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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.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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.






  • 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.