Did those early Roadsters have self driving tech? I thought they were more barebones sports cars, not like the current gimmick-dumpsters.

Exactly! I live in the suburbs, where every driveway seems to have a massive full size truck (because they barely fit in the garage)–and also, where I am 15 minutes away from at least 3 places where you can rent a pickup for like 5% of the monthly payment on one of those beasts.

That is so odd… I’ve only ridden Amtrak a few times, but I was amazed at how many stops were just some small town that happened to lie on the rail line.

Most small towns that lie on a major highway and are supported by commuter traffic are only going to support a truck stop and a few fast food restaurants at best. Sure, a true high speed rail line would likely only stop in larger metropolitan areas, so those meager income sources may dwindle. But on the other hand if I were a rail commuter in one of those rural/suburban areas, I’d be much more likely to spend some time doing a bit of shopping or lingering in a restaurant during that transition from the train to my car after work, than if I were just passing through in my car.

I’m as fascinated by those shuttle comparisons as anything else!

On the face of it, I wouldn’t have guessed that the space shuttle’s power output was measured in gigawatts, nor that the space shuttle’s output is on the same scale as an entire country’s steam power output (in 1896, sure… but still!)

I refuse to use a case on principle. The idea that you need a case to protect a phone from everyday use is so ass-backwards it hurts my brain. (and was not always the situation!)

It would be so much more space, weight, and cost efficient to simply engineer in the durability provided by a case through the use of proper materials and construction. But apparently marketing thinks nobody would buy a phone that looks and feels out of the box the way a phone with a case feels. So we end up with these thin, elegant, glass and polished aluminum devices… that most of the population has to immediately hide inside a bulky plastic/rubber case to have a chance of surviving 6 months.

Imagine if a carmaker sold a premium vehicle with a polished metal and glass exterior that you had to protect under a vinyl wrap to keep it from rusting and chipping under normal use… they’d be a laughing stock!

I’ve been moved out for 25 years 😂

I just hoped that my family would take advantage of me offering up my server for them to stream from.

Same here. I initially had high hopes that my family would take advantage, but apparently my parents would rather bug my siblings monthly for their Hulu/Netflix/Max/Disney+/Prime logins than install Plex or Jellyfin lol.

Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I’ll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10’s of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.

I can see both sides though. There’s certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume–and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I’m not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.

One thing I’ve noticed in discussing dreams with my wife is that experiencing the dream first-hand with all the context, emotions, and sense of having “been there” goes a long way toward making a dream feel more realistic or believable.

There have been many times where I’m explaining a dream that felt (and still feel) totally plausible and coherent, but in trying to describe it to someone else, I realize just how unrealistic certain aspects are. Its like trying to explain the plot of an absurdist comedy or something like that.

There’s probably an allegory in there for individual perception and lived experiences vs objective reality, but I’m not feeling quite articulate enough to type it out… 🙃

I used to deliver for papa johns many moons ago. We had one guy who ordered the same thing every Saturday afternoon at about 4pm. I forget the exact details… it was something normal like a pepperoni & mushroom, but then add literally 5x extra anchovies on the entire thing. A typical large was about $12 in those days, and his pizza would be north of $25.

I hated getting that run because my car would smell like fish oil into the next day, but the dude tipped well so it was cool.

Not sure, how old I was, probably 10-12. This one isn’t so much classic nightmare, but left me extremely unsettled for weeks and still gives me the heebie jeebies when I think about it.

In my dream I was at an event for returning space shuttle astronauts who had just landed. Apparently there was some major problem during reentry, and most of the crew didn’t make it, but one had barely survived. When they brought out the surviving astronaut for an interview or whatever, the dude was literally just a naked human nervous system in a NASA spacesuit. Where his head would have been was the classic anatomy textbook image of just the brain with eyes floating in front of it, supported by a spinal cord. No bones, no muscle, unable to talk or anything. I remember the head was gently bobbing from side to side a few inches, and every so often the “head” would just rapidly spin around a few revolutions, then stop and continue bobbing eerily.

This is pretty much exactly what the dude looked like in my dream https://img-new.cgtrader.com/items/2443319/bd71a87570/large/nervous-system-and-dura-matter-3d-model-low-poly-fbx-gltf.jpg

The dumbest thought I ever had while high was that I convinced myself I had two brains, and that one brain could predict the thoughts of the other brain before it thought them.

That’s hilarious! Honestly, I rather enjoy that sensation of temporarily being… not stupid… but willing to uncritically entertain stupid ideas.

Same here. I think it was more like $300 for a pair of matching rings from a small etsy seller though. Hers with moissinite, mine with an inlay of copper and titanium shaving for some color.

Thanks, that would explain it. Not sure how I missed that!

Well shit, that’s a core memory reactivated.

It’s crazy how vividly you can remember something like that, while moments earlier having absolutely no consciousness of it.

True, but can’t you cork a Klein bottle just as easily?

Problem is, by the time they’ve failed the test, the opportunity for them to learn the content is largely passed.

The purpose of school is to educate and teach thinking skills. Tests are just a way to assess how effectively you and your students are achieving that goal. If something (in this case easy access to AI tools in the classroom) is disrupting that teaching/learning process, sure it’s useful to detect that through testing, but I’d doesn’t do anything really to solve the problem. Some fraction of kids are disciplined enough to recognize that skating by on classwork will lead to poor test results and possibly retaking classes, but generally those aren’t the kids you need to worry about anyway.

I’d ask the inverse. What definition of “inside” can you apply to a traditional bottle–so as to say that a ship is inside the bottle–that could not also be applied to a Klein bottle? Both of them have a single opening that leads to an enclosed, dead-ended volume.

A Klein bottle may only have one surface, and therefore you can argue it has no topological inside. But a traditional bottle is topologically equivalent to a flat disc, so the same logic would say you can’t put a ship inside one of those either.

I also thought I’d miss Hulu and Netflix a lot more than I do. What used to irk me so badly was how utterly shit Netflix is when you just want to sit down and find something new to watch. Their front page would be list after list of things like “Hot New Comedies” “Best Independent Films of 2025”, “Classic Action Flicks” and somehow it always felt like the same 30 or 40 movies randomly shuffled together. So I’d spend 15 minutes scrolling through the same slop in different orders, get frustrated and search for a movie that I remembered wanting to watch, only to find that it was on none of the services I was subscribed to, and cost $8.99 for a single watch of a 20 year old movie.

We had been Netflix subscribers since the very start when they delivered discs through the mail. Kinda sad how they went from having virtually anything you could think of to watch (and having a halfway decent recommendation algorithm to boot!) to where they are today.

It sounds super obvious, but i never thought to cook hasbrowns in the bacon grease… Mostly because I’m fully converted to making bacon in the oven these days.

Definitely going to give this a whirl next time we’re doing breakfast.