Many years ago, I used to work in infosec. One of my employer’s clients was a big and famous brand well-established in the luxury sector. One day, a colleague of mine was sent to test their POS. Inside one, he found a single transaction for around 6M € from a credit card swipe. It wasn’t a payment made from a bank transfer or a check, just a single credit card swipe! At the time, I couldn’t even dream a card with such a credit allowance would exist. I had a pretty good living then, with money for the rent, daily expenses, and even some savings. Still, for an instant, I remember feeling like a poor child living in a house made of mud.
I agree. Seeing stuff like that and how, more often than not, the clients treated their employees and consultants was just bad for the soul. In such contexts, you understand why workers aren’t called people but “resources.” In the end, I got burned out and quit the job.
Honestly, probably the only way to save the Environment and Democracy. Too much power in the hands of the few leads to perpetual effective monarchy. It's why the Founding Fathers were against large amounts of inherited wealth, particularly inherited wealth that creates dynasties in perpetuity.
I know people don't like the Founding Fathers that much lately, and I see why, but conservatives really don't understand them, and deliberately misrepresent them, because not doing so would undercut all conservative "policies".
World's a mess because of inequality and the concentration of almost all wealth and power into the hands of a small amount of sociopaths. I honestly think the only way to solve this permanently is to cap the amount of wealth and power any individual or family can have.
I’m actually ok with wealthy people being wealthy, but when they took over the government as a way to make even more money at our expense is where I draw the line. We need to take back regulatory power, it’s the only thing that can compete at today’s scale.
Wealth is power. If you allow a tiny sliver of society to amass society warping levels of it, this is the outcome. There need to be limits and controls, or this will always happen.
We need to recognize that janitors are also integral and valuable. An MBA large company well paid executive doesn’t provide value to society in general, only private shareholders.
You ever see those comments on youtube that describe themselves as future entrepreneurs or whatever and absolutely slobber over shitty companies and rich people? Makes me cringe so fucking hard
On one hand, yeah I wish I wouldn’t have to hear about that piece of garbage ever again, but the mugshot is an exception because this little bit of justice feels like getting a nice bottle of cold water after being lost in a desert for years.
I remember when I first applied for a job in a fabrication/machine shop. One of the questions in the interview was “Do you know how to read a tape measure‽” followed by “demonstrate that you can use a tape measure” along with some other fun ones like “what is the difference between these two pieces of material” (one was aluminum, the other stainless) and other such things. I remember being surprised/disappointed that there were grown people who couldn’t read a tape measure.
I’ve worked in machine shops and drafting offices for years now, and I’m no longer surprised by people who can’t use basic measuring tools. Still disappointed though.
OK - now I’m curious, what were the most common mistakes people made reading a tape measurer? Because I’m having trouble working out how someone could screw that up lol
At least for me, that has more to do with misremembering what I measured than mismeasuring it
Can’t count how many times I the workshop I measured something, made a mental note of it, walked back to the workbench, only to have to walk back and remeasure it because now I’ve forgotten what I just measured lol
I got in the habit of writing that shit down on scraps of paper or wood. And then, of course, I got in the habit of dropping those scraps of paper or wood into the growing pile of scraps of paper or wood back in my shop and picking up the wrong one when it came time to cut.
Or they even say this is a sign of wear and means you should throw it out.
And because I enjoy sharing knowledge more than boasting I know more than others: the reason it moves is to account for the thickness of the metal hook itself.
It makes a difference if you are hooking it onto the back of something and measuring from there, OR butting it up onto something and measuring from there.
If you want accurate and consistent readings in both of these situations, the hook has to move. It basically pivots around the true point you’re measuring from.
Everywhere I’ve worked, you’d “burn an inch” or “burn a foot” meaning you don’t use the metal tab, you hold the 1" or 1’ mark at the start and measure from there.
We had a guy we called “10/16” (ten sixteenths) because he was told to grab some 5/8" (0.625" or 16mm) steel plate, but he couldn’t find any he could only find 10/16" and 12/16".
People will count the little lines on the tape and not remember if they are 1/32, 1/16, or 1/8.
Oh OK - that does make a bit more sense. Still not exactly Nobel prize material, but fucking up the fractions at least makes more sense than not knowing how to read numbers and count lines lol
Metric would help with everything lol. I dream of the day we finally make the switch
There would for sure a transition period, otherwise it would be total chaos, not just at a personal level, but an industrial one. And I don’t doubt that somepeople will continue using inches and cups until the day they die.
