jkestner

You mean, unpaid labor!

I did the books for my mom's business through high school, which prevented me from being a complete disaster as an adult.

Not super low. It starts to make sense around 1000 units. I’ve gotten runs of 2500 done domestically. But it is pretty hard to find domestic injection molders for consumer work - they will give you an FU quote at best because they cater to high volumes and industrial customers.

And they’ll make the molds in China anyway. Chinese molders are hungry — they will work with low volumes and offer a bunch of integrated services. But if you don’t know what you’re doing you will end up with bad parts over schedule.

Easiest way to get started is to use ProtoLabs. They charge lower prices on molds in exchange for higher part cost, are way faster than China, and have way better customer service.

Anything can be a monopoly or not, depending on how you define the market.

Yes. Someone's gotta create new grist for the LLMs so they don't Habsburg themselves.

Now, I thought that going to a subscription model would give them the resources/motivation they needed to improve things regularly, and let us customers pay for just what we need. You're telling me the benefits only went one way?

I started with PS2.5. I held onto CS5 until I found Affinity.

When you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.

If it bleeds, it leads. That is, our media has hyped up violence in society as it’s become more rare, and politicians use it to scare people into thinking we need to go back to the good old days.

Like Europe, the US has a pastiche of laws across states and municipalities, and varying levels of enforcement. My state has laws protecting free-range children.

You’re probably right that only in the US do people freak out over unaccompanied kids, but I wouldn’t say that’s true of most of the country.

I don’t think you can profile this as American. Are they conservative suburbanites? My kid walks to/from school longer than that. Many kids take public transit in big cities. Rural kids may ride a motorbike much further.

My new venture-backed social network is called Wormtongue, no reason.

Not too shocking. Many people’s jobs here require that they pretend that they’re not coding for fascism.

And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.

Privacy laws now.

The Bezos investment gives me pause too. But the claim that there’s no telemetry is exciting: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric...

New privacy legislation is about 20 years overdue. Between age verification, privately owned national camera networks, and above all else, data brokers, citizens need to reassert their right to anonymity.

In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.

I guess, but I’d just say it’s moved to other distribution models because who reads newspapers now? Mostly people who want to read Family Circus reruns (okay, that’s uncharitable).

I can’t speak to other countries, but we have a very healthy ecosystem in webcomics. I back several on Patron, buy the compilations of others on Kickstarter, and otherwise grab new issues at my local comic book store or library.

Don't forget that Tesla bought SolarCity to bail out Musk's cousins. I need a chart of all his mergers.

Dumb objects are not totally niche. No one actually likes smarts that impede the core function. The Slate truck strips a lot of this out.

The trick with phones, since the smarts are a core function, is not making them dumb, but more akin to a PC. Less convenience served on a platter, more freedom to develop and install just what you want without compromising on UX. The N95 and other Symbian phones did this for me.

I don’t want the rat race of modern smartphones. I want an appliance.

And you could do a lot in it with Python. I wrote scripts to talk with Bluetooth gadgets I built.

Tell you what though, I would jump on a modern N95. I only really want a basic phone with a good camera, and sure, Python. Only need LTE and a thinner form factor.

I'm thankful I live in one of the several states with "free range" laws to protect parents from this. https://letgrow.org/states/

The valuation is actually mostly about AI. Satellites, like electric cars, don’t have quite the growth story (and I do mean “story”).

https://bsky.app/profile/patigallardo.bsky.social/post/3mnhc...

Something something about metrics ceasing to be a good measure. Texas has draconian measures for districts containing a failing school, even as they redistribute the majority of funding from cities to rural districts. No surprise the schools want to pass by any means.

I'm ramming my head against a wall in sympathy.

Interesting that the boss immediately asked the same question. So they're aware that AI gives nondeterministic answers and yet still use it.

I had to start getting colonoscopies ahead of schedule because my dad never did, until it was too late. He was scared of doctors after he associated them with family members' unpleasant deaths.

Read the safety statistics and let it override the anecdotes. Colon cancer is easy to prevent and a horrible way to die.

Might try that this time. OTOH, I get the greatest nap of my life shaking off the sedative (get the lighter, cheaper option like Versed instead of anesthesiologist-administered propofol) and my spouse makes me a milkshake.

And Lake Michigan, as it’s connected to international water. Suppose next they’ll claim all rivers as borders.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jailed-o...

If Shot Spotter is bad at merely identifying the source of a gunshot, I'm not going to trust our security tech bros to cut through all the environmental noise and provide trustworthy identification among 10,000 different Teslas.

I'm guessing license plate takes precedence over all those things. On the other hand, Flock hasn't shown any particular competence, and is happy to flag a bunch of false positives (look at all those criminals!).