I’m not familiar with this guy’s technique. How did he go about baiting potential targets?

The usual methods of the past used text and staged images, so the targets didn’t see the real person until a meetup. I’d suppose though that with the advancements in live video filters over the past several years there’s no reason this guy couldn’t just dress in drag and apply appropriate filters so he appears as required.

It wouldn’t meet the safety standards.

This may partly be because basically all of them are legal for highway use, so even if all you need is a car that is safe to drive a couple of miles to the grocery store at 35MPH, the safety features and engines (and thus emissions system capabilities) have to be designed with the expectation that the vehicle will be used at 80MPH beside all the other vehicles out there.

It might help to have a wider variety of vehicle licensing options to allow for low-speed, lower-spec ‘city cars’. Though enforcement would probably be an issue, and the safety standards would still need to be robust enough that people in small cars wouldn’t be too badly killed by the gigantic pickup trucks they have to share the road with.

As long as you don’t need to get a new loan for 7ish years

Yep, and depending on the severity of the debt and other factors you’ll mostly just pay higher interest rates on loans for several years. You have to fuck up pretty bad before nobody will loan you money (though that probably depends on a lot of demographic factors too).

They’d legally still on the hook for the difference, and if it’s a large enough amount for the creditor to care about they’ll come after you for it using the variety of means available. In the US that can include taking the money from the debtor’s bank account or having their employer take it out of their paycheck before paying the debtor.

There are some ways around that. You can self-employ and ignore the garnishment request, but that works best if you have a constantly changing client list, like a roofing contractor or wedding-dress-maker or whatever. You have to be careful about keeping cash in your business because they can show up with the sheriff and take any cash, or in extreme cases they can seize non-exempt property (like, they wouldn’t generally be able to seize the lawnmower you use for your lawnmowing business).

Also, just not having any money is a pretty good defense. There are limits to wage garnishment for example.

But yeah, in a lot of cases it’s not even close to being worth the effort to chase someone down to collect, so you get a ding on your credit report for a few years, and then almost nobody cares.

Re-Wheeled their boards.

What does that do?

It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!

Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.

I grew up playing World of Walmart

Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.

huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.

I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS ‘debug’ program to create an executable.

It doesn’t say ‘open with your thumb’. Open it with a knife or some other technique, then insert your thumb & lift.

I’m relatively new to React (about 8 months in with React Native). Can you give me some examples of abusing state?

It probably comes partly out of the social dynamic that causes the tendency to value men primarily by their usefulness rather than who they are personally. Feeling gets in the way of me getting shit done, earning money to support my family, etc., so I turn feelings off, mostly. I could turn them back on and learn to manage them and whatnot, but if that doesn’t make it easier for me to earn money, fix the house, etc., or worse, actively gets in the way of those things by taking more of my work time or making it harder for me to want to do those things, then I don’t have an incentive to be genuinely emotionally connected.

Also, evident confidence in one’s ability to handle shit helps to make dependents feel happier and safer, so experiencing uncertainty, fear, and other such emotions tends to act against one’s own interest in getting shit done and avoiding drama that distracts from shit getting done.

So yeah, it’s kind of a question of ‘who do you want to be?’. Personally, I put a fair bit of effort into suppressing ‘negative’ emotions (fear, uncertainty, sadness, envy) and try to encourage positivity (curiosity, joy, whatever the word for the opposite of envy is (ChatGPT says ‘mudita’, vicarious joy). I figure this tends to blunt some of the more subtle and nuanced emotional states since I’m kind of artificially managing the states, but it is a practice that helps people who depend on me feel stable and safe so they can do the things they want to do, which is important to me.

Compassion is probably the hardest to manage this way, mostly because it is a response to sympathetic feelings of negative emotions. Like, if I see someone who is sad and I am suppressing my sadness emotions this also has a heavy damping effect on my sympathetic sadness which is what usually triggers compassionate behavior. So I have to kind of manually watch for situations where sympathetic responses are appropriate and ease up on the suppression a bit (but not too much) to allow the empathy to kick in.

need to be taught how to feel.

