If everything is running on renewables, cool. Until then, there’s still the opportunity cost.

My dad worked nights and Mom was a SAHM who also did some freelance stuff from home. They basically had a first come/first served system, and honestly didn’t have many conflicts so the second car (usually the one they’ve had longer) was rarely used. That was perfect when I started driving in high school, because I could usually use that car (even if it was a few years older than I was)

My brother talked them into buying a used Mitsubishi Eclipse back when it was still kinda cool (an '03 model purchased in 2007?). Mom ended up really liking that car and it’s not really practical for the handyman stuff my dad does in his retirement, so now they have assigned cars.

I think you helped me figure out where I stand on AI. What is “the thing”? Did AI create “the thing” or was it a tool to help the creation? Part of a YouTube video is a perfect example. If I want music to set a mood, and I didn’t have anything specific in mind, fine. That’s about 5% of “the thing” and I can understand using a new tool for the job. But all the random shitty AI-generated pictures floating around social media where that’s the entirety “the thing”? They can fuck off.

Basically, do things for the human, not the bots or the clicks. Unfortunately I don’t think we’re far off from Dead Internet Theory - we have LLMs creating content for SEO. Basically one bot creating content to please another bot. The human element has become an afterthought.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

I love how new Teams doesn’t even have a contacts list for chat anymore, it’s just your most recent chats. And if you search for someone, any recent group chats with that person show up first so you may still have to scroll to find that person’s chat. Oh, and we store documents on Teams so if I want to switch between looking through the document repository and chat I still have to do a whole bunch of clicks between the two.

I don’t fault them for when my project manager tags @everyone on the group chat with an important message saying “good morning and happy Monday” though. I wish I were kidding.

I hadn’t heard that story before. True or not, I’m glad it was there

That’s actually really accurate when first learning to program. Eventually you figure out how to think like a toddler.

As long as you gave them the full experience with tossing a disc in the trash because of a buffer overrun. Damn Nero software!

CD: the kind you buy from a store with content already on it. Mass-produced with methods and equipment not available in the consumer electronics market, because it was never really necessary. Also includes CD-ROM (Read Only Memory) for data/files read by a computer instead of music alone

CD-R (Recordable): can be written (“burned”) once and only once. As mentioned in another comment, it may deteriorate over time because of how the disc gets written, but by the time that happens you’ll probably forget you had that disc

CD-RW (ReWriteable): Can be written like a CD-R, but you can also erase it and write on it again. More expensive, and I believe some readers had trouble with it, but in a world where data storage was expensive and small this was still a useful thing to have

DVDs had a similar thing, except there were variants where the - was a +, eg DVD+R and DVD+RW. I can’t remember the difference there, but it was pretty trivial. There was also a relatively obscure DVD-RAM that had random access memory. That was pretty cool as well, kind of an alternative to DVR that wasn’t a VHS tape. No need to lose everything you had if you wanted to add more to it

if i’m using that word properly? It gives me time to breath a bit

Just because of the irony… breathe*

My daughter (born 3 months early in mid-2022) was discharged from needing oxygen 24/7. After months of having to lug her tank and pulse oximeter around everywhere, even across a room, a wireless baby was a game-changer.

She’s made huge progress in so many other ways, but this was the big one for us

My wife and I have first names that start with consecutive letters of the alphabet, so I wanted a name that would continue that.

I’ll be honest, the name we chose (that starts with that letter) came from my high school crush. But my wife was aware from the beginning and I was so introverted back then, especially with girls, that it was never remotely serious. The only takeaway from that was that her name was kinda cute (but ages well too - plus her legal name has a lot of flexibility for nicknames)

I should be the first to get one of these, but I live in a split-level house. Until they can climb and clean stairs, probably not worth the hassle.

One of these months I’ll get around to using the vacuum I do have…