I've recently started having fast food occasionally after not touching it since before COVID. It really is fucking terrible and absurdly expensive. Except Taco Bell, which is also fucking terrible but at least it's relatively cheap still.

The US was founded on action

Yes, the action of losing and running away, repeated until the enemy got tired of beating and chasing us.

I actually suspect they're all handjob stores but I dunno.

Your work is beneficial

In my 25 year career as a programmer, I'd estimate that at least 75% of the software that I worked on never actually got used by anyone. It's incredibly depressing to think about. And that's not even counting the fact that I probably spent more than 50% of my time doing non-programming tasks like attending meetings and such shit.

I retired as a programmer (fancy way of saying "got laid off by giant corporation") a few years ago and randomly bought a used school bus to convert to a motorhome. I got so much more satisfaction out of doing that than out of any work project I ever did, and even learned to weld and fabricate in the process. Also very happy that I never had to deal with the AI "revolution". Managing a team of offshore developers got me as close to that shit as I ever want to get.

I just hate the feeling of chatting with something that is designed to sound human

My dad died at home in hospice last fall, and when I called the funeral home that we had selected to handle his cremation to come pick up his body, the answering service was AI. I could tell because of the weird artificial background noises, the strange accent that wasn't from any language on earth, and the fact that when it read back my father's name for spelling confirmation it said "Bob common name B O B Smith common name S M I T H?". One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't just hang up immediately and go with a different funeral home.

For extra fun, when we met with the owner of the funeral home later he kept cracking jokes. And he didn't deliver the urn until the night before my father's interment ceremony, after I had been frantically calling him about it the whole week before. LPT: don't go with a funeral home whose owner shares a name with a character from The Sopranos.

Based on Hollywood's current casting priorities, it would have to be a Subaru.

And Marty would have to be played by Zendaya. With Pedro Pascal as Doc.

Not quite the same timeframe, but that clip of the surviving members of The Doors listening to Skrillex is one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen.

I have a wall oven that's a couple months old and it preheats very rapidly. Unfortunately, it seems to achieve this by just lying about what temperature it's at. It's consistently 50°F to 75°F below the set temperature, as measured by a separate oven thermometer. The manufacturer anticipated this potential problem by including a boldface section in the manual saying not to use oven thermometers because they're "wildly inaccurate". Oh the irony of an electric oven using gaslighting.

For bonus points, even when the oven reaches the set temperature (which I now set higher than what I theoretically need) it doesn't bother to maintain that temperature, so I have to frequently turn the oven off and then back on again just to cook something properly. Once again ironically, this was the reason I replaced the old oven. Fortunately it was only $2500.

If employers had to pay employees for their commute time, that would be the end of RTO.

Maybe. I still don't understand the economics of making people come in to work when the companies have to pay rent on the spaces where employees work.

"Use OpenAI to maintain an ongoing conversation with your elders so you don't have to" would be more honest.

I would believe something like "hey AI, which of the massage parlors near me are really handjob stores?"