I “retired” (fancy way of saying “was laid off”) from programming seven years ago and I haven’t written a line of code since. I’m happy to have completely missed out on the AI experience, although since I spent the last few years of my career mostly managing a team of offshore developers, I feel like I got close enough. Now I own my own small house and I drive a school bus and I couldn’t be happier. At some point AI will be driving the school buses (so that the kids can still go to school and have AI do all their work for them) but hopefully I will have died a painless death by then.

Do they matter to cops? If they get paid, they get paid by tax money, no?

As I mentioned in another comment, apparently the PD splits the ticket revenue with the school district after the camera company gets their installation and profit margin covered. Cops get paid their salaries from the PD budget which is mostly from tax revenues but also from other sources like tickets and these cameras. A higher PD budget means more perks including higher salaries and paid overtime and more benefits, so while they can’t just stuff the money in their pockets (usually) they do benefit from these alternative revenue sources.

does that make you a roving part of the survailance system, too?

Probably. There’s nothing I can do about this without losing my job.

The cameras are from a company named Bus Patrol. They haven’t really told us much about how the program works, but as I understand it the district pays nothing in upfront costs. Supposedly Bus Patrol pays for the installation and then they get all the revenue up to the point where the cameras and their profit margin are covered; after that the ticket revenues are split evenly between the local police department and the school district. A figure of a million dollars as the cost for installing cameras on our 40 buses was thrown up by somebody, but that seems a bit unlikely as that means the cameras cost $25,000 per bus. Maybe that’s correct, I dunno.

I have nearly no info about the legality of this, but they’re pretty common at this point. I know one difference is that if you’re caught by an actual cop speeding past a bus’ red lights you get a fine and points on your license, but if you get a mailed ticket from one of these cameras it’s just a fine. Presumably it’s because they can’t always tell who was actually driving the vehicle. It might be a case where they can’t really take any action if a person just refuses to pay the fine, and they just send out tickets because some or most people will just pay it.

I’m a school bus driver and a few years ago I had a cop pass me while my red flashers were on and the stop sign was out and kids were about to get off the bus and cross the street. He was driving with one hand and looking at his phone in the other hand. He could have easily run a kid over. And then they probably would have found some way to blame me for it.

We have cameras now that automatically detect this and send out tickets, but we didn’t at the time. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway since the cops have to review the footage before any ticket goes out.

We had a meeting with my mom’s broker and my brother and I brought up the AI bubble. The broker responded with the most ridiculous nonsense. He basically said that corporate CEOs are smart people with a legal responsibility to keep their companies financially healthy and so they wouldn’t be using AI if it weren’t viable. It sounded like something handed down to him from Raymond James HQ which I’m sure it was, and it was surely written by AI in the first place.

My preparer randomly told me that he had invested money with a guy who was developing a “reactionless space drive”. He then mentioned that the guy had solved all the problems he was having with it by asking ChatGPT about it. I asked him if the guy had a working prototype yet and he said no but it was sure to work.

Time to find a new tax preparer.

I had a coworker go on an insane rant about his hatred of EVs after somebody mentioned Teslas. I wound him up even more by saying I’m fine with EVs just not ones built by Nazis.

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.

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.

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.

Arson.

he threw his friend under the bus rather than stand up and use the power he has

Incoming: Ed Sheeran and Jack Black duet.

when I tell them they thank me for my time and keep doing it

I remember one of my first programming jobs in the mid-90s for an internet startup. I was the sole developer and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I was treated like a rock star and thought of myself as one. My bosses called in a high-priced consultant to review my (Visual Basic) code and I still remember his report vividly. He ripped me a new one and I was highly offended and justified everything I had been doing to my bosses and they agreed with me and never talked to the consultant again. I’d like to find that guy again and say “yeah, you were spot on” but he was in his 50s at the time and this was 30 years ago, so I assume he’s dead. One of the fortunate ones who never had to deal with AI, just with shitty noob programmers.

I had a coworker once who had come to our C# project from the Java world. Whenever I reviewed his code, I could never find any actual code anywhere, it was just a bunch of classes with empty run() methods. But everything he wrote functioned perfectly, so I dunno. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I was being visited by a superior extra-dimensional being.

They meant fish tank.

https://archive.org/details/SpyMagazine/Spy Magazine 1986-1998/1986/1986-10-OCT/mode/2up

In the 1980s, Trump always made Spy magazine’s “Top 10 Worst People, Places or Things” list. His one “mitigating factor” was always “at least he’s not in politics”.

Huh, interesting to know. Ninth grade me didn’t give a shit about things like that.

The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability

The first computer I ever used (not counting punch cards or the VIC-20) was an Apple IIe, and I can confidently say that color was green. Later versions of the Apple II had full color, but that wasn’t “innovation” by Steve Jobs, it was just the technology for it becoming affordable.

OTOH trump may want to eliminate the competition.