As for the speed limit comment, that’s a almost a non-issue - practically every car on the road today either has a setting to switch from MPH to KMPH (for digital speedometers) or for analogue speedometers it will generally tend to show both. At that point you don’t need a frame of reference, just make the number on your dashboard <= the number on the sign. That’s it. Though as you say, it would almost certainly be a case of both units being on all the signs for a long while.
It wouldn’t even take a couple generations IMO. Maybe a decade or two for official stuff to move over. I have absolutely no doubt that plenty of stubborn people will completely refuse to move over to metric for their personal lives, but that’s fine tbh. No one cares in Billy over in Idaho wants to keep measuring his ingredients in tablespoons/cups/pints/etc or say it’s a 20 mile drive instead of a 30km one. As long as professionals can all rely on things being in metric in professional settings
I worked on a site with two carpenters once, and one would measure and the other cut. One guy would call out “inch and a quarter strong” or " inch and a quarter weak" etc. Meaning 1 inch and 3/8 or one inch and 1/8. Perfect cuts every time.
Isn’t strong or weak mean where the cut needs to be on the line? Since the blade is usually 1/8", weak means that the cut is made before the line, removing the thickness of the blade on the measurement (1 1/2" becomes 1 3/8") and strong means that the cut is made after the line, leaving the actual measurement. This is how I was thought, but I am not in the construction industry.
Depends on the crews tolerances? I’ve used + or - to refer to 16ths and only call out 1/8ths. 1 1/2" would be “One and four” 1 7/16ths would be “One and three plus”
In old timey boat building they denoted feet°inches°eighths°plus so 58 5/16ths would get written as 4°10°2+
I worked with a girl who would say “4 and 3 ticks!” meaning 1/8ths. We laughed at her enough that she tried to improve and started saying “4 point 3!” that lead to a discussion about decimal inches. I really blew her mind when I showed her the scale in 12ths on carpenter squares.
There’s a great test for programmers called FizzBuzz. It’s an extremely easy task - print some numbers (maybe 1 to 100), but replace them with Fizz if they’re divisible by 3, by Buzz if they’re divisible by 5, or by FizzBuzz if they’re both.
Many reasonable people consider it way too easy - if you can write this, it doesn’t mean that you can write complex programs, or that you know the applicable languages, or that you know anything about the business domain.
But interviewers know that it’s a great test because a lot of so-called programmers still fail it.
We did a fizzbuzz interview with a candidate. He passed but I had a weird feeling about it so we asked him to do another one with 7 and 21 and he couldn’t do it even with his old code right there
Damn, dude managed to literally memorize code without having any idea of what was going on. Meanwhile, I’d spend most of my time trying to figure whether it’s div or mod that i’m supposed to use to check for the remainder of a division, I always forget which is which
It’s slightly different because all numbers divisible by 21 are also divisible by 7, so you would get all Fizz and FizzBuzz but no Buzz. So the question is, should you even be checking for Buzz, or should you make your code more efficient by eliminating those lines?
It’s good for a young dev IMO because that problem has many solutions and shows the programming style of the dev as well. But I agree that having a problem that is related to the actual work is better.
I was expected to know that one was stainless steel and the other was aluminum, but not the specific grades of stainless or aluminum. Stainless and aluminum can look very similar when they’re dirty, and 300 series stainless won’t stick to a magnet just like aluminum won’t stick to a magnet. But if you pick them up or even rap on them with your knuckles you can tell the difference.
After having a customer chew us out for something that wasn’t our fault he had us follow him to another room to discuss some more work. He borrows my tape measure and tries to measure something on the wall and the tape keeps falling over and flexing. It finally hits him in the face and hands it back to me and says “I’m not familiar with this type of tool”. I think he saw our faces turn red and eyes water up as we were trying SOOO hard not to laugh.
if the corpse is in a location that I can feasibly observe within swimming distance, it’s a problem.
so let’s say there’s a swimming pool shaped like an L, but one of the legs of that L is LOOOOOOOONG and the other is a short little stub.
If I am at the end of the long leg and the corpse is around the corner in the short stub, it would require me to swim all the way to the corner to observe it, and if that distance is longer than I can swim, then I will probably be ok.
If I am in the little stub of the L, and line of sight observation of the corpse is just a few strokes to the corner, I WILL NOT BE OK.
It’s also a matter of relative mass.
If the pool had a drowned mouse in it, I will be sad. I might leave the water until the corpse is removed and then return to the water after it’s gone through the filtration system for a little bit (a few minutes).
If the pool had a drowned squirrel in it, I will be alarmed. I will definitely leave the water and refuse to enter until the corpse has been gone for at least a few hours of filtration.
