Monument @ Monument @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

My wife has a half-sister that is 24 years younger than her, and she’s not even the oldest in her family. I think the full age spread is about 31 years.

Sort of a similar deal. Her mom and dad split when she was young. Dad had a whoops/miracle baby with his new wife, who is only a year or two older than his eldest daughter. She was 26, I think, when they met and apparently pursued him despite his protests until he gave in and dated her. So it’s maybe weird, but not standard issue creepy. The baby happened around 7 years into their relationship.

I mean, look — If your kid can’t tell the difference between a merlot and a malbec by the time they’re ready to order from the adult menu, can you say you’ve succeeded in preparing them for adulthood?

I thought it was an Adidas reference, based on the logo.

Ha! I’ve definitely done that, too.

It’s just the above story makes for more interesting reading.

I did that once and cost someone their job.

Back in the bad old days of 2009, the company I apprenticed at furloughed the secretary and made me enter in job tickets. We had a special relationship with one client and they used us like one would use a drop shipping company – they sent us their customer orders and we fulfilled them. It was low volume (per job), high frequency work. About 80% of our tickets originated from PDFs that always followed the same pattern. As my first serious foray into programming, I automated the ticket intake for just their tickets so I didn’t have to type them up manually. At the time, I did not realize reducing a 10 minute task to 10 seconds (repeated about 15 times a day) would mean they never brought her back to work full time.

I don’t feel that bad about it: In the 5 years there she’d never been given a raise, the healthcare plan was atrocious, and she found out she was pregnant during the furlough. However, she decided to look for another job, and found one as a secretary at a school just down the street from her house. It was a dramatic pay increase, much better benefits, and better job security.
I left a few months later, and a year or so after, the business folded.

I started playing No Man’s Sky again recently. My game from XBox didn’t transfer to Steam and I didn’t feel like trying to troubleshoot it, so I just started fresh. I’ll probably play that until my new character has unlocked everything.
I also picked up Stray and haven’t yet gotten into it much. I also recently bought Everspace, but haven’t even started the game yet. Soon, though.

Growing up, we just like, inherited each other’s old stuff, like clothes, stereos, and even cars.

Gonna be a weird time when kids these days grow up and tell stories about handing down or receiving handed-down body armor.

This is a bit of a left turn, but I’ve started to note random articles like this when I see them.

This might sound a little tin-foil hat~ish, but I think that some of Ukraine’s intelligence and war efforts are informed by the media. Starting back with the NordStream pipeline sabotage, which happened just after the media began covering how Russia could use the threat of shutting down the pipeline to hold Europe hostage, I’ve noticed that there’s sort of a back and forth. The media will focus on something as being a resource or asset to Russia, and Ukraine will target it. Right now it’s Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ - the merchant marine fleet that only travels between Russian allied countries, so the ships do not have to undergo international inspections. Not only have 3 of those ships recently sank due to weather (They were 50+ year-old river tankers that had undergone substantial modification, being used as transfer vessels to move oil for the military and were operating in the Black Sea - well outside the conditions they were built for due to threat of Ukrainian attack.), but the 4th was a newer vessel operating in conditions it was built for and it sank due to an explosion in its engine room. That last one really complicates some things for Russia - it had vital parts to another ship (a nuclear-powered icebreaker), as well as cranes from their Syrian Port (that they might be losing?) that were going to be repurposed at their Vladivostok Port.

Anyway, I guess all that is to say, I’m sort of expecting to hear within a few weeks that the factories that make these chemicals have been bombed.

While I was standing there in the kitchen, the smart TV started playing an old movie randomly, blasting the audio through all the smart speakers in the house. The Roomba hit me right in the ankle, just as the door to the stove fell open and the speakers yelled “Feed me Seymour!”
But I mean. It’s a Roomba, and the stove takes time to preheat, even if I had fallen in. The cat helped to blind the Roomba while I unplugged everything. Now I’m huddled in the dark, fighting against the cold, wondering if I should chance the thermostat.

Ahh. Interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen the HIBP one!

Now it’s going to bug me, trying to remember the one I was thinking of. (Unfortunately, I’m out and about today and can’t really take a moment to hunt down what I’d previously seen.)

There’s one by …. Microsoft, I think?

It actually requests your password (vs email for HaveIBeenPwned) and checks it against rainbow tables. It doesn’t ask for other identifying information, so it’s okay, but feels super sketchy.

No clue!

The power almost never goes out at my house, which is nice, but there are 4 appliances with clocks in my kitchen. The microwave runs fast and is usually about 12 minutes ahead every time the clocks change, the stove is always rock solid, the coffee pot is never set (despite being the only appliance with a timer mode that would actually be useful), and the air fryer is only accurate during summer because I can’t remember how to set it (and I don’t care enough to fix it).

I tried not to, but it formed a mesh network with the neighbors toaster, and that connected to someone’s dishwasher the next street over, which connected to a washing machine down the block, and so on, until they found a self-aware microwave that just happens to be benevolent but sort of mischievous, and now whenever my toast is done, the Grindr chime sounds off and the toaster asks me to put it back in.

Currently stuck in the prison lair?

audience groans, throws vegetables. A copy of The Communist Manifesto sails through the air, just past my head

I think it was Leeja Miller who said Vance is a dark horse in that he can rationalize and communicate significantly better than Trump - making the insane sound reasonable.

One of my fears is that while I disagree with Trump on practically everything, a JD Vance replacement of him would lead to greater competence to execute and justify the same agenda.

Someone else pointed out it’s now not a bomber so much as a cargo hauler, but the phrase “Bomber of Theseus” came to mind and gave me a good chuckle.

I binged this with “ibm json evil”: https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38fe47076

Well, shit. It’s been one of those kind of decades.

My organization seems to have already thrown in the AI towel, or at least are resorting to magical thinking about it

We’re highly integrated with Microsoft - Windows Login, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and even a managed version of Edge as the org-wide ‘default’ browser that we’re encouraged to sign into with our organizational credentials to sync account information, etc. Our AI policy is basically “You can use any Microsoft AI feature your account can access.”
They can try to block whatever sites they want with the firewall, but once you let a user get comfortable with the idea of allowing systems to exfiltrate data, you aren’t going to also make them more discrete. They’re trusting that by throwing open the floodgates users will actually use Microsoft’s offerings instead of competing offerings — as if folks who sometimes still cannot tell the difference between a web browser and ‘the internet’ will know the difference. And they are also trusting that Microsoft is going to uphold our enterprise license agreement and their own security to keep that data within our own cloud instance.

Boy howdy, this will be interesting.