Unrelated, but near my gym there is an actual Radon St. I wonder if people who live there have trouble selling their houses. I suspect it may actually be a positive, as this is a Philadelphia suburb where you occasionally see the confederate flag flying, so the brain damage is already widespread.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    Semi-related: when I lived in Florida, a store opened up in a strip mall near me that sold nothing but Super-Whippers, $1 plastic whisks. They were never open and they were just 200 feet from three dollar stores and a Publix, all of which sold plastic whisks. I suspect it may have been a money laundering front, but then it's hard to imagine money-launderers putting that little effort into the task.

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  • [–] 8 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    individual consumer packages may not bear this labeling, as retail stores may have applied their own stickers with pricing and safe handling instructions

    The recalled meat could still have ended up in packages for consumers. What they're saying is that you can't know since retail stores would have cut up this meat and repackaged it.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    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.

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