MoonMelon @ MoonMelon @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

I see it as the continuation of a very old problem. Old school engineering didn't have any standards until a bunch of people died over and over and the public demanded change. The railroads, construction tycoons, factory owners, mine operators etc all bitterly fought, and still fight, engineering safety requirements. Computer industries have continued this. They all oppose public action, hide negative information, and try to pin blame for conspicuous failures on individuals rather than systemic rot.

I think also because of the relatively less visceral nature of software catastrophes we don't have a culture of safety. That's not to say software errors can't cause horrific accidents but the power grid going down and causing a dozen people in the service area to die is less traumatic than a bridge collapsing and sending a dozen people into an icy river. That's an extreme example but my point is that humans undervalue harms that are seen as less acutely, physically brutal and software just seems more abstract.

Most of us aren't working on power grid either, so when you start trying to quantify our software's risks you have to speak to "harms" rather than just crimes like negligence, and then you expose this huge contradiction about how responsibility is allocated socially. Like, not only should engineers, pilots, and doctors have higher responsibility to prevent harm, but so should cops, journalists, politicians, billionaires, etc.

So the risks are undervalued and both intentionally and unconsciously minimized. The result is most of us who've seen the inside are quietly horrified and that's the end of it.

I don't know what the answer is except unignorable tragedies because that seems to be the only thing powerful enough to build regulations which are constantly being eroded.

I'm not really into audiobooks, but my mom is, and she's lent/given me a couple. I think, for her, having a good voice actor is at least half of the experience, at least when she describes her favorite books half of her praise is for the actor.

Having listened to her favorites I can confirm the actors are really good. They are true professionals, far beyond what AI can do. AI can do commercial voiceovers, where there is purposely a single-note, unevocative tone. How can it do a shift in emotion across a line of dialogue as a character has a revelation? Or a slow change in personality as a character goes insane? Or slightly modify their voice as an angry, drunk father finally realizes he is pushing his daughter away, or his voice cracks when he knows the treatment is hopeless, or drops his guard when he remembers his old friend he didn't recognize? Etc. Even the pauses can communicate volumes.

This is the emotional landscape actors excel at navigating but tech bros aren't even aware of because of their terrible media literacy. So even if some "prompt engineer" was babysitting the AI it wouldn't be nearly as good. Basically, just saying the words is only half the actors skill, they are great at analysis also.

Seems like basically every company is covering up crimes that happen on their properties, and lots of those are sex crimes. I have no data, just anecdotally it's been almost every company I've ever worked for and the experience of virtually every woman I've known well enough to talk candidly about this shit. I'm not talking about "nice ass" comments either, I'm talking like, "blow me or you're fired" type shit.

Not an excuse for Ubisoft, but it's kind of like how Covid is now endemic so we're like "oh well". This disease is so common we apparently don't give a shit. There was a brief window of hope with "Me Too" but then reactionaries shut that down.

I found the original blog post more educational.

Looks like these may be typosquats, or at least "namespace obfuscation", imitating more popular packages. So hopefully not too widespread. I think it's easy to just search for a package name and copy/paste the first .git files, but it's important to look at forks/stars/issue numbers too. Maybe I'm just paranoid but I always creep on the owners of git repos a little before I include their stuff, but I can't say I do that for their includes and those includes etc. Like if this was included in hugo or something huge I would just be fucked.

I worked in a place where you dialed in to the PA system, and NOT using your finger to hang up was a rookie move, since the rattling of the receiver was deafening over the speakers. Definitely worse to use a sensor.

Thanks fixed. Interesting jerboa and the web version of lemmy are developed by the same person but using the "code" button in the web frontend only uses one backtick. That might be worth a bug report.

I'm actually trying to get away from github also, so maybe codeberg pages instead? This is a part of the process I haven't done enough research into, I wanted to get the static site working locally first then "shop around" for hosts.

