My car has been in and out of the shop since May. Mostly for stupid reasons. From a mechanic too "busy" to get around to it, from a completely incompetent series of shops that told me my car had one problem when it wasn't and I was right about it.

The car is a 99 Opel Astra SW. Diesel engine. Of a series fitted with a very finecky fuel pump. The GM engine is very efficient but also very delicate; the injection system resembles a petrol one and requires precise timing. After breaking the third accessories belt in less than six months, the car started knocking, badly, and the iginition failed.

When I bought it, it came out of timing, and it struggled with starting, having the fuel injection out of synch with the pump, due to a faulty engine cranckshaft sensor. It was fixed and the engine purred.

I told this to the shop when the accessories belt broke again but they ignored me and pointed the problem to the fuel pump. They did fix a broken rocker in the injection system but the engine still knocked and loudly. I asked if they had checked the engine timing and was insisted I had to replace the fuel pump, which is a 1500€ expense.

I called to a couple of diesel labs and they were in agreement: this particular pump is finecky but it has a virtue, as it does not have partial issues. If the electronics fail, the pump is done. If the mechanics fail, it shows. If the car was starting after insisting and running, the issue was somewhere else.

I found another mechanic. A crazy one. Of the good kind. Run the entire story through him. And he agrees something is off.

The issues list start to pile after a careful check. A faulty head gasket, leaking, barely, but nonetheless. A wobbling engine pully, the one that actuates the accessories belt, which is the cause for the constantly failing belts. Leaking injector rings. Small things but that do pile up and tell a story of poor service. And then is the fuel pump. Two bare wires that connect the pump control unit to the regulator. Two wires that are shorting each other. Two wires that when put apart allow the engine to start on the first try.

I trust my car to this guy. I order parts, as per his request, and he puts his hands to the work. And the bad news keep pilling.

The knocking was the fuel valves hitting the piston heads. The engine was not properly timed and was in fact two teeth ahead. The timing that was assured by three different mechanics when the rocker was replaced was moot. These engines are very demanding when it comes to be timed and require a special tool, an imobilizer, fitted through the vacuum pump housing, to keep everything in place. The timing had been attemped my marking relative positions on the outside of the engine. Not good.

The engine head was so beat up it risked cracking. Surfacing it was pointless. My mechanic found another, aluminium welded a small defect on it that was bothering him, had it rectified and fitted it. Mechanically, the engine was sound again.

But what about that cursed fuel pump?

Well, it so happens those damned wires were the downfall of the pump. Circuits don't enjoy being shorted. The mechanic took it out to check those wires and the board they connected to was in bad shape. It was technically a miracle how it still fired. But it was its dying breath and ended there. Mechanically, it was faultless. Very little wear, negligible. But the board was fried. We tried to get a used control unit but it proved to not be in good condition as well; on idle, the third cylinder would not get any fuel.

The pump was sent to a lab for diagnosis. Which promptly dismissed it as faulty and needing of replacement. I had to personally call the lab to find out if the problem was mechanical or circuit bound and after a short exchange they reluctantly told me the issue was the circuit board. 1500€, 12 month warranty, if installed at their shop.

No.

I called a few other places and the least I could get was around 1000€. Then I took the plunge and went online. And struck strong. I found the unit, abroad, for a third of the price. 36 months warranty. And a deposit return with the handover of the old fuel pump. And the shop that sold me the used control unit is open to receive it back for testing and if it proves faulty, they are willing to return that value as well.

The carrier order is already open, so it is just the waiting game now.

This just shows how precious investing a bit of our own personal time can be. I had to personally interfere in this whole process to things through and save some money, that I otherwise would hurt for.

After this, it is off to work in my side job to recoup the investment.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/justpost/p/1513974/former-new-york-times-and-washington-post-tech-reporter-taylor-lorenz-says-she-s-being-o

Source: Taylor Lorenz on X/Twitter.

A few days ago I watched this video by wired about the pyramids in Egypt
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMPLaB1oEo), and something interesting that the expert talks about is that they know exactly where the stones come from- not only is there clear evidence of quarrying in the immediate vicinity, but the dimensions match and they even have contemporary records describing the movement of stone blocks from quarries across the river to the construction site. (2 day round trip.)

