Then I inherited a second car, which for various reasons is barely practical to keep while it works. It lives outside so that the stuff in the garage (a clutter of far too many bicycles, mostly) can stay accessible. But in winter, it is possible - barely - to park the car inside, with bicycles hanging only inches above it. Some stuff had to be disposed of to make this possible, and I fear some additional stuff will have to go this fall. But you have to set yourself limits or the stuff will grow infinitely.

Meanwhile premium locations all over town are sprouting Dymon Self Storage units. That's the local brand of "premium climate controlled storage". There's one less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my house.

Then you want to make $$, and inevitably this causes the platform to be less good. Even my favourite non-ensh*ttified (so far) social platform, let's just say it has the same orange colour scheme as the HN titlebar, is getting ever more aggressive at promoting its paid plan to the detriment of usability for a free user. But so far hasn't started putting formerly free features behind a paywall (premium features are, of course).

And CD's argument that first you stiff your users to favour your advertisers/vendors, then you start stiffing them to favour yourself. Well, what about Amazon then? Isn't that exactly what they have been doing?*

For example, having no photographic memory, I can remember the general "feel" of the innards of an antique shortwave receiver I used to have as a kid. But almost all of that is context. I know what canned octal base vacuum tubes and big tuning capacitors look like, what sort of components were in the big band selector "sled" (for geeks: This was an NC2-40D) and so on. So I can "zoom in" on the coarse memory by just filling in details that are generic, not specific. And these details may be from different sources than the original memory too.

And so the brain needs to remember - if one is not faceblind, which in fact I am - just the overall geometry of someone's face, and all the other stuff can be filled in as needed (how they look when they smile or are anxious etc.) Compression, compression. We have a lot to learn from nature. Note that a faceblind person does this too, of course - just not with a geometrically exact visualization of that person's face, just one with the correct "feel".

And that's also why synthetic memories can be formed so easily. You really don't have to insert much. The brain infers the rest as needed.

But she's gone now and so is that habit.

And I've more than once found that an anecdote I've been telling has been incorrect, precisely in a "melded memories" kind of way. It happened at this sort of gathering which were usually held for that reason so X was involved... and then finally look at the old pictures and there's no sign of X. It is literally the brain invoking "lossy compression" to make it all fit, just like certain web services that let you upload pictures without limit might reduce old ones, that hardly anyone ever looks at any more, to lower quality to limit storage bloat.

Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men. Women's memories are flawless. If they claim that they remember a conversation exactly, word for word, 20 years later, who's to prove them wrong?

Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.

Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.

Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.

I was born into a traditional food culture without excessive sugar, but I sure as heck developed a sugar craving later, to the detriment of my diet. I'm guessing this cancels out the early healthy effect.

Or synthetic clothing. Sure, natural fiber stuff is in retreat but some synthetic stuff is actually really comfortable.

You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.

You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.

You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.

You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.

Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?

Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?

Every scale I've tried since is wildly inaccurate, and they do have brains and they fake it. Step on, get a random weight within a 5lb range of the true weight. Step on repeatedly, even after the scale has timed out and had to be rezeroed, and get that exact weight again. Fake. Every single 4-sensor scale (one in each corner post) that I've tried does this.

I've since found another relatively vintage single strain gauge scale whose battery still works. And I have a mechanical scale in reserve for when it no longer does.

Then blow the droplets off both sides and let the rest air dry. We have soft water here, so no water spots. No rubbing dry with any kind of cloth.