The issue seems to be with how hugo renders everything down into a /public directory. Somehow this is breaking the static images Lightbox uses to do prev/next/close. It's a small issue and I'm sure the fix is something dumb, it just wasn't obvious to me (the images appear to be correct). But sounds like it's worth just debugging it...

Oak are great. A lot of the understory in oak/hickory forest is now maple and tulip poplar due to shifting climate and possibly deer pressure. It's called mesophication.

My property is also oak/hickory complex and I can say anecdotally that the native understory has a lot of tulip poplar.

In my experience if you have access points for mice they will get in whether you have a suburban turf grass lawn or not, and a cat can't get them if they are in the walls or crawlspace. So the best bet is to seal up any holes and keep all vegetation, native or not, at least a couple of feet away from the house.

You're going to have ticks in the native area too, especially the marginal zones. They love those. Ticks are native, unfortunately. Remediating your land for native insects' benefit will actually be better for ticks than having an acre of 2" turf grass, but that's just because short lawns are totally ecologically dead.

When I was more uninformed I was more of a purist. The more I've done on my own property, and the more I've consulted with experts, the more I've learned that it's actually a balance between human needs and ecology. Now I'm sort of in the "if planting turf grass by your house is what you need to be on board with the rest of it, fine."

We can't promise people ticks will go away, more like teach people the critical value of native insects. Keep tall grass away from your house, sure, but think about walkways instead of acres of lawn for the rest of it. People plant lawns and call Mosquito Joe to fog it all so "their children can play" but consider your children living in a world with no bugs at all. That's the trade off. IMO it's a lot more scary than ticks, and I fucking hate ticks.

We got a free, breakfast-themed Doom total conversion .wad in boxes of Chex. Truly a golden age.

You're fucking incredible, Cowbee. I've watched you spend literally days patiently and politely responding to dozens of confrontational, probably bad-faith posters in thread after thread with nothing but solid information. I really admire it.

I honestly find those sections of his books kind of comfy. If I "wrote what I know" about those days in my life the protagonist would wolf down a boiled chicken breast over the sink in complete silence.

I liked the four or five books I read, but I did laugh out loud the third time a bachelor character cracked a beer, put on a jazz record, and prepared an elaborate dinner for one.

A pack of six light bulbs. Five of them sheared right off the metal base like wet tissue when I screwed them in, just one right after the other. Fortunately the last one worked. I was a poor college kid with no transport then, so getting that pack of bulbs for my single lamp was a lot of effort, I was disappointed.

Sorry I meant to say MPV, on linux here.

I had the same issue, but mpc mpv worked.

Could you find room for a 20L water can or two? Many are "stackable". That will be more important than a big food cache. The main point isn't "doomsday prep" its for anyone who is able to hold out for a few days. That gives emergency services the space to rescue the truly desperate first.

Trees are unbelievably cool. My favorite fact is that the actual living surface of a tree's roots, called the rhizosphere, consists of extremely small, ephemeral hairlike structures that supply the whole, gigantic tree. The large roots we think of are mainly structural. Where the actual "rubber meets the road" of the life form is incredibly small. Within that rhizosphere the interplay of plant, fungi, bacteria, and soil is so intricate that it's difficult to even say where the soil ends and the tree begins.

So many amazing things happen in this space. For example, the tree exudes sugars out of the roots because it creates an electrical gradient that pushes nutrients into the root cells. This way the trees, which are masters of energy efficiency, can use passive transport to uptake nutrients. Fungi have adapted to this energy and symbiotically extend the rhizosphere beyond what the tree is capable of alone. In fact an entire world of organisms has evolved inside the rhizosphere. Similar worlds exist in the bark, the cambium, the buds, the leaves, the flower, and the fruit.

It's like this enormous organism is a fractal masterpiece, and the closer you look the more clever it is. And we all depend on it, because plants are the only organisms capable of turning sunlight into usable energy. Apart from some things living off deep-sea vents, that's it. Even the energy you're using to read this right now passed through a chloroplast. It's just so cool.

It's the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don't be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it's fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don't give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That's just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don't like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.