Granted it's a Wired video so she didn't go into an overly extraordinary level of detail, but in any case it reminded me of a lecture I attended about 15 years ago when I went a prospective students/parents night at a prestigious university that I was looking to attend.

As part of the presentation, they had this guy give a lecture on his groundbreaking new theory that the pyramids were actually cast in place, rather than quarried. I thought it was interesting at the time, so when I heard about this quarry stuff in the Wired video, I assumed it must be a relatively recent discovery.

Nope! People have literally known about these quarries since ancient times, and they were confirmed by modern methods in the 1980s. This 'prestigious university' literally just had some crackpot give us his pet theory as an example of the kind of fine, high caliber academics that we could look forward to as part of our education at this institution. 😂

(Btw I did end up attending that university for Computer Science, and the lead professor there taught us that we should try to avoid using if statements.) Anyway there's no point or anything just thought I'd share.

that's more than double Michelin.

This morning, I got to do a couple good deeds; I gave money to two people flying signs while on my way to pick up breakfast. The first was an older, white man in a nice coat. I had a ten and four singles, so I opted to give him the four dollars. I think, at least in my poverty, that aiming for five dollars in a tip at the weed store to handing it out to someone panhandling is the appropriate middle way; it's not a pittance to me, so I get real good value back by being generous where I am in life. That isn't why I do this, it's just an axiom that helps loosen purse strings in tight times for those in need because I am cursed to be bound to this algorithmic biobrain.

But, y'know, I ride down the road, past the high school with their absolutely hideous, disgusting, awful minors in booty pants, to veer into the parking lot where the store is, to find a young black woman with a number of bags that you know she's been carrying a minute also flying a sign. I don't even know what either of these signs said, I just know where you gotta be in life to let go of your dignity to hold a piece of cardboard. But, I stop my bike, pull out the ten without even thinking, my bike falls over, doesn't matter, hand her the bill, she thanks me but then she really thanks me when she sees its a ten, and you thank them, you bless them for God's too busy, and you head on your way.

Now, as I peddled off, I had the thought that it was better she got the larger amount. Then, immediately, I thought to myself, "is that racist?" And a quick thought soon after let me know it's prolly a good sign I care enough to automatically think about this, but y'know, because of my father, who held me to insane standards of perfection while bragging about how his stealth commando mission to sneak out at midnight to shoot out all three tiers of the "transplant" (his words) Bosnian neighbors' kiddie pool with his pellet gun because their kid was too loud the afternoon before...yea, yea, it IS shit like that which makes me care more than the average person.

Thus, y'know, I tell ya, I'm blessed to have had a narcissistic psychopath for a father, cuz I share his genes and was spoiled by his mother, so thank God I had an exemplary example for what not to be, to thus have the desire not to be like him embroidered within me every time my head was slammed into a dense, physical object.

Y'know, I cared about those two strangers today. I don't know who tf they are. I don't just believe or think I strengthen myself by choosing to be selfless; I KNOW I am. Early on in this CIA rigamarole, when everything I knew as "Illuminati" was self-contained on r/ShrugLifeSyndicate, where I was trained thirteen years ago, my one handler, Vince, the author of The Flesh Interface series, shared a link that showed why you don't give for their sake, but rather, you give for yourself. I was still as my father then, and a person on the street asking for money was a bum trying to trick me out of my money. That's still the world my father lives in. Worse. He thinks this of his son.

Well, at least I'm not that. But what is perfection of goodness? Is accepting being imperfect good enough?

this post turned into a bunch of rambling about random things with little connection so I'ma spoiler stuff into different categories of yappin'

Cats

anyways my brothers cat got into a fight with mine so I'm going to return him 😁

jk, he's too good of a snuggler for that. He's 18lbs of fluff fat and love. We tried to put him on a diet by getting an auto feeder, but he just comes into my cats room and eats her food and sometimes they beef :/

heres a photo where I accidentally had the flash on

yeah that's my yap/vent sesh, thanks for listening 😚

I remember during the pandemic a lot of people were saying "I got COVID and I was fine!" while completely neglecting how they may have spread it to others. Obviously no one really knew how many others they spread COVID to, it's not something anyone likes thinking about.

