In a fit of desperation and creativity I "invented" sausage and peppers soup. Pictured, the last dregs my kids were fighting over because it was "too good". I think that that is a good thing...
Remote
Blaise
@blaise@friendica.rogueproject.org
friendica 2026.05-1595Engineer, Dad, Maker, Artist, Ballroom Dancer, Entrepreneur, Axe-flinger, Pain-In-The-Ass
I make chainmaille and wire sculpture, 3d print toys my kids love to lose, teach and adore ballroom dancing, profile my own throwing axes (and fling them!), rebuild bits of my moldering Victorian home, and generally tinker with everything from computers to woodworking to gmrs radio(WRON559).
I owned and ran an industrial automation consulting firm for 20 years, and helped found the amazing Tech Valley Center of Gravity, makerspace and home away from home to my tribe...
49 Followers
52 Following
48 Posts
Favorite Axe:
Estwing E44A Camper's Axe - Throw like a Viking
GMRS Radio:
WRON559
Makerspace:
Tech Valley Center Of Gravity (tvcog.net)
Brought to you by Brawndo!
Mark Hamill (@markhamillofficial.bsky.social)
Mark Hamill (@markhamillofficial.bsky.social)
After deep soul-searching, I confess that I cannot choose a favorite between Classic Spam and Turkey Spam.
I'm officially polyspamorous!
Back Online!
Hey folks, the vagaries of distributed server systems tanked me once again!
My Friendica account, which I use to manage all my federated social media accounts, was on a server that crashed with unrecoverable backups last week. This is technically a new account with the same name, content, and photo, but it's still me, I promise!
Anyway, follow me. Let me follow you. Help me rebuild my online life once again!
Evil Empire: Check!
Disatrously maintained scummy pool of water infested with invasive life forms beneath headquarters: Check!
Disatrously maintained scummy pool of water infested with invasive life forms beneath headquarters: Check!
OK, knowers of arcane and esoteric stuffs, here's your challenge: I have a presentation framework data grid, and I'm trying to make an ancient ADO recordset it's datasource. I'm trying now, because after months of working, it magically stopped working after somebody fiddled with the code, but I can't for the life of me figure out what they set wrong.
I've checked the structure and contents of the recordset 6 ways from Sunday, and I'm absolutely certain it contains a large amount of data, but when I set it as the datasource for the grid, the grid updates column names, but doesn't show any data!
I've rewritten the code three different ways now, and it's always the same failure.
Got any thoughts, "The Internet"?
Me: How do I delete a custom agent from my AI service account?
Agent: Which agent do you want to delete?
Me: That doesn't matter, just tell me how to delete one.
Agent: It's not necessary to delete custom agents from your account. You can store an unlimited number.
Me: Seriously, I want to clean up. Tell me how to delete a custom agent from my AI service account!
Agent: I don't think you can do that.
Me: ..... 0.o
Agent: Which agent do you want to delete?
Me: That doesn't matter, just tell me how to delete one.
Agent: It's not necessary to delete custom agents from your account. You can store an unlimited number.
Me: Seriously, I want to clean up. Tell me how to delete a custom agent from my AI service account!
Agent: I don't think you can do that.
Me: ..... 0.o
It sure is a good thing the left spent the last 20 years building this "hate speech" catch-all legal framework that the right is now using to extort people who say mean things about them!
"You did that on purpose!"
"What did I do?"
"You named that table!"
"It's a perfectly fine name!"
"You didn't have to suggest that name. You know Jim is a religious nut!"
"Look, 'Boolean Flag Translation Table' was just unwieldy. It had to be shortened."
"You named it '[B-Trans]' on purpose to cause trouble. Then you started using it like a verb, and telling Jim he 'should B-Trans... that data'!"
"We use all kinds of identifiers as verbs as a shorthand!"
"Which you knew when you planned this!"
"I really have no idea what you are talking about..."
"What did I do?"
"You named that table!"
"It's a perfectly fine name!"
"You didn't have to suggest that name. You know Jim is a religious nut!"
"Look, 'Boolean Flag Translation Table' was just unwieldy. It had to be shortened."
"You named it '[B-Trans]' on purpose to cause trouble. Then you started using it like a verb, and telling Jim he 'should B-Trans... that data'!"
"We use all kinds of identifiers as verbs as a shorthand!"
"Which you knew when you planned this!"
"I really have no idea what you are talking about..."
Replying to
@PursuitOfElysia@urbanists.social @anildash@me.dm Here's hoping my shriveled, cynical, old soul is wrong!
The party of stupid wants to start giving hormones to military members who need them to stay healthy. One year after banning trans people from service because they need hormones to stay healthy.....
And a casino, of course!
Secretary of Forever War and barely closeted Neo NAZI, Pete Hegseth, has been recruiting his own pernicious kind into the military. #ShockedITellYouShocked
Xeltuwas (@illcitvirus115.bsky.social)
Xeltuwas (@illcitvirus115.bsky.social)
Replying to
@anildash@me.dm He's an amazing politician. I just hope he has a real plan to accomplish some of the crazy expensive things he's promised, or the Dems are done in NYC forever...
I feel this...
[!upload-image.png]
Watching my 8-yr-old girl flip her hair and giggle while hitting on the pretty 5th grade boy she likes is simultaneously cute and terrifying...
Especially since it's working!
Stephen Miller gave a reckless order that directly lead to deaths. How is that NOT murder, or at least reckless endangerment?!?!?
After four long months of side-hustle, dozens of "chats", and hundreds of AI-assisted iterative prompt refinement passes, I have successfully created an AI agent which will ingest technical product documentation and become a product-oracle, giving detailed answers and correcting/clarifying unclear or incorrect assumptions in the questions. It it accurate. It is thorough. It is the first truly useful thing I have gotten out of LLM AI technology. It is a work of art.
