This is not a typical home or office printer, very specialized.

Got me thinking on this meme.

🤌🏻 Perfection!

I want to know how that was done to make the edges look natural.

Maybe I don’t notice because I’m in the deepest South. Trees don’t dump all at once, it’s a gradual thing from fall through spring. All I ever see is landscapers doing a quick blow down after mowing.

Also, we’re not so much into appearances down here, not like other places I’ve lived. Your yard doesn’t have to be perfect.

SOAP calls

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Some might be surprised how many systems are still running on AS400s. IBM still makes and maintains IBMi, the modern iteration. My last company wrote our flagship product for these machines, all green screen. Our customers would sometimes move to our GUI product and jump right back to the prompt menus. Hey, if you gotta move fast and have a bulletproof system, text menus are the only way to fly!

By my god, the skill set for running and programming those beasts touches on almost nothing I’ve learned in 30+ years of IT work. Wish I had got experience in that part of the company, seen some solid job posts for that sorta tech.

That idea often comes up in these discussions and I’ve never really had an argument against. Best I got is that parts of that software may have moved to more modern stuff that was purchased by another company. But that’s a damned thin excuse not to implement this.

People keep saying to keep these XP machines off the internet. I seriously doubt there’s much threat, especially for even older OS’s like 98 and 95. It’s the very devil just trying to browse with them, nothing much out there is going to be able to attack them. Security through obscurity indeed!

In any case, we’re no longer in the Wild West days when people had machines hooked directly to the internet and a firewall was a third-party addon. LOL, ZoneAlarm anyone!

We all have a basic firewall built into our routers so unless you deliberately expose services you’re fairly bulletproof to scanners. I remember scanning for Win2000 machines in blocks of IPs, long after it was defunct. Plenty were out there!

I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I’ve only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it’s soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!

LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can’t do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.

It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don’t remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.

So, again, what sort of space do you live in where this is annoyance? I’m only aware of leaf blowers when I’m driving and a lawn service is blowing.

Who’s complaining is my question. People in nice hoods with the neighbors going nuts? Apartment complexes? Is this an autumn thing where leaves fall everywhere?

I’m always taken aback by the hate. Where and how do you guys live that this is an issue?! Let alone a major annoyance?! I can scarcely imagine noticing leaf blower noise. It’s no worse than gas mowers and those are everywhere (or used to be), and go for far longer. Is this just a circle-jerk complaint kinda thing?

I know everyone around here thinks they’re an ADHD, autistic, OCD mess, but can no one tune out background noise? (No, you’re not special, more likely an normal adult human with modern life issues.) If anything it should be old people bitching as hearing discretion gets more difficult in middle-age+.

The homeless guy that lives behind our Lowe’s probably gets annoyed at the 9PM blowing, but that’s a 20-30 minute thing, and not too late. (Always felt a bit bad when I closed.) I pick every tiny bit of plastic out though. Not in my waterways!

A bit snarky, I know, but those were serious questions.

And BTW, organic refuse gets blown in the street because passing vehicles reduce it to dust very quickly. All organic, no harm no foul in my book. Also, it’s hellacious to corral that stuff for sweeping, no point.

EDIT: This post reminded me I need a new battery blower. And if you think 5-minutes of noise while I blow out my truck bed and driveway is too much, I don’t know what to tell you.

None of the explanations matter now, too late. “White genocide” is now a thing in SA. The term is in people’s heads. Mission accomplished.

Imma need a source on that. Bottom 50% of who?

So many use cases! I’m giving an old NUC to a kid at work who’s learning Linux. Jesus, the kid bought a copy of Linux from “the best/most-famous hacker in the world!”. We had a come-to-Jesus talk about that horseshit.

No lie. We play this game every 7 years or so. I was training on a Win10 machine at work yesterday. Think they’re updating that? Nah. Hell, it probably could take an 11 upgrade and they haven’t bothered. Why? It’s a locked down machine. And if IT don’t care, home users certainly won’t.

Who you callin’ an aglet, pal?

If they’re the sort of users who find such hoops restrictive, do you really want them installing shit willy-nilly?

I work at Lowe’s and am stunned at what people buy there. In the garden area, why would you count on Lowe’s to have sod?! Go to a fucking sod place if you want more than a few pieces. People pay stunning amounts of money for bags of various rocks when they can go down the road and pay 1/4 that at, guess what, the fucking rock place.

We’re a big box store for FFS. We’re not the best or cheapest at anything, we just carry it all.

This still has me giggling after 3 months.

https://imgur.com/LVwmLYH

ChatGPT:

You’re absolutely right to be concerned — this is a real and growing problem. We’re not just dealing with misinformation anymore; we’re dealing with the weaponization of information systems themselves. Bad actors leveraging AI to flood conversations with plausible-sounding nonsense don’t just muddy the waters — they actively erode public trust in expertise, evidence, and even the concept of shared reality.

The Trump-era hostility to science and the manipulation or deletion of research data was a wake-up call. Combine that with AI tools capable of producing endless streams of polished but deceptive content, and you’ve got a serious threat to how people form beliefs.

It’s not just about arguing with trolls — it’s about the long-term impact on institutions, education, and civic discourse. If knowledge can be drowned in noise, or replaced with convincing lies, then we’re facing an epistemic crisis. The solution has to be multi-pronged: better media literacy, transparency in how AI systems are trained and used, stronger platforms with actual accountability, and a reassertion of the value of human expertise and peer review.

This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s a call to action — because if we care about truth, we can’t afford to ignore the systems being built to undermine it.