It’s the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, “Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people”.

But if you take a step back it’s reasonable to ask, “WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don’t spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus’ forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose.”

So given that realization it’s also reasonable when told you must choose to say, “Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt.”

That’s the essential argument. There’s the realpolitik decision to do “less harm”, but you can also reject the fucked up premise.

Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.

Toxic megacolon. Sounds like a metal band.

A soil probe and sample boxes. You use the probe to take what looks like a little core sample and send it off in the box to get a soil analysis from the local university extension (for a nominal fee).

For me this was Stone Butch Blues.

If you only care about pipes freezing there are low wattage pipe heating cords (also called “heat tape”) that would use way less energy than a space heater. Also if you have drafty windows the temporary “window insulation kits” that basically shrink wrap the window work surprisingly well.

When things are great, even small things like a cup of coffee with a friend or a quiet morning, take a minute to say to yourself, “this is really great.” Say it out loud. Years later you will realize those moments are as good as it gets, and if you don’t mark them they just disappear. Bad moments stick around in your head regardless, but the good ones need to be memorialized.

Media and Entertainment side sucks too. No hate on the actual devs, I know a few of the Maya devs personally and they are competent and want to help, but M+E is like 4% of Autodesk revenue so management doesn’t really give a fuck. At least there’s still Houdini and Blender is getting better as the time as well.

I’ve “rolled” a couple 401ks into a Vanguard account. Just set up a Vanguard traditional IRA (or Fidelity is good too) and follow their instructions. In both my cases my old 401k admin sent me a check and I forwarded it to Vanguard within a certain time frame. If you don’t know what fund to choose just pick “Vanguard Target Retirement XX” for whatever year you turn retirement age (Fidelity has equivalents).

The reason I say Vanguard or Fidelity is because they have rock bottom fees and also they are huge so they’ve worked this out with basically everyone.

Anecdotal, but I grew up in the heyday of malls and my local mall was one of the largest, and is now one of the most famous dead malls. The mall was in decline when Amazon was still in its infancy, mostly still selling books. Buying clothes online was considered lunacy at the time because there was no fitting rooms to try things on. Still, vacancy was on the rise in the mall and once a few violent crimes started happening inside that was all she wrote. “Big Box” stores like Walmart became more of a draw than driving all the way to the mall.

I think the reasons for the death of the mall are more complex, just like the death of the department store. There were lots of weird tax incentives, both for developers, and for (mostly white) residents fleeing the urban core during the 90s. Those were not sustainable. Malls themselves were a bit of a private equity shell game which couldn’t last. The story of dead malls is more about capitalism and land use policy than just Amazon.

I’ll never forget Forest Fair Mall in those first years though. It’s 1.5 MILLION square feet, and it was absolutely packed, especially during Christmas. Humongous fountains, sand sculptures, live music… every single spot of its airfield-like parking lot was full. The only thing today that I think comes close, if younger people want the experience, is the main concourse of a top ten airport.

When I was a child in the 90s I somehow scored a voice role in a hotdog commercial for the radio. I was paid a king’s ransom for this, half of which my parents made me put in savings (wise), and half of which I spent on a brand new Sega CD (not wise).

The magic of postage stamp-sized full motion video took about three days to wear off, at which point all that was left was basically pure shit. They jacked me. At least I learned that lesson early.

The article doesn’t really do Tim justice. He’s a bodger who is basically a genius for what I can only describe as Goblin technology. His projects are as much about fun and experimenting as having a result. In the first windmill video he acknowledged that he could just buy a small electric windmill, but that’s not the point.

I mean, this is the dude who made a narrow gauge railroad and a compressed air locomotive to transport wood to his terrifying biochar chopper and crucible.

Can I pester you with a question? Feel free to tell me to get bent because I know your time is worth money and this is just the internet. We have a new Trane system that was flawless when it was first put in, but over the past five months the blower has started making louder and louder vibration noises. Almost like it’s slightly off balance. If it was an older system I wouldn’t think twice, but it was dead quiet at first, just the sound of moving air pretty much.

Part of me wants to open up the cabinet and just see if there’s some sort of vibration pad that’s gotten loose, but I also don’t want to to void a warranty, or something. It seems so trivial a thing. We live in the boonies and a service call is pretty onerous for a tech. I thought maybe there could be balancing weights, like a car wheel or a lawnmower blade, but your comment about motors being sealed is making me think twice.

Man, fuck editing the registry. The duplicate entries, the non-standard locations, the UI of regedit… I had to dig through it so much when I was supporting a corporate launcher application in a Windows facility. Did the Windows dev decide to write their data into multiple registry entries, an INI file, an environment variable… or maybe all of the above? Find out on the next episode of Fuck My Life!

Was it this thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)

I paid $5 USD as a kid to play this thing at the mall, which was a fortune to me, but I loved stuff like this so much I thought it was worth it. The game was so shitty I couldn’t even tell wtf was going on or what I was supposed to do. Just randomly floating through a sea of polygons until the guy said time was up.

I made a 3d model in Blender and showed it to an architect, with the huge caveat that I only work in vfx and games and have absolutely no idea how to build real things, so please just consider it a “napkin sketch”. This model was just flat colors, I didn’t bother with texture maps.

I also used QGIS to show him a map of the site, along with some LIDAR elevation data I downloaded from a government website. He just took elevation/plan images and did a great job translating it into a real set of drawings with some major improvements.

After that I took his drawings and did a 3d model in FreeCAD, to help determine where our existing furniture will fit before I broke my back moving it around.

Pretty happy with my Lemur Pro, 3.5 years in. I just replaced the battery, which was fairly painless. Also had to replace the wireless radio, which was as easy as popping in a new one. I wasn’t happy that it failed, but apparently that’s industry wide, not just these laptops. Replacement was like $35. Other than that I’ve only had cosmetic issues, like the System76 sticker came off, which I don’t care about.

When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called “coordinators” and “producers”) used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.

In game dev unfortunately it’s exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding \\ into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.