If the pool has a drowned raccoon, cat, fox, or small dog it it, I will be upset. I’m out of the water and concerned that nobody told me first, and I’m not going back in for the rest of the day.
If the pool has a drowned medium sized dog, coyote, baby goat, infant or toddler, or animal of similar mass in it, I’ll be downright angry. I’m not going to that pool for a week, or maybe even a month.
Once the corpse in question reaches the mass of an adolescent human, I’m gone from that pool for the remainder of its open season.
If an adult human or larger died or was dumped in that pool, I’m never going to that pool again.
Hm… Perhaps you’re right. I might consider downgrading it on my scale, but then again it’s still generally more potentially contaminated biomass than a squirrel though.
Working third shift where the majority of my duties are waiting for a phone to ring and babysitting an empty building lest it burn down while nobody’s watching leaves me with more Noggin Time than most people have, so I appreciate you providing me with something to meditate upon :3
Raccoons also pose a greater risk than the others mentioned because their feces can contain a specific roundworm parasite’s eggs which are impervious to chlorine.
You would need to perform a much stricter disinfection.
Here is some of the important stuff from the article.
Rather than feeding ducks bread, bird enthusiasts can instead offer them treats like:
Halved grapes (be sure to cut them in half to prevent choking)
Cracked corn
Thawed frozen peas
Barley
Oats
Birdseed
Duck pellets
Even with these healthier snacks, Norris says it’s still important to only feed ducks in moderation. If the birds, especially the ducklings, become reliant on people for their food, they may stop foraging or engaging in their other natural behaviors.
“You don’t need to bring a whole bag of seed, a whole bag of grapes,” Norris says, “You don’t want to just throw a whole bunch of stuff at them.” Instead, a handful of snacks should suffice.
This is the first time I’ve been alerted to a GDPR related issue. Is this becoming a common issue for people in the EU?
I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that’s not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles
I’m not a fighter pilot, but when I think “ejection”, can’t imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesn’t have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
I learned all the different ways to use the keyboard in Windows and never looked back. The best of both worlds, although relearning everything now that I’ve switched to Linux is proving a challenge. I’m starting to think that the Linux GUIs don’t have true keyboard accessibility.
My hyper focus makes me a good programmer. Unfortunately I only activate it every couple days. With their powers combined… I’m worth keeping employed. 👍🏻
Oh god, I feel this in my soul. I feel so fortunate that most people only see the running average of my work output and not a live feed of what I’m actually spending my time doing.
I read the source article but I’m not seeing a reference to what you’re quoting? It mentions that the government are planning to create an “independent” regulatory body that oversees media outlets and can issue them fines if they don’t behave in a way that the “independent” body sees fit, i.e. what the current government thinks is right or wrong, but I didn’t see anything about this being actual policy or anything mentioning hamas websites.
That’s the current UK policy, which of course condemns discussion on the massacres of babies (of which no proof has been given and which the White House has been forced to retract statements regarding) as “glorifying terrorism.”
Netanyahu is further to the right than the Tories, is more emotionally invested in the conflict, and has more to lose if pro-Hamas sentiment spreads. Moreover, given the context of how the Israeli government has enforced media laws in the past, it’s not that far of a stretch. The big leap being made I think is that the government is “planning” to do this, not that it’s already done so.
That’s the current UK policy, which of course condemns discussion on the massacres of babies
Does it condemn discussion of Hamas or does it condemn *glorification *of Hamas? There’s definitely a difference. I would find it hard to believe there’s an explicit law that prevents people discussing the massacres of babies.
From the article:
At a pro-Palestinian rally in Manchester on 8 October, a day after Hamas attacked Israel killing hundreds of civilians, a man wearing a red football shirt with “Palestine” written on the back told the crowd: “We have all seen the scenes and it is the most inspiring act of resistance.”
Emphasis mine. He’s not in trouble for discussing Hamas, he’s in trouble for glorifying the massacre. Not really the same thing as visiting a website.
But anyway, this is a bit of a distraction as we’re talking about Israeli policy, not the UK’s. I was just clarifying that the parent user made a statement as if it were a law, but it’s not, and the link to the article doesn’t mention anything about it being a crime to visit a Hamas website. From what I understand from the article the planning is about fining media outlets that I assume won’t toe the party line, not individual people for visiting websites. Yes, I agree, it’s not a stretch to assume this could be a thing in the future, but based on the linked article it doesn’t seem to be the case right now.
That and the outright censorship you see escalating all over the western world points to one thing - the massive failure of the western propaganda model itself.
lemmy.ml
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