Worth noting that hand written/typed notes are admissible in court. It can be handy for he-said-she-said situations, because the party with the notes nearly always wins when the other party can’t back up their side.

DEI for me, not for thee. “Removing DEI” is just code for “shifting DEI to white cishet Christian men”.

They’ll call it a meritocracy to make themselves feel better. But it’s just DEI aimed at white men.

Yeah, it’s quickly going to become the “hospital dumped me on the corner because they didn’t want me to die in their bed” horror story. Except we likely won’t even hear the horror stories, because they’ll dump them in remote places where they won’t get found until after they’re dead.

Yup, the “first one is free” deal is always a trap.

Pretty sure lots of the “deleted” posts were actually removed by the mods. Rule 3 seems to be a popular justification for post removal in this community, and it basically outlaws all of the “my server is having this issue, anyone got any ideas” types of posts that OP has cited.

While I agree it’s popular for removing posts, maybe it shouldn’t be. If we want users to organically find Lemmy, one of the best ways to do that is the same way users end up at Reddit: By googling an error code, and finding a five year old “Edit: I figured it out. Here is what I did” post.

Or maybe we just need to make (and properly support) a community that is dedicated to those kinds of posts. If a “my server is broken plz help” post isn’t relevant to /c/[email protected], maybe we need to make a /c/SelfHostedSupport to redirect the Rule 3 posts to.

My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later. In reality, if someone was truly concerned about avoiding doxxing, they’d just switch accounts. Because anyone can spin up a single-user instance, federate to scrape content from all the communities they want, and then simply refuse to respect delete requests.

Because when you delete something on a Lemmy instance, the instance simply sends a delete request to all the other instances that federated with it. But those other instances can easily ignore the delete request and retain the deleted content for as long as they want.

That’s also part of why it’s so stupid that AI crawlers are scraping Lemmy and thrashing instance owners’ rate limits. The AI crawler could just set up a new instance and automatically gather the content via federation. But instead, they just send crawler bots. Because fuck the instance owners, I got my content either way and using a crawler bot didn’t require me to learn how federation works.

Or enjoy live shows. Vegas has a thriving live events industry.

I can confirm with firsthand experience that crows fucking love unsalted cashews. I don’t know if it’s the flavor, distinctive shape, or the texture, but there was a family of crows at my old house that used to go bugfuck wild when I gave them cashews.

I used to buy them in bulk as a snack, so I always had a lot on hand. I’d usually put them in a little plastic cup if I was going outside. One time I spilled some on the patio and didn’t bother cleaning them up. The next time I was outside and had a cup of them, that family of crows was extremely interested. I left a few on the patio as an experiment and went back inside. As soon as I was inside, they were on those cashews like flies on shit.

From then on, whenever I happened to take that plastic cup outside, I’d have a family of crows waiting for the traditional offering of cashews.

Unfortunately, one learned the exact wrong lesson from this, and started measuring lower lines of code produced as better… Which worked for a while, but lead to a lot of weirdness around new features for no particular reason.

Hey boss, I just got that new feature submitted for review. I managed to get it all on a single line of code! No, that one line has like 5000 characters, why do you ask?

And here we have our employee of the year! He accidentally turned left instead of right, and ended up circumnavigating the entire globe. While most of you only use 2 miles to go from A to B, he used 24899. Isn’t that incredible?

Measuring this and PR counts.

Ah yes, the “I want to see 1000 lines of code, even if it only takes 50” type of manager.

Reminds me of an old story where a pizza place held a competition among the employees, to see which cashier could convince the most people to upgrade their medium pizzas to a large. The POS system was set to track whenever a medium was upgraded, and would award the cashier one point. The employee with the most points each week won something like free movie tickets.

Employees would put on their best salesmen pitches, trying to get customers to upgrade their medium orders to larges. But one cashier always won, pretty much without exception. He was going to see a new movie every week for free. And he didn’t even seem to be trying.

His trick was that whenever a customer ordered a large, he would just put it in as a medium and then immediately upgrade it. It gave him the point for the upgrade, with zero actual sales effort on his part. So every time he had a customer order a large, he got a point by default. Customer ordered three large pizzas? Three points. He didn’t even bother trying to convince people to upgrade their pizza sizes, because the free points from every large order were already enough to let him win every week.

The funny part is that they aren’t even historically accurate crosses. The cross was more like a capital T. The upright post was buried in the ground like a fence pole, with a square peg carved at the top. The actual cross part was just the crossbar, with a matching square hole carved in it. The crossbar was lifted up and set on top of that peg.

