

- What was covered up with the smudge, and
- y u no do better job?

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.





Turn something this into a moderately off road capable adventure bike and I’m sold. The BMW and KTM guys will absolutely pay $20,000 for it, albeit maybe not $37,000.
My KLR has about 200 miles of range per fill, if you’re even the slightest bit careful with it, which is necessary for excursions out into the bush where there are neither gas stations nor charging points.


On my site I have long since routed requests from Amazon associated IP blocks directly to the wood chipper, so it’s nice to see that I was vindicated in doing so. Their request patterns did indeed look pretty scrapey and I was wondering why.


Yes, edited. I usually use Alexandrite and copying links from it is weird.


↑ This right here is the best answer in this thread.
For further nagware avoidance, remember that the Enterprise editions of Windows come bundled with the group policy editor (gpedit.msc, stick that in your run prompt) and will respect group policy settings with the intent of system administrators having control over various components and features.
In your case, a the system administrator is you.
For the purposes of decluttering your start menu specifically, for instance, I’ll link everyone to this comment I wrote the other day which lists off the policy settings you’ll want to mess with — including disabling Copilot completely.


Time to dredge this up again.


There’s still a Gulf station one town over from me. I don’t know if it’s independently owned and they just kept the signage, or if Gulf as a chain still exists and is just much diminished, or what.
Also, all modern cars still say “unleaded only” on them somewhere, just in a less conspicuous spot since you functionally can’t buy leaded gasoline outside of an airfield anymore. Mine says it on the yellow sticker on the back of the fuel flap.
I was miffed my new (12 years old at this point) car didn’t come with the glow-plug lighter, but I grabbed a random one from a beater at the junkyard and stuck it in the socket and was delighted to discover that it still worked. My first car had one, but the little catch on it was broken so when it was done heating up and popped out, it would shoot out of the socket and wind up under your seats. Fun times.
Even Stanley at least had a computer. And optionally a bucket.


Yᴏᴜ Hᴀᴠᴇ Dɪᴇᴅ
Pʀᴇss Fɪʀᴇ Tᴏ Rᴇsᴘᴀᴡɴ


A telling thing is that apparently Youtube’s algorithm knows that these videos are AI slop. I suspect this because at the outset I was aggressively disrecommending any of these that Youtube suggested to me, and basically nothing like them shows up in my feed anymore. Every once in a while one still slips through, usually some manner of synthetic music thing, and I hit the ol’ three dots and choose “not interested” and then “don’t recommend this channel” and I never see it again.
What’s much more concerning is that the average user (i.e. non tech people, i.e. practically everybody) is being handed this shit by default and in my lifetime of experience of people already being widely unable to distinguish truth from blatant manipulative fantasy, the prevalence of false/misleading/nonsense/fabricated AI bullshit being constantly peddled inches from their eyeballs is absolutely eroding peoples’ already limited ability to think.


In Windows 10, you could move it to the top, left, or right of the screen.
In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10. Let’s not sell short the full extent idiocy on display, here.
“Pouring its engineering resources,” my ass.
Or switch Firefox to reader mode (F9), which usually reveals the content of the article with any extraneous CSS trickery removed.


I generally upvote stuff to reward engagement and effort. Anything I pass by that looks like a creative work someone is putting forth themselves I’ll upvote. Also pretty much any response to anything I post or comment on. Often times comments I respond to as well.
I only downvote utter bullshit, i.e. people spouting things that are categorically not true, or bad faith arguments, or just people being argumentative in general when there’s no reason to be so.
I don’t give enough of a flying fuck if we hypothetically disagree, only if your position is so odious that it is in fact literally objectively wrong or intentionally misleading.
Or utterly useless bots that no one asked for. I’ll downvote those, too, but I haven’t seen too many of them anymore in the corners that I regularly haunt.


Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot? Is it you? Why not?
That is your answer.


Penguins are cool. I ride dual sport motorcycles. (And other motorcycles. But definitely those.)


“All” digital tech?
I don’t think most people realize that any powertrain new enough to even have fuel injection is going to be a “computer vehicle” in some capacity. How are you with carburetors?
And setting upperbound limits on input length. Because if you expose it to users, it’s not a matter of if some joker will insist on entering precisely 4,294,967,297 bytes of random data into it to see if they can crash your shit, it’s a matter of when.




Works on your motorcycle, too.


FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.