Some school districts will train you for the CDL, and some even pay you while you’re training (mine didn’t at the time). My training didn’t take very long because I already owned a used school bus and knew how to drive it, at least. You have to take four standardized tests (general CDL, airbrakes, passenger endorsement and school bus endorsement), have a driving exam, and take a 14-hour special school bus class (this is all in PA, at least). The standardized tests aren’t super-difficult, but you do have to actually know the shit, you can’t guess your way through it and hope to get a passing grade. I just crammed the free online tests over and over until I was getting 100% on them. I think it was maybe a month and a half between when I started my training and my first day on the job, but that was with not doing a whole lot each day. My district was (and still is) a weird combination of desperate need for drivers with a frustratingly slow pace of actually training people.

I have a class C. I wouldn’t bother with a class B unless I actually needed it.

I was a programmer for 25-some years but I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I now get my engineering jollies from the used school bus I converted to a motorhome and from the house I bought three years ago and am finishing up renovating. For money I drive a school bus, which pays about 1/6 of what I used to make but is infinitely more satisfying. As far as retirement goes, I’m hoping to die a painless death before AI replaces all the CDL jobs in the country. I think AI will work fine for school buses, mainly because kids are easier to replace the younger they are.

The evil truth of sourdough is that it takes about the same amount of time and effort to make four loaves as it does to make one.

I never notice when a user or a thread comes from ml until I say something that is real-world uncontroversial like “Stalin had some people murdered” and get flamed for it. I’ve never really felt the need to block servers on Lemmy but ml sure makes me think about looking up how to do it.

“31% is at least still a positive number”.

He’s the CEO of five companies. If he really works 100 hours a week like he says (and maybe ketamine does make that possible), that means being a CEO is at best a part-time job.

Bush II nicknamed him “Turd Blossom” for a reason.

My town had a bowling ball factory and on winter nights when the river was frozen we would steal reject balls and throw them off the bridge downtown. They made a truly incredible noise when they hit the ice.

I’ve recently started having fast food occasionally after not touching it since before COVID. It really is fucking terrible and absurdly expensive. Except Taco Bell, which is also fucking terrible but at least it’s relatively cheap still.

Your work is beneficial

In my 25 year career as a programmer, I’d estimate that at least 75% of the software that I worked on never actually got used by anyone. It’s incredibly depressing to think about. And that’s not even counting the fact that I probably spent more than 50% of my time doing non-programming tasks like attending meetings and such shit.

I retired as a programmer (fancy way of saying “got laid off by giant corporation”) a few years ago and randomly bought a used school bus to convert to a motorhome. I got so much more satisfaction out of doing that than out of any work project I ever did, and even learned to weld and fabricate in the process. Also very happy that I never had to deal with the AI “revolution”. Managing a team of offshore developers got me as close to that shit as I ever want to get.

I just hate the feeling of chatting with something that is designed to sound human

My dad died at home in hospice last fall, and when I called the funeral home that we had selected to handle his cremation to come pick up his body, the answering service was AI. I could tell because of the weird artificial background noises, the strange accent that wasn’t from any language on earth, and the fact that when it read back my father’s name for spelling confirmation it said “Bob common name B O B Smith common name S M I T H?”. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t just hang up immediately and go with a different funeral home.

For extra fun, when we met with the owner of the funeral home later he kept cracking jokes. And he didn’t deliver the urn until the night before my father’s interment ceremony, after I had been frantically calling him about it the whole week before. LPT: don’t go with a funeral home whose owner shares a name with a character from The Sopranos.

80 years ago women were expected to “stay home and take care of the kids”

Ironically, 80 years ago was immediately after American women had just won WWII (checks nervously to make sure we’re not on ml) by going into the factories and making the weapons that the men needed to fulfill their proper role of going out and dying. The women being homemakers shit was a calculated strategy to give their jobs back to the men who survived.

Excepting that part of the world that has fish that swim up your penis.

My sister-in-law owned a real Victorian couch. It was quite beautiful, but holy shit was that thing uncomfortable to actually sit on. The seat part was at least sprung, but it was rounded and fit no part of the human anatomy. The back and arm rests were just solid wood. Definitely from an era when you did not want guests to make it to dinner time.

he threw his friend under the bus rather than stand up and use the power he has

Incoming: Ed Sheeran and Jack Black duet.

when I tell them they thank me for my time and keep doing it

I remember one of my first programming jobs in the mid-90s for an internet startup. I was the sole developer and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I was treated like a rock star and thought of myself as one. My bosses called in a high-priced consultant to review my (Visual Basic) code and I still remember his report vividly. He ripped me a new one and I was highly offended and justified everything I had been doing to my bosses and they agreed with me and never talked to the consultant again. I’d like to find that guy again and say “yeah, you were spot on” but he was in his 50s at the time and this was 30 years ago, so I assume he’s dead. One of the fortunate ones who never had to deal with AI, just with shitty noob programmers.

I had a coworker once who had come to our C# project from the Java world. Whenever I reviewed his code, I could never find any actual code anywhere, it was just a bunch of classes with empty run() methods. But everything he wrote functioned perfectly, so I dunno. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I was being visited by a superior extra-dimensional being.

At my first professional programming job workspace was tight so I was given a desk in the server room. This room was kept at 59°F because mainframes that the company didn’t even have any more required it. It sucked – I had to wear fingerless Oliver Twist gloves all day. I blame the cold for my executing a DELETE query without a WHERE clause on the production database. “Why is this taking so long?” I muttered through blue lips.

Elon Musk seems like a genius up until he starts talking about something you’re familiar with

He seems like a moron even when he’s talking about things I know nothing about. There’s a video on youtube of him giving a tour of SpaceX’s museum of past rockets that they’ve launched, and he’s talking about how they’ve reduced the “fiddly bits” on the outside of the rockets over the years.