[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CL-215

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I suppose I'll keep buying my phones outright... no protection money to the carrier mafia == no lease.

Rave kids who listen to melodic dubstep drink Ghost because they like everything brightly-colored and artificial. Good ole' boys blowing stuff up in the woods drink Bucked Up or Rip It because they work hard and want something grab-and-go from Wal-Mart. Gamers love Bawls (or whatever the equivalent is now) because it tastes refreshing and keeps them up all night at LAN parties.

Coffee is for sophisticates who do yoga and listen to NPR and pay taxes and have jobs. It's unprocessed (drying, roasting, and fermenting be damned) whereas energy drinks are made in a factory. How would you rather imbibe your psychoactive insecticide: the natural way? Or the ARTIFICIAL way?!

Side note (as a guy with single origin beans in his freezer and an Aeropress): AMP Energy slapped and they should bring it back.

If I had to feed a family on the cheap I'd make lentil or barley stew. Saute a mirepoix and brown whatever protein is on sale, deglaze with whatever wine is appropriate, brown some tomato paste, then chuck the rest of the veggies and starches in with some spice mix and cook for 30-40 minutes. Once you've dialed in whatever time is appropriate for your ingredients it's the best meal prep hack there is. Gym bros slathering chicken breast and white rice in mystery sauce need not apply.

> Applied with a handheld tool, the patch stays on the skin for around 10 to 15 minutes

You'd notice.

Two reasons: data caps and device cost.

People want iPhones but they cost $1000 outright which isn't a small amount of cash these days so they roll the cost of the device into their monthly bill. The average consumer also doesn't understand how mobile data versus 802.11 works - their kid doesn't activate Wi-Fi on their phone or download anything, they see a large number with "GB" on the end, and they pay whatever is necessary to keep the Instagram scrolling and Disney+ flowing.

Buying an iPhone outright, flipping the old one every few years (they hold their value well) and using a $30 a month 10GB plan is doable if you have money and are savvy enough to download podcasts and use your home's AP for data.

Carriers certainly aren't incentivized to educate consumers better since they'd rather make money on device installments and milk them for hundreds of dollars a month because they "have a large family and need a lot of data". Home broadband marketing is even worse - why a family of four "needs" 500 Mbps down is absolutely beyond me. In an ideal society this type of consumer literacy would be taught in school but I'm not holding my breath.

I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.

> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.

Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:

> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.

Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.

This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:

- "Something went wrong"

- "It's not you - it's us :-("

- "An error occurred"

- "Uh-oh..."

- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]

People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".

The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.

In light of this and other ridiculous behavior I'm migrating to my own OpenWebUI instance with open-weight models from OpenRouter (with ZDR, of course). We'll see how it goes.

Because a used Thinkpad running Linux is the people's champ. It costs $200 instead of $2000. Parts are plentiful and virtually anything can be replaced with a small Phillips head screwdriver. The screen doesn't break if you look at it wrong. You can drop it down a flight of stairs and it'll keep chugging. Linux support has been great for north of a decade. It's the pinnacle of productive e-cycling.

Apple Silicon's value prop is undeniable but their laptops are otherwise "meh". Judging by all the internet whinging you'd think that every laptop besides a MacBook has a Game Boy screen and a trackball but the truth is that many non-Apple laptops are perfectly usable. I have both and actually spend more time on my Thinkpad.

I'm not a grammatical prescriptivist but I find it viscerally troubling that a bunch of LLM cargo-culted terms are starting to inform how we talk about our work.