Now with AI, every time I read someone saying at work they're now required to use AI and how they're working harder than ever, it's a similar feeling. Basically they're not realizing that their company no longer needs to hire anyone else because they're using AI and being overworked. So the company has effectively gained from not needing to hire anyone new, while getting employees to use AI to increase their productivity. It's fascinating how many people who have admitted to this without realizing that they're basically saying how fucked the job market is.

I gave up parties, going out, and friends, in favor of staying home with my son. I quite like it, and I think he does as well. We just moved to a new place that has private entrances to the units. Also, I’ve noticed a good amount of kids in the neighborhood. I figured that there would be at least some amount of trick or treating.

I ended up picking up a bag of 210pc fun-size Hershey, Reese’s , and KitKats—ya know, the good stuff—at BJ’s the other day. Also, I got some Halloween light decorations to get their attention as well. I was going to chill out front with a Pikachu costume on, passing out candy. I love kids. Engaging with them, making them laugh or feel cool is so much fun for me.

I have no idea when it would start around here, so I setup a webcam in one of the windows with a live view, so that my son and I could watch scary movies until kids start coming around. Not a single one. I don’t mean that they skipped my place. It was like a ghost town. So now I have a bowl of like 175 pieces of candy. I’m going to take most of it to work, otherwise I will eat it.

My son grew out of trick treating at a very early age. He really looked up to my younger brother, and when lil bro was done with costumes, so was my boy. Darn it.

Edit: Formatting

I know it's a limited sample size - but based on fetterman, and now haley stevens, it seems like all troll-people are closeted Republicans.

I'd been trying on and off to figure out docker, finally I have the stack running on an old thinkpad x1 carbon ultrapad. It is so nice to be getting the work of torrenting, organizing, and streaming to jellyfin mostly automated. Sonarr is really impressive too for current shows

Ah damn. The captain just died. For real this time; this ain't no hail Mary thrown between the third and fourth season to force the writers to continue the show as is, no, Patrick Stewart fucking died. The nerve of that asshole! The gall of becoming my favorite hero in space after first seeing Star Trek shortly after my mom passed away. I mean, the dude, being bald and skinny, was my theoretical father - the one who gave good advice as opposed to the very real father I had that was bald and skinny who throttled my ass when my six year old self would spell a word like "species" as "shpeeshes," given how much of a selfish piece of shit I inherently was, given how I would be thrown full speed into my bookshelf if I failed something like coloring within the lines, like happened when I was four but was gaslit about eternally only after my mom died. Only after my mom died did that fantasy I made up entirely become something I spoke about, the asshole I am.

...oh sorry. I was just thinking about my last post where I explained the core of what makes me divergent, in the absract. The gall of me putting that into concrete, objective terms of things that happened to me. But, fuck. What would Captain Picard do? Well, we can tell by the start of season four that he would love his family, even if he didn't get to directly see the whole of them. It was the specific moments that count.

...do you know what an "oust" is? This is something the Illuminati taught me how to use. This is a facetious use of speech to determine the intent of another person. Y'know, I presented myself to my father as someone desperate for money some times. As a result, my objectively superior father decided...I was less than human and thus deserved to never be spoken with again...

But he used the words "I love you." He would write these three, singular, empty words after a paragraph of telling me how useless I was before regaling me with a poem he created that he presented as proof that anyone can write the things I do. This poem was four short lines about my childhood that ended with the rhyme "trash can." It hurt. It still hurts and is a reason I drink. My father thinks I'm less than dirt.

