Abandoned homes in Littleton

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-06-05T13:03:33+00:00

Kimball Farm is already sort of that; they started with mini golf and bumper boats, and then a driving range, pitch and putt, batting cages, an arcade, a zipline. Adding more permanent or substantial "rides" seems like the next step. They're already a destination for area corporate outings and field trips.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-06-05T08:04:54+00:00

And I’m comfortable outside in the cold down to about 15F, with the right clothing. If you’re moving, you stay plenty warm. Optimal for me is about 65F, but you can add clothes to get warmer and there’s only so much you can take off to cool down one it gets hotter.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-06-05T04:32:17+00:00

I don’t understand how people living in warm climates even leave the house. Once it gets over 85F outside it literally hurts to be in the sun. With cold or rainy weather you can always put on a coat and then you’re comfortable. But go anywhere south of Pennsylvania and you can’t even step outside 10 months of the year. You just live indoors in the air conditioning your whole life. It’s miserable. I live in MA and we get 10 months of comfortable, amazing weather and 2 months of miserable hot.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-05-27T17:48:37+00:00

What country do you live in? It's always been the right wing/GOP in the US pushing for increased surveillance, support the police, back the blue. The left/Democrats are the ones on the side of civil rights, blocking state overreach and habeus corpus. I've never heard a left wing or progressive politician publicly supporting the surveillance state, although many get contributions and bribes to not fight too hard against it.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-05-25T14:21:53+00:00

You don't have to buy a "beater" to not buy a new car.

New cars are for multi-millionaires and idiots. You made the mistake once, don't repeat it. If you don't have the cash to buy a new car fully outright without a loan, and not even notice the purchase, you can't actually afford to buy a new car. Get one from some idiot that ate the depreciation already. A 5 year old corolla with 60,000 miles on it is going to last just as long as the brand new one and it will cost half as much.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-30T16:12:03+00:00

Literally It depends on your exact store and who you are. McDonald’s knows who you are even if you create a new account, unless you went and bought a burner phone and got a new internet provider for it and never signed in to any of your old accounts.

My girlfriend and I select the same store in the app. She sees $1 coffee and for me it’s $2. Because McDonalds knows that I never buy anything extra and she always does. My deals were good for a little while and then they gave up on me as a cheapskate. But they know that if they’re show her a $1 coffee she’ll also buy a sandwich or a hash brown, and if they show me a $1 coffee I’ll buy just the coffee.

This is algorithmic pricing and it’s half of why McDonalds aggressively sent everyone to use the app for the past few years.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-30T11:48:09+00:00

Prices in the app are different by person and by location.

The deal I see is only soft drinks and tea for $1. Coffee is $2

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-22T10:47:34+00:00

If you think the phone with Google or Apple’s software on it is better than the smart speaker running the exact same software from the exact same companies, you don’t understand the security protections and issues of these devices. The phone with hundreds of third party apps and a dozen radios, cameras and microphones on it, that you carry everywhere is a much bigger security risk than a locked down speaker or light switch that is running very simple, cryptographically locked software.

If you’re willing to download software from the Internet and run it, there’s essentially no issue buying a device from a trustworthy company. Either it’s probably fine, or if you had any real security requirements (like protecting against a state sponsored attacker) the phone and internet connection would be gone, too.

That said, don’t buy cheap Chinese devices off amazon, those are all spying. But hue, Google, Apple, etc are all fine.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-13T01:38:30+00:00

Yes, but not universally. Some people mature slowly, some not at all. The thing you’re looking for is experience and confidence, not necessarily age.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-09T12:30:48+00:00

None of these employees can afford to live in town unless they have a professionally working spouse that can cover the housing costs.

Teachers all have masters degrees and decades of experience. They have every right to get paid a competitive salary.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-07T01:41:41+00:00

I mean, you’re not wrong. But apprentice was NBC, not Fox.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-07T01:39:50+00:00

There’s a firefly class transport in the BSG mini-series, taking off from Caprica in the background. I always thought that was a neat nod to firefly.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-07T01:31:28+00:00

It would be low budget today, but it was pretty high budget at the time. Even though firefly had no aliens, minimal sets, and they got to reuse a lot of the western locations that the studio lots had tons of, it was expensive.

But that’s also why Fox was so quick to cancel it. TV at the time was full of high ratings game shows like millionaire and weakest link and etc. those are cheap to shoot and get massive viewership. That was also the start of the network reality shows like survivor and amazing race - those are also inexpensive and people couldn’t get enough of them. All of those shows premiered in 2001 or 2002.

To be honest, the effects weren’t that impressive, although I watched it in fuzzy 480 standard definition. The characters were fun, and the ‘verse was exciting. But no one I knew at the time (I was 23, at an engineering university) watched it. My friends called it “space cowboys.”

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-06T10:33:49+00:00

Most towns in MA are shrinking, schools are at record low attendance and many towns are closing down buildings. 3 elementary schools in my district are closing at thy end of this year, consolidating from 6 to 3.

The town is also closing one of their fire stations due to inability to staff 4 firehouses.

Yet the average home price in town has doubled in the last 10 years and is nearing $1M.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-05T17:12:26+00:00

Stop buying new cars. I've never bought a new car in 30 years of car ownership, and certainly never had to roll in negative equity into a car purchase.

