But my friends call me Spray.

Many of my friends are in critical condition after an incident involving my father and some bees. The pest control guy was not helpful. I spent many hours on the phone with him explaining the situation already, so please do not suggest I call him for advice.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I work at a small company of <100 people, and fortunately the CEO is a human that treats his employees like other humans and recognizes that without us, there would be no company anymore. However, all of his emails sound like the most heavily sanitized corpo-marketing-speak. If you were to judge him by his emails alone, you would never guess that. As it turns out, he uses Copilot to draft emails. When I found that out, it made so much more sense.

    On a certain level, I get it. I hate writing emails. But the AI slop emails make him seem like a corporate goon and they ultimately dehumanize him to new employees. I don’t know if he realizes how impersonal the AI makes him seem. He probably has become slop-blind from using it too much.

    Sorry, only tangentially related. Just kind of ranting here.



  • At least around me, I feel like the drive-thru is often noticeably slower than parking and going inside. The last time I got McDonald’s at the drive-thru, I was waiting for over a half hour to get my order. To make it worse, I was stuck in the inner lane, so I couldn’t even say “fuck it” and drive off until I was third in line. At that point, I had spent a good 25 minutes waiting, so the sunk cost fallacy kicked in and I waited some more. When I got to the window to pick up my order, it wasn’t even warm.

    I don’t get fast food as much anymore, but when I do, I order through the app and go inside to pick it up. At least then it doesn’t feel like I’m stuck in gridlocked traffic.


  • Yes, but the specific type of irony that this situation fits the definition of does not come from whether or not the tool they used worked for the intended purpose. The irony comes from the fact that they are relying on the output from LLM-generated content (ISBN checksum calculator) to determine the reliability of other LLM-generated content (hallucinated ISBN numbers).

    Irony is a word that has a somewhat vague meaning and is often interpreted differently. If the tool they used did not work as intended and flagged a bunch of real ISBNs as being AI generated, the situation would (I think) be more ironic. They are still using AI to try and police AI, but with the additional layer of the outcome being the opposite of their intention.
















  • This bridge was probably also designed to account for thermal expansion to a certain degree. It seems like more and more of our infrastructure is starting to fail, encountering heat levels it was never expected to encounter. I wonder if failures like this and worse are going to become a common headline

    Bridge engineer here (not much experience, so I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I have more knowledge about it than the general public).

    Your suspicions are correct, bridges are designed for thermal expansion. More of our infrastructure is starting to fail, and part of that is because it’s experiencing climate it was never designed for (heat, sea level rise, more drastic storm surges, etc). I would fully expect this to be a more common headline. At least for several more years, anyway. If the federal money from the infrastructure bill the US passed a few years ago runs out or is not allocated to the right structures, then this will only get more common. I don’t expect the Trump administration to champion an extension of these funds if they do run out. It was passed under Biden, after all.

    As for this bridge in particular, this is a moveable steel bridge. The fact that it’s moveable means it is particularly sensitive to expansion (as well as salinity which causes rusting). Too much expansion, and the steel will get stuck in one position. In a typical steel bridge, if the thermal expansion exceeds what it was designed for, you end up getting higher stress levels in the steel as it pushes harder against the abutments. Usually this is alright in the short term, since we design these to withstand much higher stresses than it will ever likely experience. Repeated cycles of this, however, will cause fatigue failure (think of a paperclip or metal spoon snapping after you bend it back and forth a bunch).

    Anyways, there you have it. I rambled for too long about this lol.