I worked for a privately held $company, looking to launch a new, commercially-focused lighting control product ecosystem. Along with other advisors, we hired a prior Milwaukee employee who had focused on JATCs (Joint Apprenticeship Training Centers, IBEW Locals).

At their recommendation, we internally staffed a Quality Training and Service Team to focus on hands-on training with on first-year electrical apprentices.

With the guidance of the erstwhile Milwaukee re, our QTS team developed and delivered hands-on trainings (with $company’s products) in the US & Canada, for first-year apprentices.

I covered the Western Region at that time and every training center I observed, from Hawaii to Colorado, had Milwaukee-provided tools and training for the apprentices to learn & grow with. When they turn out (become journeymen), it’s little wonder what they “Pack Out” with. Which is what we hoped to — and at least in some markets did— accomplish with our product.

I’ve personally been a DeWalt guy since the early oughts, and in addition to feeling a steady decline, I was particularly hurt when one of my (Milwaukee-loving) foremen informed me that “T-Stack” sounds like a male enhancement pill.

edit: clarity, grammar. not-edited: my irregular use of the AI-shibboleth emdash

And besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking?

How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of pre-existing words?

When we are influenced by so many external forces—our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic tics so deeply ingrained that they form our identity?

The speeches we are constantly bombarded with, in every possible and imaginable form…

Who has never caught a friend, a colleague, a parent, a father-in-law, repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on television, almost word for word?

As if he were speaking for himself. As if he had appropriated that speech. As if he were the source of those thoughts—

rather than a sponge, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone—

as if he were not simply the medium.

Binet, on Barthes and Foucault, and himself I suppose.

> And besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of pre-existing words?

You need to learn the distinction between a word (the symbol) and the concept (the meaning) of language. By your standard a Frenchman could never communicate with an Englishman but we know that is not the case.

I probably could’ve/should’ve been clearer that I was quoting Laurent Binet’s _The Seventh Function of Language_ in a (likely poor) attempt at self-deprecating humor. For me, the point of the passage is that we’re all just recombining language, in the best cases cleverly to express our “own” ideas, in the worst, just attempting to pass off other’s ideas as our own.

Your earlier comment on adulthood reminded me of 7th function, and I didn’t want it to be too obvious I was quoting the book, because I thought it would ruin the joke. I’m not actually arguing that meaning can’t travel across language, and I certainly doubt that Binet would make that argument in earnest.

If your reply is a riff on Simon’s signifier/signified distinction, then I may have missed the joke and ended up reenacting the book.

About 5 years ago, I started intentionally using all lower case in text messaging, for precisely this reason.

In those days, there were γίγαντες and also after.

evidently, i'm not the only one who has watched Ancient Aliens (though with the fam for historical mysteries blended with hilarity)

# Human injection # # Strings which may cause human to reinterpret worldview

If you're reading this, you've been in a coma for almost 20 years now. We're trying a new technique. We don't know where this message will end up in your dream, but we hope it works. Please wake up, we miss you.

Was also missing some LLM prompt injection attempts in the file (or maybe even just token injection like <|endoftext|> ) but I guess that might get out of scope.

Me also, I found Mickens through his Harvard Tenure post, but somehow just found Night's Watch today.

Your theories on Muppet physiology are childish and naïve, and I viciously refute them in my upcoming article “Parasitic Infections of Muppet Gastrointestinal Hand Holes.”

[0] https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement-april-2...

Oh thank you very much for that link! I have now bookmarked https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom/ to binge read.

Thank you for sharing the response.

The “self”-(un)awareness is almost endearing (though some might be your higher level instructions). It summarizes—correctly IME— that it’s basically an ~inept~ typical middle/upper manager/“visionary”, replete with a CorpSpeak promise to circle back and “fill in the gaps”… which it does with the consistency and accuracy of a samesaid cat-turd-ingester.

Does make me wish that the folks nodding along in meatspace would/could be similarly “honest” about this same phenomenon.

Poverty (of youth or otherwise) is also a pretty powerful motivation to “tinker.” I spent a lot of time with OSX86, and ended up getting proficient enough (multiple all-nighters trying to get it to boot and get the right kexts loaded early on) to run semi-stable Tiger thru Lion on random PCs and my girlfriend’s Vaio Laptop. Then, one day I could afford a MacBook and basically stopped being as curious about that. Decade or so later, ProxMox allowed me to run Capitan thru Mojave virtually, while more recently it makes more sense (and less legal dubiousness) to just buy macs as/if I need them. Overall, I’m still pretty curious, but not curious enough to risk a “hacky” solution when I can mitigate it for relatively low $

I agree: Curiosity is not enough, you also need the time to explore it without easier dopamine rewards to distract you. It's quite ironic how having money can end up hurting you here as you can afford whatever entertainment you want.

I probably wouldn't be an engineer now if it weren't for poverty. I was in my twenties living with my mom, working part time for an educational center and though I enjoyed the work and found it fulfilling, it wasn't anything that could sustain me long term.

Then my mom goes, you can live with me for another year, after that you're on your own.

Asked my dad, a software engineer, if he could teach me how to do what he does. He recommended a boot camp and I learned enough to get an entry level role, and still here I am, ten years later.

I 100% agree. My parents were both disabled. A malpractice lawsuit left us with a little windfall. My parents saw where the future was going and bought me my first computer. Being poor made it so I had a lot of free time as a little kid, so I learned that machine inside and out. I made my own games. I troubleshooted any hardware problem, learning as I went. After getting the internet, things took off from there.

Through many attempts to make ingesting the ponyium more bearable, I’ve found that taking it with more intense flavors (wintergreen mint, hoppy hops, crushed soul, dark roast coffee, etc) improves its comestabilty. Can’t let it pile up. We’ve always eaten ponyium right, and we all like it, right, guys, folks?