The one about cows is no joke. Hitting a cow in a sedan at highway speeds is more or less the same as hitting a brick wall.

Edit: actually, given the choice, take the brick wall, because at least a simple masonry wall will crush and crumble and absorb some of the impact. The cow will just gain a sudden increase in its net velocity at your expense.

Hey, thanks for the advice. If I have some free time and spare gumption, I’ll definitely give it a go. If that happens, I’ll let you know what comes of it.

Not op, I got a free Ender 3 from a frustrated co-worker, and am now the frustrated co-worker. I’ve tried getting a new glass print surface, tried using glue sticks, tried changing print temps and speeds, tried levelling and re-levelling and re-levelling the bed, but I just can’t get the print to stick for love or money. It’s now been re-homed to the garage, as a parking obstacle for my bicycle.

Those tech bros are up to something

Okay?

Look, it makes them happy, it’s free, and it doesn’t cost you anything. It just kinda doesn’t seem like a big deal.

Thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of that. All of my experience around Roe was seeing republicans wanting it dealt with in the legislature/executive.

Gotta love Pelosi, just when the Democrats are in danger of not spilling the spaghetti, she reliably shows up to make a disaster of it. She’s got, like, the anti-McConnel*.

*McConnel is, imo, one of the most talented statesmen of my lifetime. It’s a goddamn shame he’s used his talents for evil. It’s a little bewildering to imagine how different a place the US could be if he’d been on the side of the people. It’s also a powerful statement of what a wreck the GOP has become that Mitch couldn’t control the MAGA/freedom caucus members anymore. I hope the whole thing just implodes on itself and we get something new and less horrible.

This is it. Trump didn’t give a flying shit at all if anything he did was legal, he just went for it, and it worked.

So, I don’t think there’s a good single answer to this question.

Obama isn’t and wasn’t as progressive as he was (and sometimes is, mostly by Republicans) framed. The democrats only had a filibuster-proof majority for a few months, and even then, Joe Lieberman gummed up the works big time on getting the ACA through. Somebody mentioned that they wasted a lot of time trying to get bipartisan support for the ACA, and it’s true. They spent months negotiating against themselves with the republicans, whose answer was always “no”, and by the time they were done, the ACA was a shell of what it could have been. After the ACA, which I must add is basically comprised of all the non-insane (read: mostly pointless) reforms the Republicans were proposing as well as some more rational reforms, the right-wing hype machine started red-lining (as in tachometers, not the racist housing policy, though I guess that could also work since they really didn’t want that black man living in that house) and you’d have thought we had an actual communist overthrow of the government on our hands. The democrats absolutely bungled the PR (the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh) and pissed off everyone outside the party and made everyone inside the party facepalm. After the supermajority disappeared, the republicans started cynically abusing the filibuster and turned the rest of Obama’s presidency into anything from a lame duck to just one (republican caused) crisis after another.

Tl;Dr a lot of the democrats aren’t progressives, and we had a lot more of the old cold war blue dog crowd that Biden is from than we do now, mixed with absolutely bunglefucking both the political strategy and PR around the ACA and not being able to get past the filibuster once the supermajority disappeared.

P.S. it’s worth noting that, at the time, Roe was considered settled law. From what I recall, nobody was too anxious about the SCOTUS citing 400 year old witch hunters and overturning pretty well settled and accepted case law. The republicans were generally seeking to overturn Roe via the federal legislature/executive at the time.

Still going to poison the results and be embarrassing when the LLM starts putting creative commons licensing in its output.

I’ve really been waiting for gas stations to jump in on this. Tying it to vehicle manufacturers just doesn’t make that much sense to me, not nearly as much sense as using the companies whose mission is already to deliver energy to vehicles. You need a tiny fraction of the infra for electric charging that you need to supply gas. Shell or Chevron could EASILY ink deals with, say, Starbucks, to put one or two chargers in every Starbucks parking lot in the country and just sit back and laugh as the money rolls in. And yet, they just keep pushing for exclusively fossil fuels.

AFAICT, the charger network is a huge part of Tesla’s value proposition. Laying off the entire 500 person team like this is going to be a massive, massive disruption no matter what anyone says, you can’t just patch it with [checks notes] an entirely different team. It’s going to take that new team months to get up to date, put out fires, find their bearings, etc. and by that point, issues are already snowballing. The rapport and contacts problem is also going to be enormous; basically shit canning all of the company’s industry/logistics ambassadors is what, in any other light, would be called a disaster. This is going to be a clusterfuck, and that’s before any competitors interested in starting their own charger network start scooping these newly available specialists up.

It’s incredible to see this man still idolized, even by bosses and other execs, as he tanks not just one but two household name businesses AT THE SAME TIME.

And lies, don’t forget the lies

Dude, you don’t deserve to be criticized for being a Jew, but you absolutely deserve a tomato for supporting a genocidal ethnostate.

Oh, I did. I ended up installing Linux mint and used it on my personal machine for about six months before re-installing windows. I would still be using Linux, I liked it a lot, but I found I had a lot of trouble getting multiplayer to work between my daughter and I. Gaming is 98% of the way there, but that 2% is really annoying and it’s most of what I use my personal machine for. I’m sure I could have figured it out if I’d had a solid 12-36 hours to fine tune configs and Google hyper specific issues, but I just don’t have that. I’m confident I will return to Linux in time, but Windows still has the edge in terms of out-of-the-box gaming, sadly.

And an incomplete product; windows 11 was less functional at launch than windows 10. I’ve been a windows user since 98 and that’s the first time I can remember having said that. Sure, there were off editions that were weird and unpleasant, but I wouldn’t say less functional. Windows 11 just flat out was an incomplete product at launch.

And the live service dependencies: windows 11 pooping its diaper and having a fit about every other thing because it doesn’t have an Internet connection even though an Internet connection isn’t strictly necessary is a terrible UX choice. Anyone with half a brain knows it’s because MS has decided that if you won’t let them slurp that tasty, tasty data, then you shouldn’t be able to use the product you paid for.

And the plans to stuff ads into your operating system

And them basically doing the same shit that landed them huge anti-trust lawsuits in the 90s, but we’re doing it again because they figure they can make more money than the lawsuit will cost them, so fuck it.

There’s a lot to not like here.

Tsk’va!

This is hella cool, but I do want to say that it seems like there’s been a flood of news articles talking about how we’re sooooooo close to cracking plastic recycling and microplastics ever since the UN had that big push to try and regulate global plastic production. Seems like the industry is on a PR drive similar to the one for big carbon and oil; “no, you don’t need regulations, that’s ignorant, you’re being ignorant, a tech solution is just around the corner, we swear” etc. That’s primed me to view all “plastic solution” articles with more suspicion.

All answers to the FP boil down to one of three Fs.

We’re first, we’re few, or we’re fucked.

I identify as a time radical. We should switch the entire world onto GMT; +/- not a goddamn thing. Is it perfect? I think so, but all those people who might be confused will probably find it a lot less confusing than trying to make sense of the difference between timezones.