The square peg likely only stuck out an inch or two from the top of the T, and that was mostly just to make it more durable, as the peg wore down with use but burying the posts was a labor intensive process. They didn’t want to bury a new post for every single crucifixion, so they made the posts reusable and just swapped out the crossbars.

When Jesus carried his cross to Calvary, he was only carrying the top of the T. But over time, to distinguish it from the capital T, Christians started using the modern cross with the accentuated peg, and it eventually morphed into the modern cross that we all recognize today.

In event rigging, the standard safety factor is actually 7:1. So if a motor is rated for 1 ton, it can be expected to actually hold 7 tons. The extra safety factor is mostly because of shock loads, where the rig weighs a lot more when it bounces. Like if you’re lifting your entire rig off the ground and stop the motors, it will tend to bounce slightly as the motors all click off at the same time. And that bounce causes the rig to exert a lot more force than a simple static load. Dynamic load probably isn’t a major concern for permanent structures, (probably why you can get away with only 20% as standard) but it’s a big concern for motors and truss that move around a lot.

Especially in indoor events (where wind is a negligible factor), the vast majority of failures are caused by dynamic loads or by one motor being overloaded compared to the rest. When that overloaded motor fails, that can cascade to other motors as they are suddenly holding more weight than expected. Imagine lifting a uniform load using rigid box truss, but one motor on the end of the truss is slightly higher than the rest. That one motor will end up holding a lot more weight than the rest. And if that motor on the end fails, you have just caused a shock load on the next motor, as the rig settles onto it. And if you’re already nearing your weight limits, that single failure can quickly cascade into the entire rig collapsing.

Better rigging systems actually have weight sensors on each motor, so you can know exactly when one motor is overloaded. But the vast majority of event rigging isn’t done using the nice stuff. It’s usually done using the chain motors that have been rebuilt 3 times in the past decade.

Oh, I don’t disagree. But I wasn’t a rigger for that show. I was just a light board op, who happened to overhear the lead rigger drop the “ChatGPT hallucinated and I was too stupid to double-check it” line. I just ran the “rigger grossly miscalculated the weight of this screen” alert up the flagpole, but it ultimately wasn’t my name on the rig. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But once that was pointed out and they realized the mistake, that’s when they busted out the lift and started hanging more motors. So at least they accepted the mistake and fixed it, instead of just brushing it off.

Yeah, standard safety factor in my area is 7:1. So if you expect 1 ton of load, you actually rate your rig for 7 tons. But that safety factor is mostly to account for things like shock loads, where gear “weighs” more when it bounces. So like if all of your motors stop moving at the same time and the rig bounces slightly, it will temporarily put more weight on the motors than the static load normally would. So if you hang 1 ton on a motor that is rated to fail at 1.5 tons, you can easily cause a failure when the load bounces.

The safety factor also helps add a buffer for things like one motor being slightly more loaded than the rest. Even a small discrepancy can cause huge weight differences where one motor is holding a lot more weight than the rest. The 7:1 factor helps buffer that, where the motor won’t fail just because it’s slightly higher than the rest.

This is the truly scary part for students using LLMs. We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate weight distribution. Doctors who don’t know how to read an EKG. Lawyers who lose cases they should have won, because they didn’t follow basic procedures.

I work in live events. I do things like hanging like array speakers for concerts. Just last month, I was on a show that was hanging an LED wall behind the stage. A LED wall is made up of individual panels, which lock together and form a solid screen in the size and shape you need. There have been several high-profile LED wall collapses, because they’re huge, heavy, and easy to fuck up. And when they collapse, people get seriously injured.

Typically, you build them by hanging truss from chain motors, and then mounting the screen to the truss. The screen gets built in rows, with one row getting snapped together across the truss, then the truss is raised slightly, then you snap the next row on. Repeat until the screen is at the desired size. So this means the screen gets heavier and heavier as you build it. Part of the reason why collapses can be so dangerous is because it often happens while the screen is actively being worked on. You’ll have crew underneath the truss, hanging panels to build the next row. And then suddenly the chain motors start to slip because they quietly blew right past their weight limits as the crew added additional weight with each row.

While working that gig, I overheard the lead rigger (the one in charge of calculating weight distribution on the hanging motors, designing the truss system to hold everything, deciding exactly where the motors should be mounted, etc) utter the words “yeah, ChatGPT says these panels are only 25 pounds each. That means we’re right at our weight limit. We should be good.”

In stagehand work, we use 25 pound sandbags all the time. I know what 25 pounds feels like. The same way a farmer would be able to feel if a hay bale is too light. I had been snapping these panels together all morning, and I knew without a doubt that they didn’t feel like 25 pounds. I looked up the actual tech specs directly from the LED panel’s manufacturer. Each panel was 35 pounds, not 25.

