came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]

can you imagine if the port was visible while the mouse was being used? that would destroy the visual field. like when there’s a poor person within 18 meters of my Tesla using FSD to take me to Shangy’s Latest talk.

yes, i am a design technospiritual futurist and i experience the world in a heightened state of maximum consciousness and my mind is so powerful that i appreciate this decision unlike you mud eating cretins who spend less on a laptop than i do on a haircut.

my old boss would always insist on a Mac desktop for his work computer, so his computer spend was like 3 times mine and he would upgrade nearly twice as often.

I did video editing, GIS computational analysis, bespoke data processing/management, graphic design for printed resources, and interactive digital interfaces.

he checked his email and struggled to open PDFs. one time I needed him to sign a PDF when no one was around to do it for him. it took him 45 minutes of focused concentration and when he sent it back, it was somehow upside-down, backwards and on the wrong page.

I took a screenshot of it and showed it to people sometimes.

this is only the beginning, this whole article is full of details pointed to an unhinged asshole.

The substitute teacher taught four English classes at Woodbury High School on Monday, and Nielsen said there is video and audio of what happened. In letters to parents, Nielsen and other school officials reported that the man told students that he thought they “would want to hear about his life as a police officer.”

his ultimate would be popping up in mid screen with prompt text saying, “It looks like you’re trying to lose at smash bros” and then all the other characters are rearranged and stacked like cascading windows + frozen with spinning hourglasses on them and clippy gets like 10 seconds to damage dump.

In addition to the Cybercab, Musk also announced plans to produce an autonomous, electric Robovan that can carry up to 20 people, or be used to transport goods. He said it will “solve for high density,” transporting a sports team, for example.

ah yes, the riddle of the streets being clogged with sports team transportation vehicles.

this guy has a blindspot for busses.

more like

THE NEW PORKER

boom. gotten.

the potential energy of water stored at elevation is one of those genius, elegant solutions that clever communities have been using for hundreds of years to my knowledge, but probably longer. of course, rather than using photovoltaics, those people have been using wind driven pumps to effectively store water at elevation so they can release it at pressure for irrigation, etc. i saw setups like that all over the navajo reservation when i worked out there. they pump water from the aquifer and keep it in a gravity tank on a mesa. at just 6’ of relative elevation, one can totally meet the flow requirements of drip irrigation. but at like 100 feet, the pressure is incredible and can hit 40PSI.

water is kinda wild, because it doesn’t compress. the pressure just builds with depth and the “shock” or “hammer effect” can be captured. if you want to see some crazy low tech shit to move water, check out ram pumps. you can make a little one with shit from a hardware store, but seeing a serious one in action is fucking crazy.

i mostly think about moving water around when it comes to energy costs, because i’m an ag guy and delivering the right amount of water to the right place at the right time (often when weather patterns are not doing so) is the name of the game. for a long time, affluent growers have relied on gas and diesel pumps because fuel was cheap and there was no downside! back in the day, was only the tightwads (me) and the lazy (me) who would start trying to find site specific solutions using topography/gravity and look into picohydroelectric systems to trickle charge batteries and shit. having a access to a janky little stream that is flowing opens up a lot of possibilities for capturing energy.

but yeah, this system is basically capturing the periodic availability of solar energy (or wind energy is totally possible to run a pump) and storing it as gravitational potential energy (from elevating water) so it can be released on demand. honestly, the earthworks necessary to initially build out something like this is one of the few uses of fossil fuel energy i think is justifiable.

I was originally CS major from 18-20 and dropped out. it was not interesting and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was learning a lot quicker by muddling on my own.

at 29, I went back to school for something in the life sciences, with a lot of biology. I remember my first semesters of BIO absolutely blowing my mind at the complexity and resilient adaptation capacity of like… plant tissue.

the mechanisms of life are so far beyond anything we have synthesized or built. if one ignores the dogma of artificial and natural as constructed imaginaries, a tree is a profoundly advanced form of technology. not just in how they function, but how they maintain themselves materially from their surroundings in context and how they adapt it to support the web of interconnected relationships they depend on and how the respond to injury from the elements and other inhabitants.

and don’t even get me started on fungi, the vanguard of life.

lmao, that last sentence is powerful.

sometimes when I talk IRL about privacy issues online and the impulse to not share my user data, shopping habits, with anyone and everyone etc, I get pushback from otherwise smart people who want to know why I don’t want to be tracked. I’m not even talking like doing Snowden type shit. just like very basic avoidance. like not using advertisers’ browsers or installing all the treat apps for discount treats at the treat shoppe.

it always throws me, because it seems self evident. but these people seem to think receiving highly specific and targeting marketing benefits them by showing them products and services they are interested in.

I can’t really wrap my mind around it, except my guess is they believe they have complete control and agency over their attention and would never be influenced to do something or believe something against their interests.

which is comes across as super naive to me.

i would call that “I taught myself how to lie”.