And before that you’d need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.

Thanks for this tip, very useful

I use a cheap paper notebook, like 5x8 inch size. Each day, first thing when I start work, I write the date at the top of the next blank page, copy the items from the previous page that are not done, and add new items at the bottom of the list as they come up. Tasks I haven’t started have a blank box next to them, tasks I’ve started get a half-filled box, and finished items get a filled box. Anything that moves from one day to the next that hasn’t been started gets a digit in the box that increases by one each day. If the number gets to 10 I cross the item off as cancelled. When I’m picking a new task I try to prioritize some the tasks with higher numbers.

If I need to take notes I’ll use nearby blank space, sometimes a facing page. Generally I keep notes very short, long details go into whatever ticketing system we’re using with the ticket number in my notebook so I can find it again. There are a few other habits I use that are generally in line with the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity techniques, like simple flags for what sort of action I can take on the item (completable (about half a day or less), needs more info, needs decomposition (more than half a day of work)), with the notable difference that I don’t make any effort to ‘capture everything’. I load-shed aggressively and early, which is in-line with the way I want to live my life.

Mostly I don’t keep very many active tasks, so it’s rare that I have to cancel items. If my list is getting long I stop putting new items on it and just tell people I’m too busy to accept new stuff. I used to try to track more stuff, but I learned that just meant I ended up with lots of notes about stuff that I never had time to do, so I quite wasting my time tracking them.

When the notebook is full I put it on the shelf and get a new one.

I keep the notebook next to me on my desk. If someone asks me for something I check the book, if it looks like I’ve got time, I add it to the book. When I go to a meeting, I take it with me. If I don’t happen to have it I usually remember what’s on the current page because I just wrote it there that morning.

It’s low-tech, and I like it that way. Partly because I like to find nice pens to write with.

That’s me! Moved to a very small town with fast internet so I could have a house for about 0.75x my annual salary. It’s great, now we can almost afford to pay for student loans!

Your own hardware as a “service.”

TBH, if they could provide a high-quality piece of hardware that would just work for years on end and automatically reorder ink (at no additional charge, up to some reasonable limit) when it needed it for a low fixed price, maybe 50 or 60 bucks a year, I might be interested. If they added large-format print-on-demand service with quick delivery (same day in cities, 1 or 2 day elsewhere) I’d probably pay a bit more. That way I could print regular documents up to, say 11x17, at home, and have big stuff like poster-sized delivered quickly and seamlessly with the same printing system.

I just want to be able to print stuff without futzing around with a persnickety machine, and needing to replace the infernal thing every couple of years.

perfect mechanical shuffle

What’s perfect in this context? It’s maybe a little counterintuitive because I’d think a perfect mechanical shuffle would be perfectly deterministic (assuming no mechanical failure of the device) so that it would be repeatable. Like, you would give it a seed number (about 67 digits evidently) and the mechanism would perform a series of interleaves completely determined by the seed. Then if you wanted a random order you would give the machine a true random seed (from your wall of lava lamps or whatever) and you’d get a deck with an order that is very likely to never have been seen before. And if you wanted to play a game with that particular deck order again you’d just put the same seed into the machine.

A substantial proportion of the heat from burning gas on a stovetop in the usual manner does not heat the content of the pot, so the difference in thermal efficiency between electric and direct gas heating may not be as large as you might expect. This factor could probably be improved with different stove designs though (cheap burners do a worse job of putting the heat where it does the most work).

Additionally, gas ranges impact indoor air quality a lot more than electric stovetops, and gas delivery to homes leaks into the atmosphere a fair amount of gas with high greenhouse potential (I work for a gas pipeline company on leak tracking software) so there are other tradeoffs that one should consider beyond just thermal efficiency.

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer here, both are good options for different situations.