They say once you go Grinch you’ll never go back.

One time my roommate gave me a welding starter set cuz he wanted to learn how to weld LOL.

The American Dream - a tax-optimized portfolio of high-yield stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

…and they SUPER freak out if you say their favorite game isn’t the best one.

No, “the banks” wouldn’t be what the AI would be trained on, it would be the private info of individuals the banks do business with.

Only if they were trained on public material.

The whole focus of concern about social media is on kids being exposed to material their parents don’t want them to see. I think this misses a much larger point - simply the effect social media overuse has on attention span and encouraging superficial thinking.

Scrolling through the firehose of infinite content trains people to process each item as quickly as possible and make a quick value judgement based on minimal information before moving on to the next item. This is absolutely backasswards of how kids should learn to think. It encourages binary thinking - seeing every issue as two opposite extremes - and spending as little effort as possible acquiring information before making that binary decision about who to idolize or demonize. Degrading people’s intellectual process makes them much more susceptible to suggestion and conditioning, which of course is how oligarchs want us.

Sometimes a conference room gets overloaded for a big meeting, sometimes people have pirated conf room chairs as desk side chairs… it varies.

I had a couple stuck on walls where I always wished I had put light switches. They toggled lights on and off using ESP-01 microcontrollers. Another one was in my daughter’s bedroom where I had rehung the door to swing the opposite way so she could leave the door partway open without the hall light shining in her face in bed. As the batteries died I replaced them all with buttons run by newer ESP32s… if any of that makes sense.

The Circle of Nope

related, nobody steals pink power tools. A building contractor friend of mine had some pink paint leftover from a bathroom remodel, so he slapped it on all his power tools - no more tools stolen on job sites!

I don’t think our method of internal government would matter as much to the world as the foreign policies of the individual leader. For reference on that see 2016-2020.

That’ll actually be a shame.

By “everybody” you mean everybody except Amazon. And I had fun hacking those. They were often on sale for like 2 bucks and they came with a battery that was good for like a thousand presses. You had to start the online setup process but not select any products, listen for the button’s msg to Amazon which contained a unique ID. You could then have your own server listen for a “pressed” signal from that button and do whatever you want. I keep meaning to find out if there’s still a way to initialize brand new ones.

“Grab that.”

“No you, I’m not touchin’ that.”

Or they might have assumed there was something wrong with it. I learned a trick at Microsoft to not have my desk chair “borrowed” for meetings - put a big piece of duct tape on it, Nobody wants the duct taped chair lol.

They get better!!

Maybe because they tend to be round. Some of them make me think of the old Cray supercomputer,s but with a ton of extraneous wires and plumbing added to look more futuristic.

I agree if they simply go away, what they produced should become opensource. Sometimes this involves removing dependencies on proprietary software, which anybody who used the opensourced portion would in turn have to pay to license. So they have to rewrite those parts or make special arrangements. Anyway it’s not the slam-dunk you might think. Like after what happens in an action cop movie everybody walks away, but in reality they would spend months or years in court over damages to buildings, passersby getting hurt, etc. Nothing is ever as simple as outsiders think.

As we scroll through the endless inbox of our news feeds, there’s a tendency not to want to spend a lot of time on most items, because there’s an endless stream of them. So we tend to process each thing quickly, react instantly, and move on to the next one. Training yourself to slow down the reaction part and focus on just observing the information first, can help not build up an ever-growing mountain of depression and cynicism.

Amazon Dash buttons have entered the chat.