Aww c’mon, I was gonna deliver this in a much more conspiratorial tone!

Lol yep sounds a lot like my process! Took time to get it down and settle on tools (though those always changed anyway) but once you did, could make a buncha money for sure. With KVMs I could do a lotta volume on those kinda jobs and get some of my engineering homework done in between. Hardware repairs were more fun but way more time consuming and hit or miss depending on overall condition.

Not a bad gig overall but certainly did come with some downsides. Like, desktop computer filled with insect carcasses, brown everywhere with tar from cigarette smoke, stinking up the shop, customer somehow oblivious to the gnar-bomb that is their daily life intersecting with “ordinary” society.

Definitely not wrong! Especially once you’ve dialed in your routine of anti-malware utilities to run on pretty much everything. It’s like an antibiotic cocktail, lol. Or did you prefer the “back up and nuke on sight” approach?

Yep, I did similar around the time. Can’t blame people for being mad that the thing they bought is damn near unusable (and was destined to be, but they didn’t understand that part). If someone buys a new bike, even if it’s cheap, it shouldn’t roll like you’re on gravel after a couple weeks and become impossible to pedal within months. But damn, there were a lot of horrible machines sold in those days.

And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting “those sites”.

Completely agree, and I have watched a ton. The quantity of ads is outrageous, and the “ongoing coverage” streams make you watch a pile of ads before you even find out what’s playing.

The video was always stuttering and just shy of unwatchable on the “live” streams, the ads were out of hand, commentary audio was super inconsistent, even the camera work was pretty shit overall. Like, missing critical moments when that was the only thing going on.

I thought NBC / Peacock did a pretty bad job.

Excellent work, and thank you for sharing. What a win! I’m always heartened to hear about straightforward open source wins against leeches 👍

Thanks so much, this is exactly what I was looking for.

I also know exactly what you mean - weirdly, maybe the most potentially harmful thing about cannabis is the way it makes doing nothing tolerable and even enjoyable. I think overuse does lead to a lot of very stunted life trajectories and ultimately unfulfilling time spent on earth for many people. Certainly did for me in my youth. Of course there are the rare folks like my buddy who smokes daily for decades on end and does more stuff than I do.

In myself I’ve noticed that it makes me much more shy and less willing to engage with others when under the influence. Oddly enough I can sometimes be more productive with it, though, because the right dose tends to quiet my otherwise kind of scattered attention and I’ll work on just one thing rather than 4 at once (badly). I write software for a living and a small dose actually helps me just grind out some boring code that needs to get written. But like you said it limits depth so it’s not good for thinking about project structure and decision making. And at higher doses it does leave me very content with doing very little - at least in the moment.

Anyway. I’ll keep my eye on it, thanks for relating your experience!

Would you be willing to elaborate on the negative effects you observed that led to your decision to drop it? I gave up alcohol this year - I’ve slowly been adding in cannabis lately and want to watch for issues with overuse and such.

Hey, thanks, that’s a useful (and probably fairly accurate) distinction and I’m happy to find that a positive shift in my viewpoint, if minor. The corruption might be a really big problem or it might be one guy who’s an aberration for being wildly outside the court’s norms, really unclear on that part. But I needed a solid reminder that it’s not quite yet another ruined and hypocritical institution we once held dear.