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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I hope this is the case, but I don’t really think so. I got a call Thursday from a friend and he told me he and his whole department were losing their jobs. He was pretty upset about it. Apparently management decided they could be replaced with AI.

    He and his team manage a medium sized in-house developed management application. It’s a combination of stock management, product management and sales tools. Because the products their company sells are pretty unique, they never found a good off the shelf application to do everything they wanted. So they developed their own and connected it to the off the shelf applications they have for ERP and CRM. Pretty slick and his team and him are praised across the company.

    Apparently the IT manager had gotten a very impressive demo for Microsoft Power BI with AI integration. Using AI tools to realtime develop an application. He was so impressed he decided they were going to fire the in-house team and have an external company use the AI to develop a replacement tool. The external company said they could use very cheap people as the AI would do basically all the work. And it would be done before the notice on the current team ran out (2 months).

    He called me kinda in shock about the whole thing. Like that’s not realistic right? That’s not something Power BI can do? With or without AI? And even with AI it can’t do that on such short notice? I told him he was right, that’s not how anything works and the IT manager got duped. Either way, they are out on their ass. Now they are very skilled people and will probably find new jobs right away, but it still sucks ass. AI sucks!


  • The word die can mean end of life, but has an alternative regular meaning: stopped working.

    We use it all the time, for example “I don’t know what happened, I was driving along and the engine just died.” “Due to bad weather my power died.” “I wanted to game, but my controller died.”

    Words can have different meaning and the verb die has a lot of meanings. And there is also a noun die, which is also in common use.

    died; dying ˈdī-iŋ

    intransitive verb

    1: to pass from physical life : EXPIRE died at the age of 56 die young died from his injuries a dying tree

    2a: to pass out of existence : CEASE their anger died at these words

    2b: to disappear or subside gradually often used with away, down, or out the storm died down

    3a: SINK, LANGUISH dying from fatigue

    3b: to long keenly or desperately dying to go

    3c: to be overwhelmed by emotion die of embarrassment

    4a: to cease functioning : STOP the motor died

    4b: to end in failure the bill died in committee

    5: to become indifferent die to worldly things




  • Eli5: Call company that installs solar panels. Give them a bunch of money (thousands to tens of thousands depending). Wait 20 years to get that money back on the lower energy bill. Replace the whole system because it is obsolete. Rince repeat.

    For real totally disconnecting from the power grid is a bad idea. That means you need a lot more equipment and battery storage. This increases the investment significantly, without much upside. It also prevents you from selling the power you generate but don’t need back to the power company (but depending on where you live this might not be a thing due to overproduction).

    Also depending on you latitude and local climate it may be nearly impossible to go fully off grid without a huge system. Where I live we have about 6 weeks of very little to no sun (low sun combined with a lot of clouds and snow). That means all the power you need during that time needs to be collected previously and stored. This during a time it’s cold af so the power usage is high (using heat pumps for warming the house, which is very efficient). This means a lot of batteries and a lot of solar panels, just to get through these 6 weeks. It could easily triple the costs or more, even if you have the room for it to begin with.

    I would analyse the power usage and see where you can save money on. 300 per month seems very high. Where I live energy is much more expensive than in the US and my bill is closer to 100 per month.

    Just call a company, have some panels installed for say 2500-5000 bucks depending on how much room you have on the roof and if you need upgrades to your power system. This will save you at least 50 per month on the bill. But be aware the ROI will be on the order of 10-15 years at least and more if you are unlucky. Saving energy is free and means money in your pocket right away.




  • When they got swept away by the water with their bikes, the movie switches to a montage of them getting the bikes transported to their garage. There they tear down the bikes, replace damage parts, do paint jobs. With a full 10 minute part about how they troubleshooted a misfiring issue on one of the bikes and the full rebuild of a carburateur. There’s even a human interest part where they argue over replacing a part, some of them want to replace the part, others want to attempt a repair. Till one of the wraiths shares a story about how they were a kid working on old bikes with their dad and his dad never believed in throwing parts out, he could always repair it. So they contact a necromancer, which revives the dad for him to fix the part with his dad. And then the movie resumes like normal.




  • For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another. Considering the compelling record evidence about the physical, mental, and emotional impact of unwanted pregnancies on the women who are forced by law to carry them to term (as well as on their other living children), the Court finds that, until the pregnancy is viable, a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her health remains private and protected, i.e., remains her business and her business alone. When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then – and only then – should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it




  • So they fucked up one time 50 years ago and thus the entire process is deemed to be flawed? Mistakes were made, mistakes are going to be made and as long as we learn from them and fix our mistakes, that’s just a normal part of life.

    Look at any tech, machine or industry we have today and you can see how many people died and suffered for those things to exist today. Hydro power has killed over a hundred thousand people and has destroyed entire eco systems, we still consider that clean and safe power. Cars kill people every day and planes still fall out of the sky sometimes. I still feel perfectly safe stepping into my car and driving on the road. So you saying “hug that shit” is like I’m supposed to fear my car, because of the horrible accidents that happen every day.

    I can’t find the source for you claiming higher cases of thyroid cancer and leukemia due to the leak of hazardous materials from the Asse-II mine. I can find plenty of FUD articles from anti-nuclear websites, but no actual peer reviewed research.