand, not filtered into a boring puree or boiled down essence. I have always enjoyed reading things written by actual humans, because I can connect intellectually and emotionally with the actual real live person behind the ideas, and learn and grow with them as they also do the same, and I expect that enjoyment will continue if not intensify in the coming years as AI buries such signals in ugly soulless noise.

There will always be an appetite for real human creation. The hard part will be reliably finding it. I will be relying heavily on my finely tuned bullshit detector to work as an AI detector for now, and I can only hope that it will be enough.

The way to deal with a raw deal is to say “no deal”. Appeasement of tyrants and bullies just strengthens their position and encourages them to take more. They’ll never stop, because they’re never actually satisfied, there is no such thing as having “taken enough” and eventually they’re going to make up reasons they need more. It never ends. That’s why we must fight tyranny to the death, to the last man, never give in, and be willing to die for what we believe in. Maybe what we believe in is wrong, but it’s better than living in a world you can’t accept anymore. Vichy France is not a good place to be. We learned these lessons after WW2, we knew tyranny had taken refuge in the Soviet Union and called itself communism, but eventually they too fell, and we thought we had found the answer to it, because we had defeated the Soviet Union with trade and peace and prosperity, we thought we could kill tyranny itself with trade and peace and prosperity. The long peace throughout and afterwards made us lazy and apathetic to the inherent dangers of tyranny and fascism, but nope, it wasn’t gone at all, it was festering below the surface and now it’s come back, seemingly everywhere all at once. And we’re going to have to learn these lessons again and understand why people were willing to die for our freedom.

Dessalines makes a relatively good piece of software for completely the wrong reasons, but he won’t stop us from using it for our own purposes and we don’t have to acknowledge him as the “leader” of the community just because he runs the software project. That said, I’m also glad we have alternatives like Piefed, in case he tries to enshittify us out, we have alternatives.

Southern Ontario, and as a top 5, I miss the thunderstorms, the easy access to nature and the beauty of its expansive landscapes, how quickly road work gets done (working at night? more than 1 hour a week? you’d think these guys don’t even have a union or something…) the privatized government registry system and the general efficiency and lack of bureaucracy, and the best damn drinking water in the world.

They really think Ukrainians are that stupid, don’t they.

We have successfully automated plagiarism and fraud. Truly, we live in incredible times. Both literally and figuratively incredible.

There are many things I miss about Alberta. This isn’t one of them.

I’m glad someone understands.

It’s fascism. Plain and simple. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it seems like we’ve completely forgotten everything we learned from WW2. This is what we were supposed to be remembering when we were honoring veterans and thanking people for their service.

Why not both‽

Or we could burn more coal so we can generate the energy needed for synthetic gasoline…

The problem is, people can, do, and will use that exact same argument to say we don’t need any more solar panels or wind turbines, because we don’t need and can’t use or store the excess power for anything and that’s why we need to keep thermal plants as backup for base load generation. Look, when we produce too much electricity, the electricity cost goes to zero and negative! It’s “wasteful and inefficient”! But these two problems can solve each other. Synthetic fuels (doesn’t have to be gasoline, hydrogen is step 1, methane/LNG is a bit more manageable as a chemical fuel. As long as the carbon source is atmospheric, then it and other synthetic hydrocarbons are carbon neutral to burn) provide an on-demand energy sink/storage method that can support and drive more electrification and renewable power, it just has to be part of a consistent and systemic approach with strict regulation and a clear view of the big picture (something sorely lacking these days).

We focus too much on efficiency and cost sometimes. Sometimes efficiency is only a “nice to have” while being outweighed by practicality, convenience, safety, and any of the other factors we choose to make a priority.

It is expensive and inefficient for an airplane to have two engines instead of just one. We do it anyway because it’s required for safety and redundancy. We made that the priority, and that was an active choice. We need to start making more active choices about what the priority is when it comes to our energy futures. All priorities have tradeoffs. Cost and efficiency have their own tradeoffs. Question it when people tell you that things can’t be done because of “cost” or “efficiency”. When they do that they’re presupposing what the priority is, but often it’s billionaires trying to cut corners to make themselves richer at our expense, our safety, our futures. We can do inefficient things. Sometimes it’s even the right choice.

This is like a running joke they do. They reuse the sounds on purpose. The Wilhelm Scream is everywhere when you know how to listen for it.

Renting a seedbox is my solution to all these issues. I imagine your VPS probably wouldn’t be happy with self-hosting a seedbox (although technically its very easily doable) perhaps you could find a VPS that allows seedboxes (or vice versa, a seedbox that lets you run other stuff on your seedbox since it’s basically just a VPS anyway)

What is the heat deflection temeprature of the plastic you’re working with? Unless you really need the red-hot temperature of nichrome wire, use a PTC (positive temperature coefficient) heater instead. They are ceramic (often sold as “ceramic heaters”) and as they heat up their resistance increases very consistently and they reach a stable equilibrium at a particular design temperature and wattage. These are the lego of electrical heating you are looking for. They are found in almost every consumer product that needs safe, consistent but not excessive heat. They literally can’t reach excessive levels of heat they basically just stop creating more when they get too hot, as if they had a built-in thermostat, but as a physical property it can’t “fail”. They are safe and reliable, albeit not a particularly efficient method of creating large amounts of heat, at the scale you’re working at they’re fine and much safer than nichrome wire.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but maybe together they can make one thing slightly less wrong. Interesting take.

It will never happen, they are already “too big to fail”, the government is in their pocket, short of a complete social rebellion (which I hope becomes closer every day) I really can’t see this ever proceeding.

Fuck your AI slop too.

Gross. I love that Rachel keeps holding the government to account since it seems like no one else will.

Yeah but it’s cold and groceries are expensive and amazon doesn’t deliver.