How many old technologies do YOU recognize? Nobody is old enough for all of them!!!
ANSWERED YES TO ALL TEN? CONGRATS, we've finally tracked you down your immortal life-sucking bastard. Hunters of the Order will descend on your lair imminently, since you weren't even using a VPN
One year on my birthday when I was struggling with money (earned £6.70 an hour, slept on a mattress on the floor), I had friends visit for a party.
We went to an aldi to get food, and everyone insisted on paying for their own food, buying full bottles of fizzy drink, their own snacks and so on. Some of the friends brought their own baked goods too. Later, one friend covered a Chinese takeaway order for me and everyone ordered lots of food to eat with no hesitation, only to mention that their eyes had been bigger than their stomachs when the food did arrive.
I didn't realise what was happening until the next day, when each person left my flat with the same "oops, bought too much food to take home with me— I'll just leave it with you!" farewell.
I think about it a lot. I don't know if it was planned or not, but they all made sure I didn't need to worry about food for a good few weeks. Back then, I had to freeze loafs of bread to ration them out, and I had an iron deficiency from not being able to afford good food. But alone in my flat, I realised that I suddenly had a kitchen full of reminders that my friends loved me.
Kasane Teto, in light of recent events
Yes, some disabilities are dynamic, and most of us in the disability community know this. However many people aren’t aware of just how dynamic some conditions can be.
A person can go from no symptoms at all to being profoundly debilitated all in one day.
Some have baseline symptoms so low and flares so high, that things can go from 1 to 10 very quickly.
I know it can seem impossible that some people’s disabilities fluctuate with such extreme variability, but this is a real phenomenon that people deal with.
irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers
always going to include this Psych reference
if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills
where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*
I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".
doctor: cure is simple. go see clown
chronically ill patient: but doctor, I'm seeing a clown right now and he's not helping
the intended reading of this joke is that the doctor is being called a clown, but I also like people's alternate readings in the notes where a) the patient's partner is a clown, figuratively or literally, or b) the patient is hallucinating a clown everywhere they go
or the clown is a specialist that several doctors have referred them to. and you go, but it doesn't help.
PSA for my writer friends and fellow medical whumpers and sickfic enjoyers: you don't have to injure your character badly to fuck them up.
Two weeks ago I fell off a horse (or rather, fot thrown off with force) and slammed into the arena wall with my back and right shoulder. What looked very dramatic at first and had me struggling to breathe for a hot minute including a ride in the ambulance to the ER ended up "only" being bad bruising. No broken bones, no internal bleeding. Just a bruised shoulder, ribs, and back.
I was released home the same day after my x-rays came back clear with pain meds.
And let me tell you, I was almost incapacitated by "just" bruises. I barely managed to get around by myself at home. Could barely stand for more than a few minutes bc my back hurt so much. Had to force myself to breathe properly. Had shit lying around on the ground for days bc I couldn't bend down to pick it up.
Getting out of bed in the morning still hurts. Imagine sitting on the toilet and thinking "fuck how am I gonna clean myself up".
It's been two weeks and I'm now finally starting to feel somewhat normal again. I expect to feel some pain for at least two more weeks.
So, uh, if your character gets knocked down good, like, in a fight, they can be totally helpless even without any serious injuries.
Tested for y'all, can't recommend.
every day i walk into work and my manager says “here is the rule you must enforce” and i go “got it bossman” and i spend a couple days enforcing the rule and then my manager comes up to me and says “why are you enforcing the rule? we changed the rule yesterday and didn’t tell you” and i go “ok bossman new rule it is” and then a customer comes in asking to break the new rule and i say “sorry you can’t it’s the rule” and they say “but you don’t understand the rule doesn’t apply to me” and then my manager comes out and says “they’re right the rule doesn’t apply to them” and i ask why and my manager says “it just doesn’t.” and then the next day we get rid of the rule entirely and no one remembered it existed in the first place.
anyway this sounds like a metaphor for neurodivergence or something but it’s not this is just my fucking life
I dont know if tumblr has seen this behind the scenes photo, but everyone has to see it because its amazing
The heros journey keeps trying to get me but ive been unloading an entire clip of 9mm into every mentor that tries to teach me anything. Ive killed 7 wizards this way.
Refusal of the Call
"i don't care if they make their whole way though uni with chatgpt" i think you guys are so internetpilled that you have forgotten there are actual jobs out there that require people to know what they are doing in any way possible or else people die
i know a lot of people study just to get paid well but girl this is engineering be for fucking real take this seriously
114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.
I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.
Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.
There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:
1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.
2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.
3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.
The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.
Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.
A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.
We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.
Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:
"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."
The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.
I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.
So if you're going to blindly trust the AI to do critical work tasks, I hope you're prepared to be making an apology tour for the rest of your life if it all goes wrong.
We've already seen AI give incredibly bad advice in numerous fields, including stuff like trail directions and identifying mushrooms. Pretty sure some AI "therapists" have convinced people to do drugs or kill themselves or other harmful acts.
We've already at the danger point, if not past it.
Cool Canadian history moment 🇨🇦:
We had some absolutely criminal negligence in the building of the Quebec Bridge, with multiple engineering firms ignoring real signs of structural issues.
There is some debate about this, but most engineers in Canada agree this started a new ritual upon graduation with a B. Eng from any Canadian university. You attend a ceremony upon graduation and are given an Iron Ring.
You wear it on the pinky of your dominant hand, so it touches any paper you are asked to sign. Every time you sign off on something in your capacity as an engineer, you are reminded of your duties and obligations.
I have engineers in my family, and it is considered a sacred oath. Much like doctors, Canadian engineers have an ethos to do no harm.
And if you genAI bullshitted your way through your degree, you didn’t earn your ring. How fucking dare you accept one.
I'm just thinking of this:
This was the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea.
This happened due to a series of incidents that all came back to the same thing: the owner was not an engineer and made his own modifications to change the building from apartments into a mall and maximize floor space, a sentence that here means "removed a shitload of necessary visible support structures and weakened the remaining ones while skimping on or even skipping necessary interior structures."
The building collapsed only five years after completion.
There was a meeting going on during the collapse as to whether the mall should be evacuated, with its owner-slash-"designer" saying no because he didn't want to lose the sales revenue. He and the other executives, of course, left before terminal collapse. If you're wondering how they pulled that off: the warning signs started in April. The building collapsed on 29 June. The terminal collapse began circa 5p KST and became complete at 5:52p. In between those two times, the owner still refused to close the mall.
502 people died.
This is the second-deadliest non-deliberate building collapse in recorded history.
This is what happens when a greedy person who doesn't know engineering design is allowed to build and own a mall.
Something something Cybertruck....
Something something data center....
Something something AI.
An engineer DID actually try to stop the owner from doing this. He got fired for his pains, although when the courts got involved he was able to show he had no responsibility for the collapse.
What happens when the engineer doesn't know the owner should be stopped, because they let Claude get their degree for them?
