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This is written like a number 3 child. ;-)

I have two, both adults now. The first one, if she woke up early and I was still asleep, would politely come over and say that she was hungry.

The second one, though, she was a scavenger. I woke up to her crunching on something. She was eating pistachios -- shell and all!

With the first kid you sterilize everything. After that I guess you learn how much dirt they put in their mouths and don't bother.

Yeah, I felt that someone had to speak up about the health of the lawn.

I have a feeling that humanoid robots will have other, more intimate, tasks first. Our most primal drives seem to drive the advancement of technology.

Also, mowing the lawn on a very hot day is pretty bad for the grass.

Do you feel the same way about cloning a GitHub repo and building it? It, too, achieved a result.

The track saw and router, imo, are existing libraries.

Oh, sure, I can make things with it. But I have an extraordinarily hard time saying that I made something.

It feels like it cheapens the whole thing. Maybe I'm just old, because I remember people saying the same thing about code completion in Visual Studio back in the late 90s.

This is so much more than code completion, though.

It's making things less fun, for me at least.

Man, do I feel this, but my situation is a little different in that we are similar ages but my kids are (nearly) all adults. I've put enough in 529s that both of them will be able to graduate without any debt, something that I feel will give them a huge advantage in life.

I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.

I regret not building the PC when I was looking at it. It's not a money thing, at the end of the day, but I can't bring myself to do it.

I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time.

My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)

It penetrates walls so much better than 5GHz. If I lived closer to my neighbors I would agree with you.

Plus I still have some esp8266-based widgets that I made which only operate on 2.4GHz.

I've been running Unifi since ~2014 and it's been rock solid. I forget that they are there most of the time.

The only headache has been setting up a Canon printer -- it doesn't know what fast roaming is and won't prompt for a password if it's enabled. You must disable that first, connect the printer, and then turn it back on.

I find it funny that the one device in my household which will not roam between APs is the Nintendo Switch.

I help my neighbors out a few days a week, and walk their kids down to the bus stop and make sure that they get off to school okay. There's a bunch of kids at the bus stop, and I know them all pretty well by this point.

The one little girl is black and has very tightly curled hair. Every few weeks she has it done up differently, with different colored beads, etc. I make sure to pay attention to when it changes so that I can tell her that it looks amazing, and she gets a huge smile on her face every time. It's often the highlight of my morning, and I truly hope that she heads off to school with more spring in her step.

Adults aren't much different -- they also like to receive compliments. Give out compliments as you see fit and soon you'll have something in common to talk about.

.. and it's okay to be the one to start a conversation.

You're not going to make friends by studying. Hard pill to swallow, but you have to make an effort to talk to people and get to know them. Go out to lunch with them.

If you're eating alone at your desk, you are signaling that you wish to be left alone.

First of all, I 100% agree with you. With that in mind, do things like AutoTune now feel more like creative tools when compared to AI?

You're only 29 -- I have good friends in my life that I didn't meet until I was in my 40s.

You might need some hobbies which are more social, like volunteering. It's very easy to fall into work -> hacking at stuff -> sleep cycle, but you can't live inside your own head for the rest of your days.

I'm older and I've lived through the analog era, before people had cell phones or internet. Facebook wasn't around when I graduated from college, so most contacts from before that withered away -- especially if you ended up living in a different state or city.

It is sometimes heart wrenching to hear about people from your past, knowing that you didn't keep in touch. A girl that I went to elementary school with, always kind of an odd girl (but in a good way), developed leukemia in her 30s and passed away in 2019. I didn't know for seven years. Seven! I went through her Facebook page and it was a roller-coaster of emotions, playing her life backward as she chronicled her condition worsening, periods of hope, all the way back to when she was saying that she had some kind of bug and felt awful.

She was a good friend to me in elementary school, but we ended up going to different high schools and different directions after that. I feel bad that we didn't keep in touch, and that I was completely unaware of her suffering.

I can't wallow in this, though, and this is where I'm attempting (maybe poorly) to make a connection to your situation. You can't change the past, but you can start making meaningful attempts to forge new relationships and to rekindle old ones. Those people that you never kept in touch with? Reach out to them, if only to say "Hi". Reach out because you want to do it, and not because you need something.

How many days will you sit there and think "why doesn't anyone reach out to me?" when you, yourself, are not also making the effort to do so?

Now we can spend the rest of our days arguing over whether it should be on Saturday or Sunday!

I'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths.

There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day.

A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street.

There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief.

Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".

Lowtax, I think is what you're looking for.

From what I understand the CAN traffic on my vehicle is encrypted. Clearly this does not apply to all of the traffic, as I can fetch some OBD2 data with a generic dongle.

Ah, so you've also given up on chocolate-coated-anything, any packaged desserts, etc?

As much as it bothers me, I do feel like I've had a healthier diet since cutting out soy. It's not the soy itself which makes these things unhealthy but rather that it's used as a filler in processed foods.

I'll be honest, though, I do miss Nutella.

My wife couldn't understand why I didn't care for edamame. After 40+ years on this planet I finally figured out that I really struggle to digest soy protein. They sneak that stuff in everywhere, but I do my best to avoid it.

The US produces most of their own nitrogen, but the same is not true of potash.

Perhaps someone in the industry can chime in, but I had read that the soybeans that the US primarily grows and previously sold to China were used for pig feed. In my mind I pictured it like "cow corn" -- humans technically can eat it, but it's chewy and not very good.

Are there different grades of soybean?

It wouldn't surprise me, at all, if the soybeans rotted away with no consumers.

Has the USA's potash supply been reduced due to strained relations with Canada? They are our top supplier, by far.

I brought it back to life at one point as a Java Swing app for my kids, but the server side of things was still wonky. I'm glad to see that it's alive again, I had a lot of fun with this in the early 2000s.

I did some more creeping, but this is probably the end for me if he doesn't get back to my email. He was involved with real estate, but their realty webpage is offline and the last record in the Internet Archive is from 2018. That's the last time I heard from him as well. My original comment was incorrect -- that's the last time I interacted with his service.

I wonder if the whole thing was on auto-pilot until things eventually broke.