Elon Musk seems like a genius up until he starts talking about something you’re familiar with

He seems like a moron even when he's talking about things I know nothing about. There's a video on youtube of him giving a tour of SpaceX's museum of past rockets that they've launched, and he's talking about how they've reduced the "fiddly bits" on the outside of the rockets over the years.

I'm a retired programmer but I'm too young for Medicare, so I drive a school bus mainly because we get excellent health insurance as a benefit. Otherwise I'd be paying over a thousand a month for a shitty policy with something like a $7000 deductible and my limited finances couldn't handle that. Hopefully I can make it onto Medicare before my school district privatizes the transportation department or replaces it with AI-driven buses. Also hopefully Medicare stays around.

It's so weird that terrorism mainly strengthens authoritarian regimes rather than bringing them down. But of course there's no reason at all to suspect that's their real goal.

I lived in Cleveland at the time. They evacuated Terminal Tower (the tallest skyscraper in Cleveland) in case the terrorists got so fucking far down the target list that they had to attack Cleveland.

In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients' businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software -- they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.

you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead

AI discovers compression algorithms.

I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I'm 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I'll do after I'm replaced with AI I don't know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I'm more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.

I'm a school bus driver and drug testing is a DOT mandatory requirement. Some of the districts around me have a reputation for making sure the "random" tests are only give to the drivers they know will pass, so a driver just has to keep clean long enough to pass the initial screening.

I was a programmer for 25 years and never had a drug test in that time. No employer ever even contemplated doing it. In general, programming high or drunk isn't going to hurt anybody, but I did once have a colleague accidentally shoot a 125 mph knuckleball a foot over a kid's head. He wasn't coding high as far as I know, but he was coding stupid, which is a lot worse.

I've been tested only twice in my life (I'm nearly 60), once while in college for an engineering internship at IBM and once five years ago when I started driving a school bus. I actually failed the IBM drug test (for marijuana) but they just told me to "clean up my act" and gave me the intership anyway. I'm kind of OK with drug testing school bus drivers only because there's not really any way of testing whether or not a driver is currently high. On the other hand, they don't regularly test drivers for alcohol and it's more common than most parents would want to know for drivers to be drunk.

the only thing I noticed was the return of dreams

Same thing happened to me. I quit wake-and-baking about five and a half years ago because I felt it had just taken over too much of my life. Shortly afterward I became a school bus driver, which requires an initial drug screening and then you're subject to random tests thereafter. I'm a little pissed that I've never been selected for the random test, which means I could have been happily puffing away for the last five years.

The dreams are insanely weird and happen every time I sleep, even just a short nap. Most of the dreams are about me messing up driving a school bus and losing my job; one dream was me driving through high school hallways with kids scattering in all directions while thinking I really shouldn't be doing this. I never dreamed at all when I was smoking.

A weave is attached to remnants of real hair. There's no fucking way there's any real hair coming out of that head unless it's his eyebrows, ears or nose.