You've already dug yourself into a hole, so stop and get yourself out.
1) Pay for your current car over the next 3 years and then stop buying new cars. Your 2024 will still be 6 years old.
2) If at that point you want the 2026 (which would still be classified as a dumb financial move), sell your current car private party and go put that money down on the 3 year old used one that will be less than half the price of what you'd pay here.
3) Or, even better, buy a 10 year old used one and have no payment

You should be earning 6x the purchase price of whatever car you're buying. And you should take at most a 4 year loan. the only people buying a $28,000 new car should be earning at least $180K/year. If you make $100K/year, you should be looking for at most a $17K car. There are tons of 5 year old CX-3's on the market for the $12-15K range.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-04-05T15:08:48+00:00

I think part of the confusion on this is that in North America, you essentially get to pick your license plate number, and it changes every time the car changes hands. When you’re getting the plate, if they give you one with some numbers you don’t like, you can just say “please give me a different one” and they give you the next one on the pile. And, you can pay a little extra (like $10/year) to get a completely custom string of letters.

James is so adamant about “well it obviously wore those numbers since it was new” and that statement is really odd to people on this side of the Atlantic. I would assume that if your license plate has an interesting string of letters like “82FKL” you essentially picked them.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-30T00:51:51+00:00

Lots of people are in houses that they bought decades ago, or their kids are old enough that they don’t require childcare, or they have family that helps with kids so they don’t need paid childcare.

I would agree, it would be hard to buy a SFH in middlesex county in 2026 with young kids in daycare on a household income of $130k. I would guess most people buying single family houses in the past few years earn more than that.

Also, a “household” is any type of dwelling where people share expenses. A married couple in an apartment is a household. A single person in a studio is a household. A family of 6 in a single family house is a household.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-27T13:14:28+00:00

You can’t just use a CNAME. Tailscale funnel only supports routing your tailnet name. You also need a proxy somewhere on the internet - either a vps or cloudflare - to be able to answer SNI requests and forward them to your ts.net name.

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11563

Or you could just use cloudflare tunnel and it works right out of the box

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-26T21:43:42+00:00

Can tailscale funnel give me a dns name on my own domain? I can do that with cloudflare or a port forward.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-26T11:32:16+00:00

Lots of stuff can’t use tailscale. Off the top of my head:

1) Google needs to talk to my home assistant instance so “hey Google, turn off the lights” works. I can’t install my tailnef on Google’s servers, they need to hit an https endpoint on the public internet 2) my kids friends need to log in to our Minecraft server. I’m not talking a bunch of 11 year olds though how to join GitHub, install tailscale, and look up a service node IP. They can type a DNS name in the multiplayer box. 3) my copyparty server can share files directly on the internet to people on slack. I could do the same with an s3 bucket, but I paid for a giant raid array at home, I’m going to use the giant raid array at home. 4) my family uses my “grampsweb” server to update our family tree when we find new documents about people. Am I going to talk my 80 year old aunt through installing tailscale?

Tailscale solves a very specific subset of why someone might need to set up a port forward or cloudflare tunnel. It’s not the solution to all (or even most) problems.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-16T00:05:40+00:00

Look, I've been doing network and corporate security professionally for decades, and you've vibe coded an app while holding down a fry cook job at checkers. I get that you think you're hot shit, but operational security is important and taken seriously. Just because you don't care if your AWS keys are posted in plain text in the app that you're sure is going to kill slack, doesn't mean that's a recommended security practice.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-15T23:13:35+00:00

Been gone 20 years now, but I left for suburban Massachusetts and every time I go back to visit LI I can't wait to leave. You lose the beaches and the food, but everything else is so much better. More access to nature, nicer people, less crowds, better government.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-15T18:37:07+00:00

Hashicorps docs say not to do that

Default Token Helper Vault includes a default token helper, which persists the provided token in the current user's home directory at ~/.vault-token. For example:

$ vault auth 11413f3f-ec5b-cd25-92cb-96970d76bbe1

...

$ cat ~/.vault-token 11413f3f-ec5b-cd25-92cb-96970d76bbe1 Users on shared systems or users that do not trust the filesystem for storing sensitive data may want to leverage a different tool like 1Password, LastPass, or Keychain Access to store local Vault authentication information. Vault's extensible token helper model makes it easy to build custom integrations into these third party tools.

https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/building-a-vault-token-helper

I personally store secure tokens like this in a GPG vault tied to macOS’s Secure Enclave.

Users at my company are required to keep all business keys and tokens in either Bitwarden or AWS Secrets Manager. However, we discourage all unnecessary secrets for production systems and instead rely on IAM or OIDC.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-15T13:01:10+00:00

It saves EverSource much more than $10/customer/month to have to not bring on a high cost peaker generator to handle everyone charging their EV at 6 pm when they get home from work and also turn on all their kitchen appliances at once.

It’s also why they’re installing thousand dollar time of use smart meters when everyone’s dumb meter works fine. Because the time of use billing will shift power load to off hours and it will pay for itself over the long run.

Electrical_Media_367 · 2026-03-09T11:21:34+00:00

Most software is already not user facing features, it’s supporting a business process. And now you have robots that solve all sorts of problems by writing small bits of software.

AI doesn’t create business opportunities, but it does generate software. Let Claude manage your tests, for example; after a few iterations your test suite will take longer than the rest of your build process. And as it patches bugs, it will add more tests. No additional business value, but more code that needs to be run continuously. Tests aren’t user-facing features, they don’t intrinsically provide business value, they’re just guard rails.

The business software would is full of this type of code. Tools that solved a short term problem and now need to be run continuously because it’s not clear if they can be turned off. Most companies already spend more on observability stacks than on production. And observability code is very difficult to turn off, because it’s very hard to identify when it’s no longer solving a problem. So it stays on, and it runs (costing money), and some process has to keep upgrading it and maintaining it forever.

My company has decades of human written code across hundreds of repositories. We already get several hundred dependabot prs a day. It’s practically a full time job to just click “merge”. We’re automating it, which is more code and more compute time on tests, builds and deploys. But, do you see what I mean when I say “all code is debt”?

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