We can choose a salad (or burger) without shit… but not next week at this point. Gotta pick one - or let others pick one for you.

Afterwards, please find your local precinct and be part of the discussion. “Both parties” have been captured by money/capital, but only because we let them. At least on the dem side, the rules we have allow us to outnumber the money, but only if we show up on November 4th.

Edit: Just to be clear - Show up on Nov 3 and vote for your preferred entree of the options available, but show up after too.

As a occasional bleeding edge buyer - I disagree with the motive of ‘look at me’. (caveat: This post is entirely ‘look at me’, but I’m proving my point, not desiring attention, and have never even thought about my purchases this way until now)

I had an HTC Magic - one of the very early Android phones - not because I wanted to be cool, but because I wanted the tech and google was still this sort of open, consumer-friendly company at the time vs Apple. That phone was pretty solid compared to the candy-bar or flip phones of the era, aside from battery life, but compared to modern smart phones it was garbage.

I had an OG Rift VR headset (CV1). It did what it claimed, but it was low resolution, clunky, heavy, and unpleasant to use. But now we have Steam’s Frame.

When I was a teenager, working retail at a tech store, I saved up to buy an early LCD monitor. Now you can’t even buy CRTs outside of niche vendors.

I want quality EVs. I never bought a Tesla, but I wanted one before the crazy came out and just couldn’t afford it. Now we have every auto manufacturer making EV options.

I want quality folding phones, but my normal shape phone is still functional and I haven’t needed to buy a new one for a few years. When I do, it’ll probably fold. I’ll be v3 or so by that time, but still showing there’s a desire.

I want to be clear that I’m not disagreeing with your ‘let others work out the kinks’, but sometimes I’m fine with having the first iterations because I want the resulting tech.

Consider this my investment strategy - but instead of personal profit, I’m investing in innovation.

Counterpoint: if you want version 4.0 of something. Someone needs to prove it’s viability.

You can buy v1.0, just know it for what it is and only buy in if you can accept the risk.

I never bought a folding phone, but I want one and I appreciate the early adopters.

I HATE this part. I have no power to just not invest, because Vanguard or whoever owns the portfolio and they think this stuff is just going up-up-up, but they are playing with my money since I only have 4 flavors of their choosing for my 401k.

They might be right in the short term, and this used to be a thing (I think, in my parent’s age) where you could assume that number-goes-up over time and you could ignore minor dips, and maybe it’s still true for a long enough duration… but:

In this thread, I think we all see that this isn’t sustainable, but we, normal people just hoping to retire someday, don’t have the ability to disconnect from the bubble even if we want to. There are too many public companies involved and they’re all interconnected.

I despise that I’m probably invested in spacex, nvidia, oracle, etc. I’d sacrifice short term gains to let other people take this risk if I could.

I think this is one of the greatest dangers AI presents. Sure it makes some of us stupider, sure it drinks our water and eats our GPUs and raises power prices… but once upon a time, it took actual human effort to run a dragnet, even with judicial approval.

Now, you plug in an LLM to the giant pile of corporate surveillance data and ask it to find troublemakers. Anonymity is dead and its death made retroactive and since there’s no government oversight, the government can just lease access to the tools they used to need approval to use.

I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I want to do this, but only got as far as setting up a minimal Home Assistant. Only put a few hours into it, though, then got sidetracked by trying to turn an esp32 into a speaker/microphone puck.