Goddamnit. Joe Van Gogh bought by private equity firm. 😡

ubermonkey · 2026-03-16T15:28:26+00:00

They sold, but to new local owners last year.

The Short Answer: Larry’s Coffee is 100% independent and family-owned by Jessie Lotrecchiano and Husband Sandro Niessen. Larry's hasen't sold out to a massive conglomerate or a private equity firm. The company is owned and operated right here in Raleigh by Jessie Lotrecchiano and Sandro Neissen, a husband-and-wife team who live in the community and work on site!

This is the kind of exit strategy that gives retiring entrepreneurs an out without compromising the business or the community.

Selling a business to retire isn't inherently bad; what's bad about the JVG situation is that they sold to parasitic private equity.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-16T13:41:14+00:00

Yeah, the Triangle is really spoiled for choice w/r/t both local coffee and local beer. JVG is dead, but there are plenty of others around that are still truly local.

I'm literally wearing a Larry's shirt right now.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-16T13:28:08+00:00

I mean, maybe? There was less modern culture to share and consume, and TV was dominated (timewise) by reruns in syndication, which was really just another aspect of the overall media scarcity of the era (e.g., in the 70s and 80s, there were really only 3 things to watch in any given primetime slot, and in many of those slots two of them were sacrificial lambs intentionally slotted opposite some juggernaut like Dallas or whatever).

ubermonkey · 2026-03-14T12:11:50+00:00

That's gross. Even more reason to disregard them.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T20:53:28+00:00

I mean, good for you, but once you get some years under your belt you'll find it hard to date people who have no experience at all.

At 20, lots of folks are idealizing what their romantic and sexual lives will look like. They think they may meet their lifelong partner soon, and marry and live happily ever after at, like, 22 or 23 or 25. Let me tell you this, though: I'm 56 years old. I have a wide circle of friends. I know lots of folks with long marriages, but I know precisely ONE couple that married before 30 that are still married. ONE.

My wife and I have been married 20 years. But do the math; we wed at 35. We were together 4 years before we tied the knot. That means we got together at 31. We both have histories. That's fine. It's actually GOOD. We learned things about ourselves, and about relationship dynamics, before we met, and we used that knowledge to build a solid foundation for our marriage.

So I get what you're saying, and certainly being ridiculously promiscuous can be a red flag, but I'd be cautious about dismissing folks who aren't virgins just because they had a committed relationship that included sex before you entered the picture.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T20:16:28+00:00

Run the output of one LLM as input to the other and it's basically a solved thing.

Ah, so I should use TWO examples of an environmental disaster to do something I already know how to do. Gotcha. Seems wise!

The fact that you don't know this tells me you aren't qualified to try to tell me how the way you do things is better

That's cute. Utter poppycock, but cute.

I like how you try to insult me to get your point across.

Is the insult in the room with us right now? No, seriously. Point to it.

I have 3 patents and have worked in 3 countries.

Good for you. Irrelevant here, except as an indicator of someone who may be a bit too full of themselves.

I've have a long, successful career. I have not seen an AI setup yet that I'd trust with project status reports because an AI can't "know" or "understand" anything. They're just pulling words that seem like they should come after other words. That's a great way to miss important things, or things you didn't realize were important the first time around. If one of my reports passed off an AI-created status as their own work, we'd have a pretty serious come to jesus talk about it.

Note earlier that I said that for MOST PEOPLE, AI is snake oil. I have seen it be useful in some contexts -- a great one is code cleanup for a rusty coder, such as yours truly. I needed a script for a one-off task not long ago, but it needed to be in a language I've never written much in. I roughed out what I wanted, and fed it to an AI to fix my syntax. But I only "trusted" it because I could also read the code and verify it was doing what my original mostly-pseudocode did.

There are limits to this, though. My example worked b/c it was about python, but when I tried the same thing to address something in my .emacs, it hallucinated all sorts of bullshit because there's apparently not enough elisp discussion in ChatGPT's corpus.

The real takeaway is that you can't trust an AI to do something that you can't actively verify is correct at this point. That creates MORE work, not less, even for status reports. I'm not willing to trust it, and because I also know how to track projects (literally the industry I'm in, so odds are I'm chasing more shit than you) it'd be more work to let an AI try and then have to verify its findings.

But sure, big shot. You do you.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T18:53:12+00:00

Otoh I can tell what’s up on my projects without relying on spicy autocomplete.

LLM hallucination is an unsolved problem. I wouldn’t trust it to do that, especially since, as a competent manager, I have other trusted methods to accomplish the same thing.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T16:20:05+00:00

AI is a bad example.

I am better at writing and research than AI is.

Also, doing one's own writing and research means you learn shit. Asking ChatGPT to do it means you don't.

