Casting is much harder to access now in many urban settings. I wish I could but have no space for it where I live.

A lot of that is inflated.

Spark plugs are nothing to replace and just like removing and replacing 8 bolts. I haven’t worked on stuff in 10 years but $16 for a plug sounds like twice what they should be.

A leaf spring is 6 bolts per spring. With a lift, that takes way less than 1 hour

The time estimates are way off IMO, like triple the real world time. I bet the parts are similarly double to triple what they can be found for on the open market.

sure if it was a laptop, but not a monitor. It would mean that this is intended as a reflector and that doesn’t really jive. It would need to be grounded too. Plus the shape and length would really act screwy and unpredictably.

streaming BG checker

…but make sure they are saddled with additional debt and are completely unemployable for the rest of their life with a criminal record. Give them less than no hope. Show them the cowardice of monsters worse than those that housed and fed the masses before they placed them in gas chambers. The feral human suicide machine of the USA is a crime against humanity.

ABI?

I’m super conservative about what I’ll do. I’m probably going to try and pick up some projects and see if I can complete them. I will probably start working on my bedroom electronics lab. Things are all over the place right now. If I can sit at my desk for extended periods of time, I have a ton of unfinished projects. I might get into circuit design. I kinda want to do Ben Eater’s 6502 project but with another processor. I have a few Z80’s, an 8088, or 68k. I also have some newer stuff I could mess with. I probably should use some of my PIC stuff. Several of those have FORTH on them already so I don’t have to mess with any proprietary crap to use those. I’ll probably try to finish my soldering and hot air rework station, then a few power supplies. If I can do that successfully, I might build a Gentoo server and start thinking about potential IT jobs. Who knows. I would love to find a way to get back in race shape on a bike. If I can be physical again, that is beyond imagination and highly unlikely, but I really wanted to learn casting and machining more, but I could weld, paint cars, use my commercial license, wrench on bikes or cars, or a range of heavy equipment I’ve been certified on in the past. I am very skilled with FreeCAD and understand the topological naming issue like the old timers, so I could be valuable in that space. There is a part of me that wants to explore wholesale Buying more too. I like the intuition and statistics of that world. I don’t know really. That is likely far too ambitious at this point to speculate. Of all of my curiosities I would probably like to get a degree of some kind. I know a lot of the CS stuff to various extents so that might be a thing too.

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Egg roll meets sweet and sour sauce.

Probably would work but I like to keep a little extra CO² in solution when it settles and want to make sure there is no oxygen as I do not do extreme cleaning steps like I probably should.

Things have changed a lot since I painted. All of the paint systems I used have been phased out in favor of water based alternatives. Those changes largely stopped the way I did my work as water based colors require a very consistent and controlled environment like an advanced downdraft spray booth. I could control many behaviors with the evaporative speed of solvents and reducers in ways that are not possible any more. Now those behaviors (I assume) are handled with temperature, humidity, and a much larger feathering area for masking changes with less accurate paint. The funny part is that clear coat catalyst and solvents are the largest pollution and health hazard by far. The switch to water based color coats massively increases the overhead of a body shop, creates the need to have whole room IR heaters or integrate them into the booth, and then adds an extra panel to prep and feather the repair on every side. It amounts to a massive increase in the cost of auto body work that includes far more pollution and energy use just to say the most insignificant aspect, the color coat is water based. That is a big reason I stopped painting and why my experience is not exactly relevant to the present.

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I agree to an extent, but light is invisible. Colors are a frequency phenomenon and the same property in both instances.

Part of the art of mixing and matching paints for cars is abstracting the various spaces and focusing on each. I need to see the flat tone, opacity, coarseness and composition (metallics/pearls), layering (pearls), flop (how the color changes depending on facet angles and tint the tone of this independent of the perpendicular tone).

I’m unusual in this space as well. I specialized in very small repairs where I am mixing paints in much smaller batches than the minimum recipe supplied by the paint vendor for the original color code of the vehicle. I knew paints on a much deeper level where I mixed mostly by eye and intuition. I had many techniques, but overall, I had to know the tinting properties of around a hundred different colors and how each one would behave in combination with the rest. My skills were very much a matter of flattening my perspective and observing three dimensional colors as if they were a two dimensional abstraction with several little 2d bubble universe facets to play with.

It is a learned skill. I hired several employees over the years. It quickly becomes evident how a person thinks and their ability to see color on a level that most humans never encounter. Even now, I still know that white and black do not exist and are simply byproducts of other colors and properties. True black would be impossible to see, and white would be a blinding light source specifically tailored to the individual’s vision spectrum and neural processing. I see colors and complex properties in everything.

Oh but there are. I have painted cars and done automotive class airbrush graphics for many years. There is a ton to know and learn about when it comes to colors, matching, and expression.

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I prefer a middle ground. My favorite model is still the 8 x 7b mixtral and specifically the flat/dolphin/maid uncensored model. Llama 3 can be better in some areas but alignment is garbage in many areas.

…but then you have to know the properties of color in your media too if you want to really match colors to a reference

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Then neither is the result of any digital tool. Fools fail to adapt to new tools and efficiencies. If you are using publicly available instances hosted by others, you’ve played with baby food and adolescent nonsense. This is the same foolish insanity as all those that claimed digital media was ruining traditional art media. Specialization is always the constant with technology. When the rules change, those that fail to adapt go extinct.