25 years of brewing coffee and somehow this is the first time this has happened.

I was doing a job for a customer and they mentioned moving abroad. I half-jokingly asked if they were taking the trailer too or if I could buy it and they were more than happy to sell it. I deducted the price from the invoice. They lost a trailer and they have to pay me 400 euros. Good deal.

It's even the exact model I had been eyeing. Just needs a new plywood top as this one is pretty far gone.

Ignore the trash heap on the background. Now I have one less excuse not to get rid of it.

I have a brand new, unused one as well but I'm saving it untill this one is no longer good. This is roughly 7 years old and gets used monthly. I always put a trash bag over it which is why it's still relatively clean.

It's one of those freshnel lenses you glue to your rear window to act as a fisheye lens. It's actually surprisingly good. I can see the ground about 1.5m (5ft) behind me. I wish it would reach my rear bumper as that's what I'd like to see but this helps!

Also, I took the picture with a poor man's smartphone - my apologies.

Many people who loudly pride themselves for tolerance, kindness, and openness toward difference drop those principles the moment someone expresses a preference or view they dislike. Disagreement itself is fine. What is not fine is the usual responses that follows: comments whose main purpose is to insult, shame, and make the other person feel small, delivered in front of an audience that can be counted on to approve.

It's status performance. The goal is not to show why the opinion is wrong or change minds; it is to hurt the speaker and fish for applause. Feeling morally justified does not change the nature of the act; when the sole intention is to hurt they're being evil and a bully.

The people who upvote or otherwise reward those insults are part of the same behavior. Standing by and cheering while someone is targeted is participation. It supplies the social payoff that makes the cruelty worthwhile.

This is one of the reasons large parts of the internet feel needlessly hostile. When perceived moral superiority is used as cover for meanness, and when an audience reliably encourages it, the result is environments where many people simply stop speaking. The claimed values of kindness and tolerance are revealed, in those moments, as conditional.

And no, this isn't about being tolerant towards people with extreme views. The idea for this post was sparked by my previous post about AI music and the vicious personal attacks I received for admitting to enjoying some of it.

I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That's it. That's literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me.

You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that's all fine but just note that you're no longer addressing what I'm actually saying here.

I'm also not claiming it's great - only that it's good. I've yet to discover an AI song that I go back to like I do with many human-made songs but if I want to put on a playlist playing in the background then one consisting of entirely AI-made music reliably provides me well above average track after another whereas with organic music I need to sift through a ton of absolute crap to stumble upon the occasional good track that still rarely exceeds what AI is able to output. I can go on YouTube and put on a 2 hour playlist of Jazz House or similar and I don't get the urge to skip a single track.

Currently I feel like where AI still trips is lyrics - they still are only plausible sounding nonsense once you actually start paying attention to it but especially for instrumental music it has far exceeded the level of a good average human artist.

Few examples of what I'm refering to: with vocals and without.

Even with perfect measurements it's impossible to get to that line straight unless the frame is perfectly square. This not only completely solves that issue but also saves a ton of time not having to measure and cut them one by one.

Also the lumber I picked turned out to be 10 cm longer than the deck and I even picked the exact right amount. By the time I was done I only had a basket of <10 cm off-cuts.

Already got made fun of by some teenagers with more fragile egos and less expendable income than me.

Could've just asked and I would've let them try!

Axial SCX24 Base Camp for those interested.

Edit: I've got around 3 kilometers on the odometer already. Good for something with the max speed of around 0.5km/h

But wait - there's more! I also had a paintbrush wrapped in plastic for over 2 weeks because I was too lazy to clean it but yesterday I needed to do a little more painting with the same color so I was able to use the already saturated brush.

What I learned from this? That I'm already performing at the highest level and nothing needs improvement.

I'm only half kidding. I'm a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.

Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn't much but it's a start.

Rare to get any car-related repairs done in an hour. I must’ve surely fucked something up.

Again, one of those things I should've bought 15 years ago. I just didn't know these even exist. This is the second most exited I've even been about a bucket only narrowly topped by the time I found two for free.

For those that don't know, steelmanning is the opposite of strawmanning.

It means re-stating your opponent's view in a manner that they agree "yes, that is my view" and only then you express why you disagree with it.

Failure to do so means one of two things: either you don't actually understand the stance you claim to oppose or you're not even in the business of finding truth and changing minds to begin with.

Not sure if this is actually unpopular, but it didn't feel like a showerthought either.

I'm still looking for a piece of bone or suitable stone for an arrow head but some unfortunate bird conveniently left half of its wing near my campsite, so at least I got the fletching done.

I also don't even have a bow but maybe that's the next project then.

Building a screen door for customer's balcony.