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?"

I was using my mom's computer the other day and I couldn't figure out why I wasn't seeing any ads on her browser. Then I remembered that I had installed uBlock origin for her. I love when past me does current me a solid. I've also told her that she can go on Faceborg if she wants but I will not help her with it in any way (I can't since I haven't been on it since 2008). She tells people I "refuse to let her use it" which is not strictly accurate but I feel pride anyway when she says that.

My brother and sister-in-law were considering renting a house in that price range. The reason is that they were sending their two kids (1st and 3rd grade) to a private school with a $30K (each!) tuition, so paying around $4K per month for a house in a good school district would have actually saved them money. Eventually they came to their senses and just bought a house in a good school district instead.