All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.

I was trying to get myself prepared for realistic disaster scenarios. For us, that is earthquakes and cold snaps. And in my mind, realistic means how do I both ready myself and work with my community?

So I got a book on prepping. The titled seemed innocuous enough. Unfortunately, it was one of the crazy bug out into the woods and go eat squirrel stew sort of prepper books. Totally worthless for anything practical. The best thing I can say for it was that it was an e-book, so it didn’t cost much.

I just looked this up. The idea is called an ethnic religion, where a religion is closely tied to an ethnicity as opposed to universal religions like Christianity or Islam. It’s far from the only one, but it is the one that has the most mind share, at least in the West.

I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.

What? All you have to do is edit a few files with ed, run some simple commands in the terminal, and you have a working system

Definitely start with a nice beginner friendly distro, like Gentoo, NixOS, or LFS.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.

I just gave the chat bot that was put in place at the IT department where I work at a poke. It answered my question perfectly: “How do I print from my laptop to the library?” And it’s not like the chat bot is the only route for support, but it does divert a lot of routine questions from our help desk so they can focus on questions that require a human touch. That could be people where a chat bot is not a good format or it could be a non-routine question.

Then eats it with a fork and knife, pass it on

What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?

Someone with very large fingers?

A painting of a random pope’s son? He has a fan base?

AIDS. So much AIDS. There’s a famous photo from 2018 with the men in black representing the original members of the San Fransisco Gay Men’s Choir lost to AIDS and men in white representing those who did not die to AIDS.