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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • My problem with Tesla is that so many things seem half-unthinking, half-finished or half-assed:

    Unthinking: I know! I’ll put a ledge in from of the headlights, so snow can pile up while I’m driving!

    Unfinished: all the seam mismatches and eternally unfinished-but-really-close! full self-driving (it ain’t gonna happen).

    Half-assed: that recall they had to do because sometimes the latch doesn’t catch properly and the hood flies open when you’re driving and blocks your view. Tesla’s solution isn’t to fix or replace the hood latch so this doesn’t happen; they push a software up that monitors the hood latch and pops up a warning, telling you to pull over and check the hood latch. Because apparently fixing the issue that their poor design (see #1) and bad implementation (see #2) doesn’t warrant an actual fix, they’re just going to fob the risk , the cost and the work off to the customer.













  • I was trying to solve a betweenle a couple weeks ago, had it down to the words immediately before and after the word-for-the-day, and couldn’t think of it. I went to three different AI engines and asked them what word was between those two, alphabetically. All three engines repeatedly gave me “answers” that did not occur between the two words. Like, I’d ask "what 5-letter English words are alphabetically between amber and amble, and they’d suggest aisle or armor. None of them understood ‘alphabetically’.






  • I said I’d put more effort into the work, not that I was putting no effort into it. Like, my grandad was an amateur photographer and I have all these negatives of his work. I can’t afford the money to get them scanned professionally (so many negatives!), but I bought a pro-sumer grade negative scanner and am scanning them myself. Unfortunately, as I said, there are a lot of negatives, and it takes me around one hour to process each roll. It’s gonna take me another year to scan all the negatives.

    Then I have an entire bookcase of photographs that need to be scanned (only a small subset of these are granddad’s work). Again, I can’t afford to get them scanned professionally, but I have a decent scanner for the PC, so that’s what I’m working with, but it’ll take a long time to scan in and process all those photos.

    My uncle was a professor and the university taped some of his lectures; a different aunt was a very small-time actress and has maybe 200 VHS tapes of her performances. Granddad was a local musician, so we have some audio tapes of that. Etc, etc, etc.

    Everything needs time and concentration, and I’m only one person. It’s gonna take me years to finish everything.


  • I’d put more effort into recording family history. Why aren’t I doing so now? Because it’s a lot of work and I don’t have anyone to help me with it. It includes scanning photos, scanning negatives, and labeling and organizing all the pictures; converting reel-to-reel takes, mini-cassettes and audio cassettes to digital, and labeling those; converting VHS to DVD and labeling those; finding and transcribing family recipes and organizing them into an annotated cookbook; transcribing old letters from the early to late 1900’s in various handwriting styles, and every medium from faded pencil to blotted fountain pen to hurriedly scrawled ballpoint, in everything from tissue-thin airmail paper to fragile student notepaper to cat-pee’d-upon cards; and writing a short biography of the various people who are pictured, recorded, written, etc, in all the various media.


  • Most of my cars, I’ve bought from friends, co-workers, or relatives, or people that they knew. We agree on blue book value, I get it checked by my mechanic, occasionally I’ve had to get a bank loan, and it’s done.

    Part of it’s starting to keep your ears open when you think your current car may be getting toward the end of it’s life, so that you can take advantage of anything you might hear about. Part of it’s asking people if they’ve heard of anyone who might be getting rid of their old car. And part of it is people remembering that you’ve asked about these things before so that, when they or someone they know start thinking about getting rid of their old car, you’re one of the people they think of who might be willing to take it without hassle, at a fair price.