And one time out of 7, it STILL makes up its answer whole-cloth!
This isn't probably going to reach the right audience here, but seriously, if you are still paying to be productized by Windows, just stop.
ZorinOS , which more or less looks and feels just like Windows from an interface and organization perspective, runs wildly faster on my four year old laptop than Windows 11. I didn't have to install a single driver (exception: I needed to get my browser to control my USB ports, which is a weird, uncommon requirement, but I did have to install a driver for that.). It has an app store that actually has things in it I want, unlike the windows store, it boots in thirty seconds, and I found a Linux app to replace every program I commonly use on Windows. It even comes in a "Lite" version for even older tech.
I even got Linux Lite to run on my twelve-year-old laptop in under an hour, and although it's a little bare-bones looking, it plays video and loads web pages just as well as my newest laptop running Windows 11.
I'm no fanboy, but I feel like maybe we're approaching consumer-level Linux...
Oh look, the Republicans want a billion dollars to pay for the ballroom that isn't going to cost the taxpayers anything!
Holy Ship!
We no longer have the ability to govern ourselves, and the people who do have the ability are using it to destroy our civilization. This all ends in technofascism or luddite terrorism (or a mix of both). I can't see any other outcomes...
" The $16 billion data center... was flat-out rejected by both the town’s board and its planning commission in September. But those votes turned out to be only minor bumps on the project’s path: The developer quickly sued, the town settled, and the construction vehicles rolled in."
I have two children, and I haven't needed to turn a light on in 10 years.
Replying to
@unusnemo Unfortunately, its "We'll sue you to death, then have your corpse arrested and executed" confidential...
Wayback is vital to preserving our culture and history. It needs to collect current events to work. Now, the big news outlets are specifically blocking the archive, crippling the archive's ability to preserve data. This has to stop. We're losing big chunks of our history...
It's probably true for most services today, but if you want to see the ultimate evidence that Meta is dangerous, check out what happens if you use their products!
My next Kickstarter will be for my new, AI-enhanced toilet plunger. I call it the "Smart-Ass"!
Do you think that when the Project management cult powers-that-be changed "Risk/Benefit Analysis" to "SWOT Analysis" (SWOT = Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats), do you think that they were only looking for a way to repackage what everyone's been doing for a century as a new concept, or do you think that they were simply so poorly educated that they had never heard of "Risk/Benefit Analysis", so they just reinvented it?
After hours of shopping, I've discovered that in Upstate New York, it now costs at least $130 per hour to rent a cheap/small/low quality boat, with a 3 hour minimum. Before the pandemic killed the idea of affording weekends away, I could rent the same boat for for less than $60 per hour, with 2-hour minimums. Looking more broadly, I see this same level of discrepancy with furniture, groceries, cars, housing, etc...
So if everything costs 116% more seven years later, my naive mathing says this means we've experienced a greater than 17% annual average price increase on just living for six straight years. How is this not the BIGGEST news story?
Replying to
@anildash@me.dm I'm not saying it can't be done, I just don't have much faith in political promises like "We'll get the state to help", "We'll just tax corporations and rich more", and "We'll just raise the minimum wage". I literally don't remember *any* of those ever producing anything but just-barely-statistically-significant results...
What the hell god of picayune minutiae did I offend that the HR robots insist I take sexual harassment training for the second time in three months?
I. WORK. FROM. HOME!
Maybe they think I've got my eye on the printer?
The sitting "president" sues the government he's is in charge of, and forces a settlement that gets him BILLIONS for his personal use. But he's not a corrupt dictator, that's just crazy-talk!
I CANNOT BELIEVE I have to keep saying this:
Age-verification is universal surveillance.
Age-verification is universal surveillance.
Age-verification is universal surveillance.
Age. Verification. Is. Universal. Surveillance.
How is this possibly being allowed to go unchallenged?!?!?!?
[!upload-image.png]
Listen, left-folk. I know you don't like guns. I know you think banning things works, despite the results of Prohibition and the "Drug War".. I know you think it is better to trade essential freedoms for a little bit of perceived safety. But christ, for the bajillionth time, look where your authoritarian attitudes will lead!
The worst thing you can do under a dictator is point out corruption...
We're like one professional wrestler and a machine gun away from locking in "Idiocracy" as a perfect prediction.
We need a new internet. This one has been taken over by fascists!
Per the HR employee evaluation website, on average I spend 25% of my week in technical or project management meetings. I spend another 20% trying to translate waterfall designs and deadlines provided by customers into tiny chunk tasks, each representing "a day's work", while I have to learn a new project management tool (or new interface to an old tool) every six months. I actually accomplish something productive for about 20 hours a week, all said and done.
Because we're "Agile"...
Let me ask you a question. Using your personal, for real situation right now: If Cloudflare decided to ban all the IP's from VPNs and flagged your home and work IPs as bots, along with all the devices you personally own, identified by device fingerprinting, what would your life be like? Could you really get on with any kind of normal life?
Well, governments just started talking about banning VPNs in service to "Know Your Customer" and "Child safety". Do you think they'll try to hunt down every piece of VPN software on the internet, or will they use their "mandate" to force a choke point corporation to use their already ubiquitous scanning to block suspects without any due process or chance of appeal?
We wouldn't want to be able to defend ourselves in one of the more likely places one might need to defend oneself, now would we?
I'd love to know what it is about being ultra-rich that makes people lose every last marble, then borrow more, and lose those too?
Every single time I see a "Spiderman" publication/movie, I read the UI word "Twip" as "Thwip" for weeks afterward. Once I even accidentally said it in a meeting!
Apparently, Amazon's AI has decided that I need a 200-ton press... Now mind you, it may be right, but I've just gotta know what I bought that told it I'd want that, of all things...