I guess I could tell a story about the worst person I ever met. I don’t know exactly what criteria elevate someone to the level of “evil” versus just being an awful, horrid person, so I’ll let readers make that judgement.

It was 2010. I was 20 years old and needed a job. Through family networking, I was able to land a brief stint working with a distant cousin of mine who I’d never met before. Let’s call him “James”. I’m scheduled to work with him for about a week, traveling out of state to a small town in Virginia to do some maintenance on pools and such. Seems like a simple enough gig.

He pulls up to my house in his pickup truck to pick me up. Keep in mind I’ve never met this guy before in my life. We’re not 10 minutes down the road when he starts dropping every racial slur you can think of talking about Obama and minorities and such. Guy was like a thesaurus of epithets.

Fast forward 5 or 6 hours that we’ve been driving. During this brief window of time I have heard this guy scream at his girlfriend over the phone about how she “better not be at the bar” or “hanging out with her friends”. He has road raged at every inconsequential inconvenience, making multiple reckless, dangerous maneuvers to save virtually zero transit time. He has pinned every misfortune in his life on black people, immigrants, gays. Anyone but himself.

After this harrowing trip, we’re finally at our destination and we can get to work. To say this guy was an abusive boss would not do it justice. His preferred method of communication was yelling. He’d light up a joint and smoke it very brazenly when there were children not particularly far away from us (one of the pools we worked on was at a community center where lots of kids would play). I don’t have any problem with weed, but c’mon.

Each day when we were done with work, we’d pick out some place to eat. During this week-long stay in this small town, I witnessed multiple random acts of kindness by strangers. James had nothing but angry, hateful things to say about every single one. I saw a guy let some veterans cut in front of him in line at a Bojangles. “What a kiss-ass,” James says. One day at a KFC, an elderly woman gives me and James a big bucket of chicken and biscuits because they got her order wrong and told her to keep it. “Old bitch,” says James after she walks away.

Every night after dinner he’d be at the bar getting hammered. Picking fights with other patrons and generally being a miserable pile of shit. One evening James gets up from the bar to go take a piss. A big biker guy James has been fucking with comes up to me and says, “Your friend’s got a big mouth.”

“Not my friend,” I reply. “He’s my boss, unfortunately. But if you and your biker buddies wanna drag him out back and beat the piss out of him, you ain’t gonna hear me complain.” Biker guy gives a big laugh and pats me on the back in an understanding way.

On the last day of the job, we’ve begun the drive back home. He sees a hotel with a pool that we’re about to pass and unilaterally decides we’re gonna try to fleece some hotel owner by doing some “maintenance” on the pool. He convinces this old man that the pool needs inspecting and the guy agrees to purchase our services. James fucks around for an hour doing virtually nothing to this pool and then charges the guy several hundred dollars. Brow beating and bullying him the entire time.

And to wrap it all up, he didn’t pay me what we’d negotiated. Unfortunately I wasn’t good at advocating for myself at this time in my life, so I just put up with it.

The silver lining to all this is I haven’t seen or heard from him since then. He drove away and has never darkened my doorway in the 15 years since that dismal week. Good riddance.

I appreciate Angus Young’s self-awareness.

“I’m sick and tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve put out 12 albums that sound exactly the same.”

It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,

I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).

For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.

I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.

I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.

That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).

To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).

Roger that. Makes sense to me

I think the “No Spamming” rule means “Please refrain” rather than “Please reframe”

I’m not sure how to interpret “All posts should be of shirts only”. Like, no photographs of people wearing the shirts? Just pictures of empty shirts? Or does it mean don’t post pictures of non-shirt objects having text on them?

This picture has been floating around the internet for ages. I dunno if it’s entirely accurate, but it suggests Nutella is primarily palm oil and sugar. With hazelnuts and cocoa making guest appearances

Don’t get me wrong, though. The stuff’s addictive.

I am salivating over the Frame. I was blown away by consumer VR when it came to market 10 years ago. I had access to an Oculus Rift (pre-Meta) and an HTC Vive at my job. They were both impressive from a technological standpoint and super fun to use.