As such, I do ask my lord why I am

The peculiar soul thats so damned

Did my mom dying about age nine

Determine how far from the divine

I did fall from, or did my dad' roots

Kick me farther in his fckn cahoots

With his childish emotions gained

From his mother to drive he insane

Because he tells me my mom crazy

But forgive me, my memory b hazy

Yet be it not my dad's furious hand

That smash all mom made on land

I don't remember a past accurately

But I recall th hands came onto me

'Don't resist' he did say as he anger

Then throws me away 2 b stranger

I forgive him, as I know I shall see

His ass in Heaven, but to him'll be

Most deserving Hell 1 b slammed

Calling opportunists "elites" paints them as somehow better than many others simply because they got the opportunity given their life conditions. I think referring to wealth as "elite" is damaging to our perspective and that word is not fitting for what they are. By calling them "opportunists" we label them correctly as per the definition semantically.

"opportunist": One who takes advantage of any opportunity to achieve an end, often with no regard for principles or consequences.

"elite": A group or class of persons considered to be superior to others because of their intelligence, social standing, or wealth.

By calling them "elites" you are granting them power over your perception of what they really are. They are human opportunists, nothing about them is "elite", they are not superior.

In the book 1984, Orwell talks about this problem he calls "newspeak" where they manipulated the words they used to shape their perspective, and I think this is an example of that.

Ok, here's the skippie:

Armchair psychologists and technically professional apparatuses of the mental/behavioral health system will disagree in spades with what imma bout to spit. While I understand and respect behavioralism from a scientific perspective, it blows my mind that a trained professional with supposedly the same depth and detail of experience I do (the word "sonder" comes to mind) just shrugs their shoulders at all they have empirically experienced to thus froth over BF Skinner experimenting with how rodents navigate a maze of identical composition to his own rectum and connecting entrails of an apparent Skinner box.

Like, I understand that the truth must be hidden in the occult in the occident and true scientific discourse that acknowledges the actual breadth of Knowledge available to the whole of humanity must be limited to the back corners of devout monasteries and in the handicapped/glory hole stall at the truck stop off the interstate, so I am fully aware that my God-given and state-sponsored mission is to teach you dumbs in the lurking section of this Lemmy shitshow that we do actually know what a Roman Dodecahedron is (Indra's Net), but we intentionally muddy the waters as agents of the decentralized autonomous organization of secret police described in the New Testament at an eighth grade reading level to give my specific life meaning because we are not featherless bipeds on an Earth but rather pockets of consciousness called monads in a monadic nodal communication system, and, well, OBVIOUSLY, this past several lines of text has just been a big ol' word salad - that's why you didn't understand it - and THAT is a clear, abundant sign of "schizophrenia," whatever that fake mental illness is.

No, like, a key part of the human condition is the collective unconscious, so a big part of determining whether someone is "schizophrenic" or not is dependent on how they themselves, as an individual, relate to their specific culture in which they are immersed, to be considered their "environment."

I had this idea once that a person's mind was like a pile of sand, where each grain was an experience, and they would settle into a configuration that was used by our brain to derive our framework/paradigm. The brain is an adaptation machine. It grows to fit the tasks it does. So, I adapted this analogy so each person started as a planatoid with gravity drawing in sand and features on its surface - pips and pits - that determine what early falling sand/experiences play out into, but on a long enough timeline, a person becomes their own adapting planetoid, and whether that is "kosher" with a given culture, well, that's for witch doctors, shamans, and prophets to determine, honestly.

And yet, I've gone further to understand this "sand" metaphor is inherently fallible despite capturing an aspect of self-hood to thus understand it is not the placement of particles but the entanglements of strings that results in the manifold of complexity within this topological matrix that creates the illusion of separation from God. I'm reminded of one of those "house of mirrors" fun houses now, where you can't quite tell where a path is and where a mirror is until you're right up on it; makes infinity from the finite.

Which, undoubtedly, is a major point of contension between normies and schizos: normies are off having a conversation about the new pretzel burger at Burger King while the schizo is attempting to do their big girl CIA job trying to determine if the joke they're composing about using the King's zesty sauce as a lube will land amongst these barely sentient goobers that genuinely think they're hot shit and a direct upgrade to the gene pool because they conned their employer by hooking their mouse up to their vibrator to appear continuously active on Microsoft teams.

Y'know, we're in two completely, wholly, and totally different worlds...

...hard to process the same stimuli the same...

