busybee fluffy rambles

Today the Niro became available for test drive and purchase, and I got the next available appointment. CarMax was super busy and they weren’t able to see me until nearly an hour after I arrived (ugh) but the process went pretty well.

I gave the car a test-drive and found that I really like it, and the OBD check showed no battery degradation whatsoever, so I decided to go through with the purchase. So now I have the nicest car I’ve ever owned (after giving the LEAF a little pat and telling it I appreciated our time together).

Today I had an appointment at the Nissan dealership for them to appraise my car as part of a potential used-sale deal. They offered me $5500, or $6000 if I was willing to part with it same-day, and were giving me some pretty hard-sale tactics for an immediate agreement, but I told them that my replacement car hasn’t arrived yet and I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be actually buying the replacement.

They made me an offer of the full $6000 if I sold it to them now and just continued to borrow the car for the next week, but I again said no, as I’m not positive I’ll be buying the Niro.

This was also after they tried to FUD at me about the Niro, like they said that the Niro is “uninsurable” because of the break-in problems (which don’t affect the Niro, and the models which do have the problem haven’t had significant insurance difficulties either), and tried to bargain me into upgrading to a Leaf SV Plus, which is both outside of my budget and also doesn’t actually address the two critical issues I have with the Leaf (namely, CHAdeMO charging and a lack of thermal management on the battery).

As mentioned the other day, my SlimeVR full-body trackers arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. The last two days I used them pretty heavily, and then ended up just reselling them (at cost).

For some reason Spotify occasionally rebroadcasts the old episodes of my podcast and whenever they do a notification goes out to all RSS feeds (including the one that gets autoposted to my Mastodon feed). I don’t know why they do this, but it certainly has the effect of reminding me that I need to make more episodes. And hey, it’s nice how it gives more visibility to the original 6 episodes.

Anyway, that said, I’ve gotten a few prompts for episodes to make and also I’ve revisited my prompt list and I’m getting some amount of inspiration. No promises, but hopefully I’ll get to making these again soon. I miss doing it a lot.

I am of course always open to receive prompts from others! Especially if they want to do a commissioned episode.

Today my SlimeVR trackers finally arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. I bought the 7+3 kit. I’ve got them set up pretty well, I think. Here’s some observations.

So, today I took a rather small trip down to Tacoma, and stopped at a friend’s place in Puyallup on the way back. I very quickly discovered that in the current cold weather, my Leaf consistently had an actual range of around half of what it predicted, and if I’d relied on its range estimate I would have probably been stranded around 5 miles from home.

Some thoughts about lighting fires, both literal and metaphorical.

Today I found out that the Hobbes OS/2 archive is shutting down.

I ran this archive back in the 90s, when I was a student at NMSU. It was, for reasons not worth getting into, one of my ancillary duties when I worked part-time for the IT department.

The tech world is abuzz with the announcement of the Rabbit R1, a little handheld AI assistant thing that has an interesting goal.

The tl;dr is that it’s a ChatGPT model that will run little AI agents (called “rabbits”) on your behalf to make complex API requests for you. I actually think it’s a pretty cool idea and one of the few things that I don’t hate about the modern AI push (ethics of ChatGPT aside, of course).

At $200 for the hardware it’s obvious that the LLM is running in the cloud somewhere, and it’s not like the other stuff wouldn’t also require cloud to operate anyway, though, and that raises the one big question I have about it: who foots the bill for the actual backend services? Because at $200 it’s probably being sold at-cost or for a small profit, and operating the necessary cloud services ain’t free.

A random conversation tonight awakened a memory in me, namely, back in the 90s, we didn’t refer to fursonas as fursonas, but as “personal furries,” and I had it in my mind that the term “fursona” actually started out as derisive and came from an anti-furry space. Which led me on a bit of a quest.

>>> import datetime
>>> apollo = datetime.datetime(1969,7,20,20,17)
>>> delta = datetime.datetime.now() - apollo
>>> apollo + delta / 2
datetime.datetime(1996, 10, 13, 20, 57, 7, 893840)

Anything that happened on or before October 13, 1996 is now closer in history to the Apollo 11 moon landing than it is to today.

It’s way too easy to get heated while in the thick of things and for bad-faith interpretations to take over from the point anyone’s trying to make, and that is absolutely a two-way street.¹

For now I’ve removed Toot! from my phone and DNS-blocked plush.city from my home network, so hopefully any posts I make to Mastodon are just from my automatic crossposter (like this one). I’ll still (eventually) see replies to my blog posts that come in as Webmentions, but hopefully not being Always So Online will be better for my mental health, which hasn’t been great as of late and I’m definitely lashing out at others much more than I would like.

I forgot to check up on my previous annual goals post, but better late than never, right?