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Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I keep seeing this sentiment expressed over and over again and it seems that a large cross-section of the public still doesn’t get it. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, of all places, but it bears repeating:

    Trump is not a “businessman.” Trump is a con man.

    He has never actually run a successful business and he doesn’t know how. The only thing he does know how to do is run a grift to bilk investors, creditors, the government, HUD, etc. out of money for projects that he really has no intention of completing or to prop up businesses he has no intention of sustaining. He is incessantly robbing Peter to pay Paul just long enough in the hopes of keeping his creditors or the prosecution at bay – not always successfully, I might add, because his businesses have been bankrupted four times including the infamous three casinos.

    The issue now is that since he’s oozed his way into government he is shielded from having the hammer brought down on him by many of the people he’s cheated.


  • It makes total sense if you’re of the generation(s) whose brains were fucked up by the American public education system pre-1980 or so, and were never taught how to understand abstract concepts nor any critical thinking skills. They learned everything by rote recitation.

    Everything.

    FYI, this is probably in no small part why your parents struggle with technology or at the very least anything with an on-screen user interface so much.

    Up until then, “thing you stick in machine that plays movies” inevitably involved some manner of tape. I imagine the majority of the public has absolutely no idea nor any interest in how this actually works inside the machine; as far as they’re concerned it’s either magic or complicated nerd technology stuff that they have convinced themselves that they’ll never understand. It was just hammered into them that When Done With Movie You Must Rewind (or else mom/dad/the video store will get mad at you). However, no logical connection is made between the medium in question and the act of rewinding. Merely that it is a movie thing. Movie things get rewound.

    I’m sure this is also why a particular generation insists on calling Nintendo cartridges “tapes.”


  • My father is an engineer, which has its ups and downs. He can definitely be trusted to read a dialog box and nearly 100% of the time even understand what it says. Abstract concepts, problems he’s never encountered before, all generally no issue.

    My stepmother, however, once asked me if she needs to rewind a DVD before putting it away. We’ve been working on it with her over the years. She’s certainly better now, but she still has an acute case of just randomly clicking on things without reading them.








  • In a way, we brought this on ourselves by tolerating scalpers. Gamers made it known that they’ll go hysterical and pay any price to have it now. If enough of us don’t do that, scalping video cards won’t be a lucrative business and the fuckers will be forced to give up. I guarantee you the reason the stock is disappearing so fast is because resellers have their fucking bots set up to spam all the retailer web sites, and the rest is people trying to compete with them.

    What a rat race. Fuck the entire thing.

    We have it better than we’ve ever had it at any point in the past, also: Broad PCI-E backwards compatibility means you can stick your old card in your new board and tough it out for a few months until the fervor dies down and/or the scalpers lose their shirts sitting on their inventory.