“I have never wished anyone dead, but I have read some obituaries with great relish.”

but couldn’t due to a crippling fear of heights

I grew up with a 50m cliff as a backyard.

Absolutely stunning view, the kind that super-wealthy people pay many tens of millions for these days. My parents picked it up in 1977 for practically a song because nearly all the construction companies came from the prairies and had no clue of how to develop on anything other than a pancake-flat piece of land.

But still. It installed into me a particularly overactive fear of heights. I have trouble getting onto roofs thanks to it. When putting up Christmas lights, my wife needs to hold the ladder, as I am tensed up six ways to Sunday by the time I’m at the top.

Skiing is just as bad. I can take most any slope up to and including a double black diamond. It’s only the triples I cannot handle, because that involves vertical drops.

So I understand that fear. Just not the desire to bodily leap out of a perfectly functional aircraft. That’s nuts.

I like RustDesk. If you’re worried about connectivity, you can even run your own relay server.

You stopped a bit short on your delete spree I guess.

No, that was just the first two steps. Just on the “rip shit out” category, I typically churn through at least three separate tools, usually in this order:

• Win10Privacy
• Win11Debloat
• Winslop

I mean, sure, Windows can take as little as a half hour to “install”. But on a personal rig (which also includes my own workflow software and personal data shoehorned back into place), I take another 24-48 hours to gleefully beat it into submission and install secondary programs that bypass the warts it has acquired over the years.

And as a benchmark, XP needed only about 6-8hrs of extra work to reach the same threshold of data migration, workflow software, and improved usability (I was an NT fanboy, IMO the primary improvement of XP over 2000 was the start menu).

If we add up the AI push, the spyware/telemetry explosion, the recent attempts to force the use of a Microsoft Account as the default login, and the massive bloating and instability of Windows in general, it’s slowly becoming time for even non-technical, everyday users to move to Linux.

I just rebuilt my Win 11 Pro Workstation setup (yes, it is the version for stupidly high core and thread counts), and one of the first things I did was to violently eviscerate anything AI in the system. Right after gleefully ripping out all the telemetry and spyware.

The best sales people are those who - on a per-interaction basis - spend as little time as possible working over marks.

It’s called fail-fast. You want to determine as fast as possible if the person you have approached is going to be an easy mark or not. You use a variety of openers and follow-up questions to determine whether you should just wish them well and move on, or actually focus on them to see if they’ll bite.

Honestly, the absolute worst salespeople are those who chase after people who will never bite, and take offence at rejection. Because being immediately rejected is the other person doing all your work for you - they are openly telegraphing that you will waste more time on them than any benefit that will come out of them. Which is why a “f**k off” should always be followed by a “thank you”. Take that as gospel, fail them fast, and move onto the next person.

Not sure how anyone with two functional neurons to rub together would want to become a violent fascist goon. I mean, the hope is there that they will all be eventually swinging from gallows, but sometimes evil does get away.

I’m hyper independent for two main reasons:

1. Maintaining connections takes too much damn energy, no matter how good the other person is. And as someone with a nasty Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s, there are a myriad of co-morbidities along for that ride.
2. i would rather full-ass something to my own satisfaction than suffer someone else’s half-assed attempts.

This. Hella surprised he’d risk muggle transport and be recognized and called out.

Dammit. I’ve had an LG plasma for the last 15, and it looks like I’ll have to get that Sony well before I’m ready for it.

Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.

For many places, it’s operational inertia. If you’ve had a hosting account at the same place since 1998, you’re bound to still have username/password access to services like FTP even though other (and better) options exist.

And then there is the issue of sole control. Many greybeards like myself still run traditional username/password auth on services because,

1. We have whitelisted our IP address, and if dynamic, keep that whitelist updated
2. That outside of said whitelisting, the service is a quasi-honeypot meant to protect the machine as a whole. Any connection made from outside the address space of my ISP, by anyone else, is by default considered malicious, and is banned instantly as a precaution. They don’t even get the opportunity to attempt a login; merely connecting to said service is sufficient evidence of hostile intent.

So while my setup is not ideal, it is ideal for myself. if I had anyone else as co-admin, or even clients, things would get stupidly complicated very quickly. But since it’s just me…

REPRESENT.

Even in Canada I grew up with non-American time, thanks to German parents, and knew of AM/PM only via analog clocks and use outside of the home. I remember confusing the heck out of an elementary school teacher by giving an afternoon/evening time in proper units. She had to do the math (calculators still being hella rare in those days) to convert out of PM in order to see if I was correct or not.

An IBM Selectric??

Now, something cheaper and clearly not as reliable, I can understand. But these machines were quite bulletproof, easily on-par with Olympia or Hermes in terms of build quality and usability. They were meant to take a pounding on the daily and keep on ticking. About the only way these things broke down is either via benign neglect or intentional malice.

And they were also built like tanks, with heavy steel and iron… there would be a non-trivial chance of injury or even death via ricochet or shrapnel where an IBM Selectric is concerned. That makes me think this was staged… you don’t want to close-fire on a Selectric without body armour and face/neck protection.

The problem that far too many people always miss is that appeasing a bully or a predator only ever encourages more of that behaviour. It never discourages that behaviour.

WHERE ARE THOSE “DON’T TREAD ON ME” CONSERVATIVES WITH THEIR GUNS??

…The fuck?

Is Tim Sweeney legitimately outing himself as a pedophile? Does the Parasite Class really feel so comfortable and immune from consequences that they can openly advocate for pedophilia?

Except when you realize that both parties - aside from a few specific Democrats - are totally right of centre.

Like, the Democrats are moderate but solid right-wing neoliberalists, and the Republicans are off-the-deep-end alt-right fascists. So there isn’t a “centrist” position because there is no-one left of centre to balance things out; there is no in-between position that is actually at the centre of the political spectrum.

Even AOC and Bernie would be considered centrists anywhere else in the world. So any use of the word “Centrism” within the bounds of American politics really means “strong right-wing”.

And when almost everyone is right of centre, they really can be grouped together as being equally evil and hostile to the common man.

Now, if you were to look at any first-world country with an actually-functional democracy, you would be correct, because these countries actually have socialist parties that advocate for the masses, and seek to advance the needs of the common citizen. But I digress…

I mean, when the crime is going to happen regardless…

I remember jungle gyms. They taught a lot of lessons on how to discover personal limits and how to safely exceed them.

The loss of jungle gyms from our playgrounds are - I feel, as just one attribute of many, - directly contributing to our emerging young adults lacking the self-confidence and risk-evaluation skills they require to succeed.