ChatGPT just hallucinated the 25 pound weight, and the dumbass rigger didn’t bother to double check any of it. We were going to be ~40% over our chain motors’ posted weight ratings, and needed like four extra motors to help carry the load. The screen was already halfway built on the truss, so hanging new motors was a giant pain in the ass. It required a scissor lift and climbing riggers to go install new pick points. It easily added an extra hour to the install, while we just sat and waited for the riggers to work.

That rigger is still working in the industry. I hope that it was a learning experience for him.

There is a notable part of the GOP that does genuinely seem to want to protect kids. I don’t want to believe that people wake up in the morning like a mustache-twirling villain, plotting about how they can go about hurting kids the most efficiently today. This is especially true among conservative voters, who often vote because they’ve been propagandized to believe that liberals actually want to hurt their kids. I do believe that in many cases, their intentions on protecting kids are good.

But you know what the road to hell is paved with. The problem is that they have a really fucking warped idea of what “protecting children” entails. So they tend to put a lot of energy into things like anti-LGBT legislation, encouraging “traditional values” by stripping kids of freedoms, and enacting Orwellian surveillance laws in the name of “protecting the kids”.

But I guess even a broken clock can be right every now and then. If they were willing to crack down on Grok’s CSAM, I’d take the win even if I don’t normally agree with them.

I’d argue that the HP stripe logo is just as bad:

The KIA logo always reads as “KN” to me, but at least I can fucking read it. The first time I saw the new HP logo I legitimately didn’t know what I was looking at. lip? lili? lqi? lgi? I basically always end up reading it as “lip” instead of “hp”.

And value is a perception, not an objective measure.

This is the key takeaway tbh. People tend to equate “price” with “value”, but only when they’re initially looking at the price of something. This “price≈value” thing is easy to explain for anyone who has become the de facto tech support person for their family. Your aunt calls you up one day. “Hey, you work with computers. Can you come take a look at mine? It started acting up…” You, being a good nibling, agree to come take a look. You’ll even do it for free. You troubleshoot your aunt’s computer, and get it working again. You uninstall all of the bloatware, nuke all of the adware toolbars, get her browser set up with uBlock Origin, run virus and malware scans, etc… It needs a pretty deep clean, but you get it done.

And here is the tricky part… Six months later, the computer starts acting up again. And instead of recognizing that maybe she needs to stop clicking on every “hot singles in your area” banner, your aunt blames you for breaking her computer. Because “you touched it last, so it must have been you.” Never mind the fact that she is the one who touches it every day.

The reason for this is because your expertise has no value in her mind. You did the work for free, so it is valueless. If you charged her a small amount and called it the Friends & Family Discount™️ then you’d get a lot more respect when it needs to be fixed again. Because she pays you for this, you clearly do this for a living, you know what you’re talking about, your expertise has value. But the issue is that if you try to charge her for it now, she’ll balk. Because your lack of value has already been cemented in her mind, so suddenly being asked to pay for it will be an extremely hard sell.

And that’s essentially what happens whenever streaming services increase their prices. The reason for the increase doesn’t actually matter. It could be a simple inflation adjustment. It could be rising licensing costs. It could be increased technology prices making server maintenance more expensive. It could be because the company is trying to create more original content to give viewers fresh stuff to watch. But none of that matters, because the value has already been locked into peoples’ minds. They’ll balk when the price increases, because they don’t see it as an immediate increase in value.

For the inverse of this, I’m reminded of an old story about computer mice… There was a computer shop that sold several different types of computer mice. Everyone in the store knew that one specific mouse was the king. It felt good, it was so durable it basically never got returned, and it had decent features. And it was also one of the cheapest mice that the store sold. Every single POS and computer in the store used this specific mouse, and most of the employees used it at home too, because it was simply the best value out of the entire selection. But the mouse sold really poorly.

The employees would watch people buy “premium” mice that were 20x the cost, and half the quality. And sure, that may be good for commission, but the store was tired of dealing with RMAs, customer complaints about bad mice, etc… And no matter how much they tried to push this cheap mouse, customers wouldn’t budge. They wanted their premium mouse, not some cheap imitation.

And so the store manager did something a little counterintuitive… They increased the price. By a lot. They put this cheap mouse juuuuust below the price of the premium mice that sold so well. And suddenly, it started flying off the shelves. The store could barely keep it stocked. Because now customers were seeing the high (but not quite premium) price, and equating it with a high value. They started to feel like they were getting a good deal, instead of potentially getting swindled by a cheap product. The mouse got good reviews and was easily able to compete with the more premium mice. But only because people’s first impressions for it came from the fact that its price made it seem like a good value.