Reposted as unlisted on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Zikeji/113389042020055586

Yup. Toyota Yaris '15 stock. Lowest trim they offer.

My car is a 2015 and didn’t come with a cruise control lol :(.

To be fair, I can drive at and maintain a consistent speed without it, though I didn’t have to often thanks to stop and go traffic 🎉.

Programming and self hosting the results when I was ~14 is what led me to a tech background. No university, but I’ve been working professionally in both IT and software for over a decade and self hosting even longer.

I’ve been told they’re a projection put in the sky by God to test our faith lol.

When I was young, around 10, I was bored. We had one shitty desktop and no internet 99% of the time (we had dial up but only 1 landline, and my mom used the phone alot). We were also homeschooled, and the software teaching us was on that computer. I found the software documentation which was in HTML, and used that to make my own “website”.

Even before then though I had a draw to tinkering with computers. After a bit I convinced my mom to get me intro to C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup, and messed with that for a good year or so. Then we upgraded to DSL when I was around 13 and I got into Roblox and learned Lua, then other languages.

I saw a few others, but the ones I looked at were basically instruct layers where you’d need to add your own parser. I didn’t find anything (in my 3 minutes of searching) that offers an openai chat completions endpoint, which is probably the main stopper.

I believe that’s because those two APIs support function calling, open source support is still coming along.

I’ll never forget the day I learned that “picture an apple in your head” or “picture the audience naked” wasn’t just a saying and was literal.

Not an avid chess player, but as someone with aphantasia pretty much spot on for my experience.

I work two jobs and have no days off but Friday is the start of not having to drive the next morning so yeah, in a way.

When I first came across that wisdom I realized my desire in a relationship was to just pour myself into the other person, basically worship them. But not for their benefit, but to distract myself from myself. It’s fairly easy to see how that goes wrong.

I’m still learning, and I’ve found even more stuff I need to work on, but either I get there or I don’t, what matters if I never stopped trying.

I found that same nugget just under a decade ago. Dropped off the dating scene to work on myself. It really made me reflect. I’m still working on myself and honestly I suspect I will be for a while to come.

I’ve been using Porkbun for over 5 years and haven’t had any issues. I switched from a mix of Google Domains and Namecheap.

Generally the country based TLDs have that problem. That isn’t unique to porkbun or .de

A heat gun is also inexpensive and very useful. 3M mount you need to remove (and/or reuse)? Heat gun. Sticker? Heat gun. Frazzled threads on clothes? Heat gun. No time to properly blow dry? Heat gun! (the last one is a joke, don’t do that).

Audiobooks have been a great coping mechanism for my ADHD, they’ve also made me a better driver.

For the latter, if I listen to my music I definitely feel a bit more aggressive, whereas if it’s an audiobook (and I’ve given myself sufficient room), I’m much more forgiving.

For the former, I can mix them with menial tasks and it makes them so much more doable.

While I agree with this, the one except I’ve found is Sprite. Different genetics have different tastes but I’ve found I like my Kroger generic Sprite more than the name brand.

1. ~18.

2. See answer below.

3. No.

4. No.

5. Yes.

6. Yes.

I started vaping around when I was 18, back when disposable coils were first starting to be a thing and the paradigm was mainly making your own coils, testing resistance, and then pulling your own cotton. Very much a manual process, and not a known thing just yet. Smoke shops were just starting to carry juice.

I started after I got in trouble at work for eating sunflower seeds. Back then I had a pretty bad tick where I had to do something with my mouth quite often. My coworker mentioned it and I saw it as an alternative, I also liked the idea of replacing caffeine with nicotine as a stimulant.

Easy to guess, but my symptoms and tick were ADHD related. It worked for a short while, but soon I was using both caffeine and nicotine, though by the time I quit vaping for the first time I had completely gotten over the tick.

Since I started I’ve been through a few cycles of quitting and resuming. I’ve never quit because I saw it as an addiction, and mainly have quit for financial or health reasons, if any at all. And by health I’m referring to purely the impact stimulants had on my blood pressure, nothing to do with vaping itself.

Being ADHD my addictions have always been as transient as my hobbies, and I’ve quit both nicotine and caffeine multiple times and only the last few times grew conscious of the withdrawal symptoms.

I do recognize it as a legitimate addiction, as the time I quit intentionally (asthmatic friend was visiting) I did notice the desire to resume, although that may also be related to finally finding working ADHD treatment.

If you plan properly you can use 0nic liquid and mix it with nic liquid to slowly wean yourself off nicotine, and have personally coached two people through this process, one of which was a lifetime smoker.

Aside from health concerns from nicotine itself, the only health issue I’ve had from vaping was suffocating myself by vaping too much lol.

I do think vaping in public should be treated the same as smoking, and that access be behind an age restriction. But I don’t see it as anything more than a mildly unhealthy vice. My addiction to sugar and sweet stuff has been much more harmful to me and is completely unchecked here in the US.

Long ago at my first job I worked as IT in a warehouse. This story involves two employees, Retired and Pretender.

Retired is a retired U.S. marine, working in shipping, he also had permission from the owner to open carry in the office and warehouse.

Pretender was in sales and is kind of a tool who had to do all the cool things everyone else was. Three of us had motorcycles and would go on day rides. Pretender found out and less than a week later he had a motorcycle and wanted to join us (without a license). He sucked, and there are a few other examples but aren’t the topic of this story.

Pretender overheard me and a coworker talking about the guns we had. Needing to fit in, he said he’d bring his to work tomorrow and wouldn’t answer when we said he didn’t have to and just to tell us the model. Sure enough, next day he wants to show us this obviously new gun that he obviously had no training or common sense for

We played along and then went about our day. Later on, we hear Retired and Pretender in a pretty heated argument as they walk past our cubicles. Then apparently Pretender walked to his car with Retired in tow, and reached into his car and grabbed his gun.

Retired (peacefully) put a stop to it, the owner came out to figure out wtf was going on, fired Pretender on the spot and let him retrieve his belongings before seeing him off. He also called in the non emergency line and had an officer come over to put a police report on file. Unsurprisingly, the officer used an older mugshot to confirm it he had the right character.

What were they arguing about you might wonder? Pretender was telling Retired how to package an order for shipping, Retired worked in shipping for years and was having none of it. A few months later the owner got a call from the state saying Pretender filed for unemployment and to confirm the reason he was laid off, with he had listed as “downsizing”. We had a laugh over that.

TL:DR: moron coworker drew a gun on a retired marine why open carried and fortunately didn’t die, but he did get fired.