For it’s not so much that it’s going to be an unnecessary call than that the person just doesn’t want to collect their thoughts or (worse) doesn’t want to say what they want in writing. It’s usually going to be some ask that’s completely apart from anything I’ve been thinking about in the past 5-10 days, might be sketchy, and they apparently seem to think it’s urgent and/or nuanced, yet they’re just going to completely hold out on providing context and time that would let me be prepared for whatever pile of shit they’re about to dump on me.

If you can’t communicate it to me in a slack message or two, there’s a very real possibility that either you don’t know what you want, or that I can’t help you with it on a cold call.

I can literally feel myself deflating when I get these, like it’s a huge involuntary sigh accompanied by the classic heart-sinking…

…followed by a deep breath and a “Sure! 👍”

Both things could be true.

7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.

It drives me nuts that I can’t quite tell if that piece of tongue-in-groove (LOL) flooring is white oak, possibly varnished, or some sort of tight-grained pine.

Also, apparently Professor Hoadley was a really nice guy and very well respected.

I looked into his worldview a bit when the San Francisco lecture happened, and it is deeply, deeply fucked up.

There is a certain allure because it’s based on a well-known philosophal thread of “mimetic theory” (filtered through a then-contemporary Nazi apologist, and Silicon Valley hubris) and for all it’s “Anti-Christ” talk, it doesn’t even 100% require a supernatural belief system, just the commitment to one as an outward-facing and socially enforceable ideology. What makes it so fucked up and dangerous is the almost Foundation-like orthopraxy that it demands.

The gist, IIRC, is that humans want and need something stable to copy from to know what they want, and that modernish (like in the last 300 years) interpretations of major religions, but particularly Christianity, have landed on a perfect balance of giving people boundaries, aspirations, and just enough freedom to keep society going. Therefore, the only way to avoid falling back onto outmoded and dangerous practices like mass scape-goating is to get huge blocks of people invested in that worldview. Ideally it would be the whole world in one ideology, but their nod to reality is to concede that three or four could survive in tension if they’re geographically insulated.

So moving onto the Antichrist, anyone or (importantly for the Thiel version specifically) anything that poses an existential threat to this orderly control of society risks chaos and a descent into destruction and with a Christian context can therefore be comfortably called the/an “Antichrist.” If Palantir watching literally everyone and everything means the enforcement of “western” values on western populations, then opposing that is dangerous to humanity and therefore a threat. Fighting that threat is a crusade, and even justifies the interim use of tactics that will ultimately be rendered moot by the imposition of a religio-philosophical order, such as mass scaepgoating and pogroms (coughjdvancecough).

Then, just as the classist cherry on top, remember that the supernatural part of this is all just to make sure that the stupids buy into the same worldview as the elites who will preserve society by controlling it and directing it towards self-sustaining power structures. So a Thiel can be gay, and a Thiel acolyte like Vance (we’ll look past Musk for now, as I think they probably view him more as a lucky and useful idiot) can marry a Hindu woman from one of the viable global powerbases (though we’re seeing cracks in that as current political realities weigh on him), and he doesn’t even really have to believe any of the specifically dominionist nonsense he preaches, as long as the MAGA rubes do. What it does give them is a handhold where they can legitimately believe that they’re doing what’s best for the world by trying to dominate it, and that is fucking terrifying.

As an aside, Thiel’s philosophical mentor would have been very nearly as horrified as most of us are by the conclusions he’s reached, and this is why you don’t let the software engineers think they’re the only ones who are smart, simply because it’s harder to do calculus than write a B+ Freshman essay. If Girard is “love each other or we all face ruin,” Thiel is “love each other, or we all face ruin, but you’re too stupid to love each other unless a brutal technostate surveillance apparatus enforces adherence to a love-based religion.”

I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.

“Hotel,” nothin’. That’s clearly the Selina Meyer Presidential Library.

Pretty sure the one with the racing bumper is the real deal.

I’m inclined to agree on that one. No “AI sheen,” no impossible parts, text that makes sense, the bumper matches the car behind the forklift.

I like the one with the long shocks monster truck style

Which is AI generated (from a Sora video) as well. There’s also at least one photoshop and the lego one is just a close-up of a (very nice) lego model.

Also sounds like an org that wants its event, which depends on visas for its players to happen at all and on visas for its fans to be a commercial success, to get special treatment from the Orange Menace.

It’s basically hickory. Cuts nice, but hell on tools. This batch of lumber was supposed to be for a desk, my great move into proper (if simple) furniture. Instead, I killed a set of jointer blades trying to set it up, jacked up something when trying to set the new ones, and sold off most of the boards with the tools. I have since moved onto an insert-head jointer, but frankly my shop has been missing me lately.

lemmy.world/lemmy.world/post/41759738

Love this! Made me dig up mine to post as well.

In the article, the main “woke distractions” are celebrity gossip and reprinted AP articles. I know for MAGA, “woke” mostly just means things they don’t like, but this is making that true to the point of self-parody. I suppose rain on a golfing day, the sound of fingernails on chalkboards, and hangovers will be “woke” soon enough.

Apart from all the deflection and Putin and Gilded-Age foreign policy policy theories, which may well be right, I think President Dingleberry also found out that Greenland is 1% larger by area than the Louisiana Purchase, which would make him the president that most embiggened America. How can you you deny MAGA if he literally made it greater (in size) than any president prior to him?

It’s also possible he has only ever looked at a Mercator and thinks Greenland is literally the size of Africa or South America.

Jolanta Lasota, the chief executive of Ambitious about Autism, said: “Theoretically any Barbie can be reimagined as autistic, because autism doesn’t have one look. But representation is powerful and Barbie is an iconic toy, so we hope many autistic children feel pride at seeing some of their experiences reflected in this new doll.

Per the article, they tweaked the eyes so they look away slightly, made sure to use one of their fully articulated sculpts so she can move her arms to allow role-play of stimming, dressed her in clothes that would be loose and comfy, and gave her a fidget spinner, noise-canceling headphones, and augmentive-communication tablet.

To a certain extent, every Barbie is a cash grab, but this doesn’t seem any worse than average, and not every family is going to take it as their mission to rise above every consumerist influence in their lives.

https://youtube.com/shorts/UO_whAN302s

But we can only vote in one party’s primary for any given election cycle, including runoffs, so it serves as a defacto registration.

No, but they do track which primary we choose to vote in, which locks you in for any runoffs and serves as a defacto party registration until the next primary.