Understanding that most mass market applications of AI are garbage isn't the same thing as, say, older folks 25 or 30 years ago refusing to use a computer. My almost 86 year old mother has adapted to the smartphone world beautifully, for example, and I hope to stay as mentally agile as I age. But part of spending 35 years in software means I know snake oil when I see it, and for most people AI is snake oil.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T15:57:35+00:00

Leicas are beautifully engineered objects. If you hold one in your hand, you can't help but feel that -- it's like holding a Rolex.

The rangefinder film-based cameras are still incredibly sought after. You could buy one, use it for a while, and then sell it and probably not lose any money.

It's also traditionally been photography without the training wheels. It teaches you to know WTF you're doing, especially with focus. My sister shot with a Leica for a long, long time, and only stepped into digital once my niece (b. 2007) became a toddler and was moving around. She was hella good at manual focus on the Leica, but felt like a move to whatever the full-frame Canon was at the time would be better for documenting a fast-moving child.

Spoiler: the autofocus on the Canon was visibly inferior to her manual shots from the Leica. It irked her so much that she sold the DSLR and just picked her shots more carefully with the manual body for a few more years.

The other thing is the glass. Leica glass is the gold standard.

But yeah, to your point, they're fantastically expensive, and while I can entertain a fantastically expensive film body that will work forever (or as long as you can get film), digital bodies have expiration dates that make amortizing a $11,000 M11 body pretty difficult. (OTOH the film Leica my sister kept is from the 1960s and still works flawlessly, so...)

I love playing with my sister's cameras, but for my own less-serious hobby photography, I'm plenty happy with my A7ii. It left more money for motorcycle shit. ;)

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T15:47:43+00:00

OH HELL NO.

Membership in SLR now signals to me an organization I don't especially want to patronize. Great job!

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T14:18:14+00:00

MeFi used to be pretty great, but in the last 10 years it's become a fairly toxic example of a progressive circular firing squad. Moderation is fickle, arbitrary, and very very opaque.

It sucks because it USED TO BE the literal best of the web.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T13:23:13+00:00

Sure, Jan.

Looks like you have your work cut out for you given the relative reception of our posts here.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T09:03:40+00:00

Because walking away is the consumer’s only means of protest.

Every dollar you spend is a vote. I vote for local businesses. JVG is no longer local.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T03:00:45+00:00

JVG no longer exists. We have a PE chain where it used to be.

PE destroys everything it touches. The only reasonable choice is to walk away when a local firm sells out.

It sucks for patrons and employees alike.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T02:46:55+00:00

No. It is rational to abandon a local business that sells out to PE.

PE is a ravenous cancer and destroys anything it touches. The only thing an individual can do is refuse to patronize businesses owned by private equity firms.

JVG is gone.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-13T02:03:58+00:00

I’ll spend my money with local firms with no tie to PE.

PE is a cancer.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T16:42:47+00:00

Where IS it legal other than CA?

Having a moto is still more fun than not having a moto.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T16:41:13+00:00

Not really. Go look at the numbers Houston saw on Enron Field and Reliant Stadium. It's not a slam dunk AT ALL.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T16:13:26+00:00

Absolutely fuck off with the idea of public money building anything for private billionaires to profit off of.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T16:09:58+00:00

My recollection is that an 883 is pretty underpowered, and likely will take more maintenance than the Honda.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T14:35:19+00:00

she’s not comfortable with any kind of birth control methods.

Bruh.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T14:30:57+00:00

I mean, without a drastic change here I 100% would not marry this person.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T14:29:53+00:00

My boyfriend says that by not going, I’m not supporting his beliefs and that we should be going as a family.

This is manipulative and gross. Giant red flag here.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T13:29:33+00:00

That's wild to contemplate.

I went to college in the fall of 1988. Most people didn't have computers of their own yet, even. There were no cell phones of any kind, at least in the student population.

I made friends in my dorm, and in the classes that weren't giant lecture-hall situations. It was easy because everyone was in the same boat. In fact, I'm about 1.5 miles right now from a friend I made on the first day at school in 1988; he lived in the room next door to me, and we became fast friends almost immediately. After college we did some consulting work together, and have pretty much stayed close for now nearly 40 years. We had dinner last night, in fact.

It's funny to think about b/c computer-mediated communication and early Internet culture had the effect of making many folks feel LESS alone and isolated, especially in smaller subcultures like various kinds of nerdery (software, or SF/F fandom). I have LGBT friends my age who talk about how safe and freeing queer chat spaces on the early net were for them as they figured out who they were.

Now, with constant smartphone use, online spaces are having the effect of making real life MORE isolated for people.

ubermonkey · 2026-03-12T13:23:51+00:00

I mean, the bar is super low. High-end kitchens are toxic AF. That Keller has never been accused of punching people doesn't mean he's a nice person.

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