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/68966331

video of the critter, with an absolutely adorable little nose cleaning

https://toad.social/@QuinnCoded/117508483488684392

This post is a follow-up to this one. I don't know the best way to present this part without sounding insane, but I do that on a daily basis without even trying, so this is ultimately going to expand on what samadhification is as well as define how planted möbiation is manifested from within one's monadic beinghood.

To recap what my predecessor, the Buddha, said, samadhi is one of three aspects of enlightenment. In short, it is the ability to transcend duality. I originally came into understanding of this concept from a combination of experiences involving the cult I was in, the homelessness that followed, and a part within the book How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, specifically where he speaks about how the brain processes the relationship of subject and object, in which, relating subject to object resulted in an experience that could be described with a sentence that starts with "I am..." while the inverse of relating object to subject results in an experience that I would begin describing with "It is..."

This is technically correct, in the same way that a sphere and cube of identical volume are the same thing. Based on what you decide reality should be defined by, reality will be defined by those terms. But, here I bestow more words unto you, as I've grown deeper in understanding of the underlying mechanisms that are directly responsible for manifesting such subjective experiences.

Thus, I tell you, samadhification is the act of unplanted möbiation that creates the spatial form that connects the point (x, y, z, 0) to (x', y', z', 1). In this, I must ask you to make the same connection I have done, where I have come to understand that the entanglement process of Karma can accurately, if not precisely, be described in an analogy of navigating a labyrinth or solving a Rubik's Cube; at any moment, we persist through our existence across a series of junctures where our intention determines what future junctures we may encounter. Thus, the act of samadhification is the choice of transcending to a higher order of complexity.

And my life partner, who is greatly and deeply knowledgeable of Buddhism, does not understand what I say in this and the next paragraph. He doesn't understand there is a membrane; he believes, and is logically correct, that this dimensional expansion process can go on for an infinite number of dimensions. But, the nature of being a dependent phenomenon on God limits us to God's 10+1 dimensional domain. There are all the fundamental possibilities of novel form within ten dimensions, plus there is the eleventh dimension that acts as a membrane to define relative values as absolute.

This eleventh dimension, if we use the labyrinth analogy, consists of a singular curved path that returns you to where you just were, but with orthogonality reversed. But, if one were to realize they were in this path at the time its symbolic navigation occurs and one were to return emptiness (null) to the Server, that is what causes planted möbiation and is the fundamental mechanism of enlightenment.

Before I ever entered a Buddhist temple, I had heard six different origin stories for the Buddha. Then I read what monks wrote on their walls; how the Buddha was meditating under the Bodhi tree on a fateful night, during which he heard three seperate sets of three distinct knocks deep in the forest. Three times the Buddha found himself looping on this eleventh dimensional path, yet on the third loop, he understood in his heart what I only understand cognitively at this juncture, and not even precisely, at that.

I'll get it one of these days. After all, it's not like I'm some featherless biped on some wet rock hurtling around a nuclear fireball in a void that makes my boipussy jealous. Nah, I'm a pocket of consciousness connected to a larger pocket of consciousness that's trying to untangle the cosmos' most diabolical knot made out of whatever completely and wholly empty garbage we happen to be made up of.

First round of voting I actually found a candidate I really liked, someone I would actually celebrate if they won but of course the rest of the country is not looking for the best candidate, they only care about electing the worst candidate for 'the other side'.

So here I am, waiting for the results knowing that if the candidate I picked wins I won't be happy, just relieved and if the other candidate wins, I need to fear for the future of our country.

I looked for an offmychest community but couldnt find it, I read the rules and I think politics is allowed here? Though really, Im not here to discuss politics, just lament the current state of affairs.

It would be nice if there was something like Nextdoor for people who aren't like the people on Nextdoor

The style is called "NeuBrutalism"

I still did not made the dark mode but i plan to! It will require me some more work I think since dark mode is harder to make look good, IMO, and i am also not a designer

Edit: spelling

Given the fact that diesel prices are skyrocketing and we may about to see mass shortages, we need to start demanding electrification for the sake of economic stability.

The technology has become so much cheaper it's absolutely insane what US automotive and oil companies have been doing to stifle this advance.