I hounded my boss for a year when COVID hit to make it permanent. Worth every bit of annoying him.

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None of them. They don’t really work. AI image generators are trained against detectors (long story short). Any given detector only really kinda works on one model maybe.

I’ve got two for a pair of cats we adopted at the same time.

First was Stusy (pronounced stu-c). He was named after a typo. My partner and I were planning a move and I accidentally misspelled study. We looked at it and decided it was a good cat name, which it was. He was the smartest cat we ever had. He died a couple years ago too young from what the vet said was likely genetic kidney problems.

His brother, our scaredy cat, is Big O. At the cattery (our name for the local cat adoption place), he was the one that wanted nothing to do with us and so we clearly had to adopt him. Every time we pet him he vigorously cleaned that spot. I don’t remember what we were going to name him. The cattery named him Big O after the tire place where he was found. He was driven from one small town in Indiana to another, about 50 miles, before he was found in the engine compartment of someone’s car who stopped at Big O to check the meowing from the engine. He was Stusy’s best friend and while he’s still easy to startle, he lets us pet him in controlled conditions (usually us lying down and holding very still) and is the goofiest of his siblings when they’re playing.

Can confirm. Discovered that this morning.

Maybe (as in I would have to check, not that I think it likely) at highway speeds. But in any low speed area, vehicles without gas engines can be sneaky.

My company was working on an electric bus and I saw a driver sneak up on an engineer with the aforementioned city bus. They actually, legally (in some places) need noise makers at low speeds to deal with this.

May want to give that four years or so. It’s just going to be predictable, depressing slog with no avenue to affect change between here and there

Very true. I’m behind the US lens on this one so it’s easier to speak from what I experience. I know it’s… bad… elsewhere.

That’s… disingenuous. Lot of stuff happened between those points, including the murder of homosexuals for the crime of existing.

The LGBT community keeps the fight up because complacency gets our rights taken away. Justice Thomas has explicitly stated that gay marriage is on his list of wrongs* to right. To say nothing of Project 2025.

My satisfaction

At some point.

Ow. What did I do to you?!

It is, definitely. We own our home and leave it on the level 1 charger all the time. It gets us around the metro just fine, no long commutes so it’s great for us. And as someone mentioned somewhere around here, a longer charge time isn’t necessarily bad if you’re the only driver on long trips. I’m honestly more worried about having to stop in areas with only a couple chargers (Midwest here) and some asshole vandalizing them and leaving me stranded. But that’s a concern that pops up once or twice a year at best. And the various charger apps are pretty good a letting you know they’re down.

I’m certain that I won’t be able to put out an ice engine either. That’s fire people territory and I trust them to know their business.

Someone once referred to motorcyclists (specifically the ones without helmets or leathers) as “meat crayons” in front of me and I can never get it out of my head.

As the owner of a Bolt, the only significant criticism is range (mine’s a 2020, gets ~180mi comfortably on the interstate) and charging rate (2020 bolts are limited to 50 kW, so kinda specific). Not great for road trips, but otherwise fantastic. As for electric fires… yeah I wasn’t gonna be able to put that out anyway so the firefolk have it either way.

I’ve no significant opinion of India beyond anti-Modi, and that’s a product of John Oliver. Most of my engineering team are Indian and some I like, some I tolerate. And a fear of Indian traffic by reputation alone.

But you could swap “American” with “Indian” in that first paragraph, change nothing else, and it be largely (if not entirely) accurate.

My grandmother was the county coroner for a while. She was a pharmacist professionally. In those places, it’s more “give it a quick kick and say they’re dead” (she never did that) more than anything else. She only declared death, not attribute cause to my knowledge.

The other part of it is that, for whatever reason, in my county the only higher arresting authority than the sheriff was the coroner. It was her job to serve him with papers when he was being sued and, not that it ever came up, arrest him when it needed done.

Weird system.

What, my ~7 paragraphs isn’t simple? /s

You’re correct. I think I was chafing at the systems in question predisposing friendliness to mean modes that I personally am unskilled at or uncomfortable with despite my value.

My problem with your example is that the loner didn’t have comparable value. If it was supporting other things, then it failed. If it was doing something non obvious, it shouldn’t be compared to the support. It feels fallacious, though I can’t name one specifically.

System sight is itself an issue. Many companies evaluate an employee solely on some performance metric, typically tied to money. Because it’s easy (and lazy).

I’ve had several positions where my task was to keep things running. I added no value, I prevented loss. And those positions get screwed because they’re very difficult to quantify worth and very hard to see (and if it doesn’t create money, they don’t care). You only notice them when something goes wrong. Such an employee may keep everything running all year and get a “meets expectations” because there’s an upper limit on how much contribution the system sees, and the system doesn’t want to put in the effort to see better. I may have had to climb over an air handler to get to a transducer to calibrate, but that’s not sexy and even if I report such effort, it’s what I’m supposed to do (even if I wasn’t, weekend nights are weird).

No one is going to write down “keep machine running 80% of the time” because people unassociated with the task will insist that 100% is the expectation, despite that being unreasonable.

A system built of people is not a black box. We can see them and evaluate them based on the task they’re supposed to do, but the evaluators don’t want to put in the effort to do their tasks in a way that means more work for them.

There’s a comment to be made also about scope creep for a position so that a company doesn’t have to hire marketing and engineering if they can get the engineers to do it. Despite them being suboptimal for the task. Something something down with unrestrained capitalism.

Ok. I’ve lost the plot at this point and made my point. Have a good one.