John Socks

John@socks.masto.host

I am retired in Southern California after working on the computational side of chemistry, medical electronics, environmental monitoring, motion pictures, and even some web commerce.I am interested in hiking and the outdoors, exercise physiology (especially for someone in my age group), gardening, and old man projects in general.Posts auto-delete after two months.

Posts

Post #2137419
Test
Post #1040769
I&#39;m now thinking I will shut down this account in favor of @buckfiftyseven at some unspecified point in the future. I probably won&#39;t do a formal transfer, but join me there if you wish. Everybody welcome. I have nothing but good feelings for masto.host and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in that kind of thing. Just doing something different. I have been doing the Patreon for mastodon.social all along, so costs covered.
Post #751860
@arichtman I think I&#39;m going to switch my utility car from an automatic back to a manual today. There are a few of them available. I think the agreed viewpoint these days is that manual transmissions are more engaging for the driver, and for some of us more fun. Rather than being better in any other aspect.
Post #751859
@douglasvb @ai6yr @Stinson_108 @MissGayle @MLE_online I think the land price for the station determines more than we think. It&#39;s true down here too. At the beach is expensive, a couple miles inland is cheap.
Post #751858
@MissGayle @douglasvb @ai6yr @Stinson_108 @MLE_online The thing is, I&#39;m not sure anybody at the more expensive station is making more money than the other one. The landlord a charges a large rent but only because he has a large mortgage. The gas station charges more for gas but only because he has a large rent. A fair number of people there for avoid it and go to the cheap station. Where there is less rent, and lower mortgage.
Post #751857
@ai6yr @MissGayle @douglasvb @Stinson_108 @MLE_online we used to be pretty good about chipping away at those things with property tax and inheritance tax. &quot;Based on U.S. Supreme Court records, Joan Irvine Smith—an heir to the Irvine Company—paid $7,468,671 in federal gift taxes, along with $2,086,627.51 in accrued interest on a deficiency regarding a trust, totaling over $9.5 million, after a dispute regarding a disclaimer. &quot; Of course it&#39;s a new world ..
Post #751856
@douglasvb @ai6yr @MissGayle @Stinson_108 @MLE_online when something is that mismanaged I figure it has to be owned by some distant corporation, but who knows
Post #751855
@croyle it has always been a pretty shady program. &quot;No ads, except these don&#39;t count.&quot; I haven&#39;t really decided yet.
Post #751854
I have no idea what I&#39;m doing, but I&#39;m still playing with @buckfiftyseven It&#39;s a unified identity across Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. It worked out because that name was available on all. It&#39;s either what I consider my ideal weight or my first wage. Something like that. I&#39;m finding OpenVibe useful but somewhat buggy as I share ideas across the three.
Post #751853
&quot;As OpenClaw Enthusiasm Grips China, Kids and Retirees Alike Raise &#39;Lobsters&#39;&quot; Perhaps this is one of those cases where one does not want to be an early adopter, and certainly not to have anyone inside the home network as one, but standing back .. it will be interesting to see what happens. https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/19/2231252/as-openclaw-enthusiasm-grips-china-kids-and-retirees-alike-raise-lobsters
Post #751852
I&#39;m not going to do anything permanent yet, but my current feeling is that I might move to @buckfiftyseven permanently. I love Mastodon, I love masto.host, but my current random belief is that riding atop the various social media with a common name is a way to achieve platform Independence. I didn&#39;t feel this way before, who knows I might change my mind in the future, but today it&#39;s where I&#39;m at. ymmv.
Post #676163
I missed this news from January, that Kia has a K4 sportwagon, with a manual transmission, just not for the United States. Sad. Even sadder: &quot;Made in Mexico, but only for Europe&quot; https://www.gearpatrol.com/cars/2026-kia-k4-sportwagon-manual-surprises-at-brussels-auto-show/
Post #676162
I decided a little bash script would make my life easier. So I wrote a paragraph specifying what it should do to Gemini and got it back out again. A short thing but one shot. The only question is what the multiplication factor was for effort and reward. I could have coded it. How much more time would that take than to specify it though .. possibly 10x, which seems to be going around as the number. Is that right?
Post #676161
&quot;Only Half of Americans Went To a Movie Theater In 2025, Study Finds&quot; I think that&#39;s pretty good actually. What with the big screens. https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/03/11/2348256/only-half-of-americans-went-to-a-movie-theater-in-2025-study-finds
Post #676160
&quot;Honda Cancels All Three EVs That It Planned to Build in the U.S.&quot; Sad. A regression. Not the world I hoped for. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a70722299/honda-0-series-suv-saloon-acura-rsx-canceled/
Post #676159
Related to yesterday&#39;s Minisforum news, &quot;Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze&quot; https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/11/1134179/china-openclaw-gold-rush/
Post #676158
A mountain biker died of a snake bite in Irvine CA recently. To give the gist without too many details he was adjusting a clip and fell over into a bush and the rattlesnake was in the bush. He was transported to the hospital and died some days later. I&#39;ve seen many and heard many more rattlesnakes while mountain biking. It always struck me as the worst case scenario, if you&#39;re all pumped up, got the high heart rate going, get bit .. straight to the heart. Blood is in a loop. He...
Post #676157
&quot;My $150 mini PC runs 12 Docker containers and hasn’t broken a sweat&quot; A reminder that the low end doesn&#39;t really start at $500. https://www.xda-developers.com/my-150-mini-pc-runs-12-docker-containers-and-hasnt-broken-a-sweat/
Post #676156
&quot;Panic-stricken markets are losing faith in Donald Trump&quot; What a very, very, strange way to phrase it. I hope the suits operating in our financial industries were not operating on &quot;faith in Donald Trump.&quot; I don&#39;t really believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis either, but I&#39;d hope for something a bit more efficient than faith in a madman https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/03/13/traders-are-hanging-on-trumps-every-word-can-they-trust-...
Post #676155
It&#39;s nice, after a complex, months long, process involving many emails and exchanges of documents, to just call the thing done. And then do one Google takeout for that mail account, and save it offline. Optical even.
Post #676154
Attached is a screenshot from Digg, describing their modern problems. You may recall that I sometimes caution people who blame Google for too much in my opinion. It&#39;s really about what I called the malicious counterparties. As described here:
Post #676153
I wonder if anyone, probably some little guy, is going to disrupt social media with AI. I know the majors have their ideas, and I guess the X vision is that the AI is in the platform and you ask it questions as kind of a secondary channel. But what if you talk to your own AI, and it is just current on what your friends and interests are up to? You could use it to direct feedback, or share thoughts across platforms. It might even get weird if a bit of that is automatic. To what extent is it you?
Post #396160
&quot;The big news today is that AMD and Meta announced a massive expansion of their strategic partnership to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs.&quot; So weird that computer deployments are sized in gigawatts now. https://www.servethehome.com/amd-and-meta-announce-a-massive-6gw-deal/
Post #162801
The thing about this letter, on second or third reading, is that it really drips moral superiority. He's telling you all it's okay, because he talked to Trump, and he knows it is. It's "emotional and challenging" to lesser beings.