#Machine learning for the fail

[thisismenow3]

Just pay people to do things!!!!! You know who can make a meal plan? A cook, a nutritionist, a person with years of cooking experience for large groups, etc. We have a world that is on fire and people who are damn near close with low wages, high expenses. Just. Fucking. Employ. PEOPLE!!!!!

[sysig]

Greetings, human! ♥ (Patreon)

[headphonemouse]

i dont even feel like what i do for work is work, really. i go to a location. i get beamed with psychic attacks. i take a lunch time nap. i get beamed with psychic attacks. lately ive been reading shoujo manga on my breaks. i go home. every two weeks my bank balance goes up without any notice or warning, completely unrelated to the earlier tribulations

[cursed-clock-shop]

All of the Fails have swallowed a clock at some point in their lives. This causes them to wake up at the same time every day. Unfortunately, none of them were set to the same time, so Marietta had to make a schedule to keep track of when the kids wake up.

[doedipus]

a large amount of time I've been spending on -untitled undefined scope original fiction project- since the last time I posted about it has been trying to develop the protagonist concept I came up with last summer or whatever into like, a character that would feel real and era appropriate.

it's fun research to do. naturally a lot of the details I assigned to her are things that I already think are cool, so it's been a lot of fun trying to trace her traits back through the relatively recent past, getting reminded of how much things have changed, or where the gaps in my intuition are, and then doing a flurry of reading to get a sense for exactly how someone like her and the people around her could have happened and what her life was probably like leading up to her present day. hopefully this results in some good good verisimilitude.

[silent-partner-412]

there are so many youtube videos that are like “tears of the kingdom is a disappointing masterpiece” or “tears of the kingdom is a flawed 10/10” like can we all just be honest with ourselves and say the game was fucking mid because everything cool about it was underdeveloped

[yngai]

what i like about ada's report, & i'll get into it more eventually, is that despite it being ada explaining the plot (& her motivations) to you directly, it presents an interesting relationship between ada, a known liar & manipulator, & the audience. while she withholds information from other characters & skirts about on mystery throughout RE4 & separate ways, there is one person to whom she doesn't lie, to whom she does tell the truth, at least a part of it, & that is you, the player. it is a very neat narrative device that wouldn't work as well in a different medium

[tankbredgrunt]

You’re just trying to provoke a reaction. I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you.

[ghostleeart]

babys first laser cutter project

[freebooter4ever]

one of the biggest ironies of my life that i was thinking about yesterday - i know that drag and drop / node-based 'coding' helps a wider (usually more visual) variety of brain types learn to program. this was the entire basis of the research group i was on for seven years in the burgh, and i completely agree with and support it. but im not that way at ALL. im that stereotype who likes pure code, and finds it easier to read the language and find patterns in the words/numbers/formatted lines than in nodes. i HATE nodes, and sometimes even fellow programmers look at me like im crazy for it.

Like dont give me that pretty but controlled interface, i want to know whats underneath.

[dirt-str1der]

Kiryu was so beating the fuck out of those vending machines as a child he would buy something and it would get janked up and stuck and he would stare at it before punching it so hard the glass explodes (essence of mantis shrimp) and then hed take his candy and leave

[makerofmadness]

I've seen AI translations as a multilingual person they use them in google translate and stuff now and google translate always kinda sucked but it just got worse when it started using AI. Like machine translators literally just can never be reliable because by the nature of what they are they struggle with things like slang and just cannot think about context-

And i hadn't tried this pre-AI so I don't know if this is the AI's fault or Google's fault but one of them is so obviously anglophone-based it's absurd. It translated 赤子 in Japanese into عزیزم Farsi. These words are nothing alike unless you know that they can both be worded in English as "baby" despite meaning "baby" in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WAYS, the former referring to literal newborn infants and the latter being a term of endearment. Baby in English is both of these things, 赤子 and عزیزم are only one and the other respectively. But google translate treats them as if they work like the English word because...????

For frick's sake to translate 赤子 to Farsi just use نوزاد it actually refers to infants it literally just actually is the translation of the word. This is why you get a human to translate, machine translators can't even get information that you literally just have to change the language of Wikipedia to find out. God.

oh yeah btw in case this is ever changed:

Evidence of the source of my suffering right here

@ duolingo users

More ai shit taking jobs

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA The Jerusalem Post di Oggi mercoledì, 09 ottobre 2024

[fazcinatingblog]

The invigilator allocated me to computer number 58 and I said to him "Trent number, that's Trent number!!!!" No I'm fine, I don't need help at all, I'm normal

[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[quillreplies]

real talk tho, the number one skill you should learn is to try.

yes there are fail states for things like cooking, laundry, and a myriad other things but like, not everything is changing a tire, not everything has a fail state of ‘you die’ so the best skill you can ever teach yourself is to not be afraid of trying to do something

After seeing the dad how do I channel, I really wanted this one. I searched for it and, tada! Mom how do I? Seems rather new, but I love it anyway.