A mere two years later, the Oculus Quest 1 arrived and I bought one immediately. Basically the full VR experience but entirely wireless. Again, I was blown away from a sheer technical standpoint. But I loathed the headset being tied to Facebook/Meta and their walled garden. It soured the entire experience for me, and it quickly began collecting dust. Even though I could stream PC games to the Quest with FOSS third party apps like ALVR, there was still the privacy aspect of “six cameras controlled by Mark Zuckerberg are looking wherever I’m looking in my house”. No thanks.

The Steam Frame looks like it could reignite my interest in the VR space. I’m honestly surprised Valve has continued to invest R&D into VR well after the hype died. I’m glad they did, because the Frame looks pretty sweet so far.

I appreciate the insight. I do tend to erroneously use “sanitize” and “sterilize” synonymously in this context. Good to know the distinction!

Yeesh. That’s a lot of work, but I guess it makes sense that properly sterilizing things isn’t easy.

I have a pressure cooker, but would be a bit anxious about putting glass inside it. Another user said they used Potassium Metabisulfite for beer and wine bottling. Would that be sufficient for sterilization, or would one still need high heat and pressure?

fermented honey garlic Dear lord. I’ll have to look into that one, haha.

Thanks for the recipes! I’ll have to experiment with these as I get more comfortable with the fermentation process

Haha, I’ve contemplated buying my own bottles for the extra panache once I get the hang of the actual fermenting process.

Until then, I’ve recycled a dozen or so hot sauce bottles from my hot sauce rack for this purpose.

I certainly won’t say no to a recipe. This is the recipe I’m currently using (though I didn’t follow these specific fermentation steps because they are not done by weight) . If you have anything in a similar vein, I’d love to compare and contrast them.

Thanks! I’ll check it out – I’ve been wanting to find a more comprehensive sanitation process for this, since it can be so prone to going bad if not done correctly.

Ahh, gotcha. I’ll keep it in mind for the next batch

The jar on the left initially was filled up to around the threads, but then I added the glass weight and it nearly spilled over the top, lol.

Thanks for the advice! I used boiling water to sterilize the jars, lids, and weights in this instance. Would you say that’s sufficient compared to the oven? I used filtered water from my fridge for the entire process (washing and for making the brine).

Weighed everything out using a scale. Did a 4% salt brine by weight. Last time I did 2.5% so this time I went a bit higher to be on the safe side.

What exactly do you mean when you say “leave a bit more room at the top”? Room for what?

At least you’ll have an excuse to finally shoot the printer.

Nobody talks like that. Nobody

How do you think LLMs learned to talk like that? Plenty of people talk (or rather, write) exactly like that. It’s just now heavily associated with AI because AI has been specifically tuned to output sentences structured that way.

Yes, AI has a vibe to it that can be very predictable and easy to spot, but that doesn’t mean every single instance of someone knowing how to string a few paragraphs together with certain verbiage is a bot.

Idk maybe I’m being paranoid

Seems that way. Healthy skepticism is good and necessary. Paranoia not so much.

This attitude is essentially discouraging certain syntactic styles in writing. I and many others now regularly have moments when writing posts where we go, “Hm, I maybe shouldn’t word it this way or people might say I’m a bot,” and it’s obnoxious that it’s come to that.

For example, if you feel like you should stop eating meat but find that difficult for whatever reason, don’t throw your hands up. Do what you can, then stop. Maybe that means eating meat a few times a week instead of every day.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I’ve cut back on my meat consumption a fair bit over the last several years. I doubt I can ever go fully vegetarian, but I’ve come to enjoy lots of different kinds of veggie burgers and miscellaneous vegan alternatives. I remember being wowed a few years back when I first tried some vegan “cheese” made from fermented coconut. I dislike coconut in general, but somehow they made a really convincing, gooey cheese from it that didn’t taste or feel like regular coconut at all. Blew my mind. Goes great on a black bean burger or a veggie wrap.

You could install something like LMMS and let them experiment with making their own music (without needing recording equipment or learning real instruments yet).

Have him search Wikipedia on something he loves and to look for the sources.

I like this idea, but with the additional step of vetting the topic in question on Wikipedia before allowing the kid to read the page.

e.g.: the kid says, “I love MrBeast!” and wants to research him. That Wiki article, while mostly innocuous, has a fairly lengthy “Controversies” section, including blue links to topics like “sexual harassment” and “homophobia”.