a picture of Reagan with quotes of how Russia is the enemy, and tariffs are bad for everybody.

That’s particularly good.

This seems like a job for a WordPress blog or GitHub pages.

What do I do if adult tells me they want to play with hot wheels with me? I say yes.

Fuck yeah. Hot wheels are great.

I hate investing

Mutual Funds / Index funds are your best bet. (Look for descriptive words like “broad”, “mix” or “full market” in the description).

If you can, pick out one named “target retirement YYYY” with YYYY being within a few years of whatever year you will turn 67.

It will automatically follow investing best practices based on your current age - agrressive earlier, and very cautious later.

I’m not familiar with all the details of how it works

Perfect recipe to get ripped off. (Most people I know say that insurance/investment combined products suck. I’ve heard some disagreement whether they’re just a bad deal, or such a bad deal they ought to be a crime.)

I can’t prove anything, but:

• There’s evidence that billionaires are taking much more than they earn, and that we (everyone else) would be dramatically better off without them (whether we tax them away or… Come to some other compromise.)
• Billionaires own most media outlets and social media sites, even those these don’t actually make much money compared to everything else the billionaires own. This makes some people ask why they bother…
• There’s a noticable tendency in billionaire owned media to focus daily on divisive topics. The specific topic changes, but the divisiveness continues.
• There is history of powerful authoritarians investing heavily in divisive propaganda, primarily to break apart and distract groups of people who could overthrow them.

What I have laid out is not proof that today’s billionaires are directing their staff to verbally attack minorites at any opportunity.

But it certainly is something to think about next time a vicious rumor about a minority group comes along.

Edit: Yes. I do understand that neither men nor women are minorities. But there’s still enough differences to allow pushing a divisive narrative, which I suspect is enough reason for certain motivated people.

And to the “could just be a shitty set of incentives” argument. Fair enough. It could be. It’s highly suspicious, but it could be.

Would you accept “under-regulated capitalism” or “capitalism treated as an ideal rather than a tool” as a more specific root cause?

the need to constantly change jobs to move ahead financially also keeps people on unsteady ground with relationships.

That’s a great point.

Can I find a broken window and start sanding it with sandpaper, as an extreme example?

Yes, provided you have a way to polish it back TU transparent again, after changing the shape.

Linux Mint is so nice.

I would turn off “Secure Boot” in BIOS before doing the upgrade.

It officially works, but can throw in unnecessary challenges - and Mom probably isn’t traveling with national secrets next week anyway.

if they want a document printed they just go out to some print shop.

In fairness, it can be expensive to stock the holy water necessary to fend off the demons that inhabit all printers.

Yes. Web apps existed before JavaScript.

I agree. But I mean, WordPress and SquareSpace already did that for about 98% of web traffic. It was a big part of the .Com Boom and Bust.

But we keep coming up with new stuff to build web software for, and there’s still plenty of web developer jobs. And there’s still so so many many shit websites.

Today’s AI can only remix, not do the new stuff. Maybe it’ll get good enough to tackle the novel new stuff, someday. I doubt I’ll live to see it, if it happens.

The root of my crankiness is: If we’re about to no longer need developers, I should be seeing widespread websites whose search, cart and checkout actually work correctly every time.

The snake oil salesmen are bragging that the era of carpentry has ended, from on top of a wooden stage that is falling to pieces with each step.

I would say, it can only get better, but it can really go both ways from here.

Just playing some Endless Sky.

I think I’ll spend most of the weekend on yard work.

why do you guys always just move the goalposts?

“Vibe coding” has a pretty specific definition, which includes not understanding the code. So writing tests, or correcting the code both disqualify a piece of work from being technically “vibe coded”.

“yes”, “no”, and “ship” is hilarious.

Knowing it (well, appearing to, by regurgitating the average) better than many developers, pretty soon. A huge number of us know disturbingly little about how computers actually work. (Edit: Sorry, I’m being needlessly unkind to a bunch of us, since as Snoogums said, the current stuff doesn’t actually know anything at all, yet.)

Knowing it better than top developers is a science fiction fantasy singularity daydream.

And even Heinlein’s and Asimov’s post singularity fiction novels acknowledged that there would likely be roles for expert humans.

But for how much longer?

How much longer will we need people who understand how things work?

Exactly. My phone is for texting and calling out. Receiving calls is an unfortunate bug.

Perfect score. Social obligations fulfilled: 100%. Words spoken: 0. Emotional energy cost: 40%.

If you want my advice, talk to them constantly as if you are the narrator, and smile and make eye contact at every opportunity.

This is great advice.

I’ve always done this, and my kids all started talking surprisingly early.

But my motive is just that it calms them.

Some baby fussiness comes from insecurity, and I find that a running narration makes them more relaxed about being set down and returned to - that kind of thing.

Basically they get the same comfort from my narration as I get from leaving the TV running when I’m alone in the house.

I don’t know (or worry about) if it really makes any serious long term difference - but it was occasionally convenient as heck when they could tell me what they wanted a bit earlier than I (or anyone) expected them to.

With my last kid, I felt more brave and also mixed in some singing, and think they are more musically inclined because of it.