Rhaedas

We lost one early to kidney disease. One week he just started acting off, not eating normal, even found him hiding in places (which is never a good sign). Started losing weight visibly, so we got him in to the vet and the blood work comes back. We took him home for one last night together with the other cats before taking him back to let him go. Still rough to think about. We’ve lost a few others mainly to old age, which is still hard, but to cut a great companion’s life in half out of the blue…

Grass not required - could be just hairball, or recent food, or not fed fast enough, or ran around like a maniac, or just for no reason at all.

I don’t like extra dots simply because pattern matching might get weird down the road. Keep dots for extension type and use Pascal to make it easier to read multiple words. Flatcase only if it’s short or I’m lazy for a temp file.

The rain one is a subtle “Look, it could be worse. Stay positive. You aren’t dead yet.”

Living paycheck to paycheck.

Outside of the occasional startle, no. The cat idle routine is very low level, not much going on there at all.

I’m all for eternity with an opt-out choice. But forever without parole? That is hell.

Who wants to live forever?

I have a Tesla store near my work, and I’ve been seeing a few of them drive by lately. Each time, even seeing them coming, I still have a WTF reaction. That is a god awful looking vehicle. Even if it was of good quality. I drew better trucks in crayon when I was 5.

Kiosks of any sort can vary, from fast food to grocery to other types. There are some that work well and make self service far faster and easier, and others that routinely have issues. I’ve never used McD’s, but I have used Sheetz a lot before and it flows very well both in displaying the options as well as suggestive selling that isn’t in your face and disruptive. As for groceries, Publix has always been perfect for me, while some others not as much. Walmart’s is 50/50 on if it will work okay or have some issue.

I wonder if there’s a list of what manufacturer supplies what kiosks and a correlation can be made.

Outside of the ordering, McDs has never been the best, but as they’ve dropped in quality to drive profits and still meet the demand that persists regardless, so have others. My favorite used to be Burger King in the 90s, but I will go to McD instead of stepping foot in a BK at this point, that’s how bad they are.

And the stupid thing is, none of them are doing anything much different. The quality doesn’t have to be this low in food and service. I can only assume the bottom line is greater if they sacrifice everything needed to keep standards up and maintain just enough to keep a minimum demand flowing.

Yes, there is a low unemployment number. As with the rest, you haven’t validated that it’s a good measure of the current state of things. It’s arguably never been.

Yes, definitely increased some. Where’s the rest of the data, such as part time or unemployed, or even population growth? Like I said, a single number means not so much without context. But it’s an impressive graph.

Curious what shift there has been in full time/part time numbers. Full time wages going up is great for those who are experiencing it, but if there are less actual full timers, is that an improvement?

The art of a good statistician is to make sure what their numbers are saying is an actual reflection of reality. I’m not saying this graph is falsified, I don’t know. But numbers can be made to say anything. I learned this years ago in arguments about what “unemployment” meant. It’s much more complex than a single number, but a single number is used in the media because it’s easier to paint the picture wanted.

The issue isn’t the prices. It’s that the prices go up but income doesn’t. Get out the pitchforks, but let’s go after the real villains.

First I was mad, then I was sad.

Wages not keeping in step with inflation is exactly why everything seems so expensive. $30k of today’s money is the equivalent of less than $10k in the 80’s, and cars were more than $10K then except for a few that ended up being examples of “you get what you pay for”.

I should probably state that as “wage increases being suppressed”.

The next versions will have the ability to adjust to not only context of the requests and results, but the human’s reactions and change the little nuances accordingly. That it sounds like a highly cheerful woman in real time to the prompts and much less of a robot is a big step. Add to that the latest visuals we’ve seen of real time generation of video faces that are extremely close. There may not be AGI there and the LLMs may get a lot of stuff wrong, but the presentation is going to fool more and more people at this rate.

And if we stumble upon AGI with all that in place, Asimov help us.

Guess no one at Microsoft realized people use computers differently and more options is always better than one. Or they intended to have the option and either forgot to include it or it was buggy. Either way it was #2 on my “how do you disable this” list, and I had to deal with it for a while. I get how grouping can be good for some things, but when you want to be able to bounce between various windows and some happen to use the same app, it was a pain.

Even the small things. When work upgraded to Win11 overnight and I logged into the Start being in the middle, I almost lost it. Yes, I could fix it, and a few other things, but I had a moment.

When I learned that even World War I was sparked by oil grabs, I was briefly surprised, then realized, of course it was.