it's got vigilance and lifelink

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

but so much is actively evil, hostile or otherwise enshittified. i don't want to track my greebles with splorp i don't want to pay a teehee subscription to get round cacophany's file limits i don't need 17 ways to skrimple my scronk 7 of which secretly activate scrungly plus ultimate i don't need to link it to my flowolf account i don't want to manage it with the flowby mowby i don't care if poob does or does not has it for me. i don['t care

so i'm a custodian.

whenever someone does something cool like shit on the bathroom floor or get blood all over a toilet, i have to close the bathroom down by blocking the doorway with a CLOSED sign.

this sign is big and bright. it says CLOSED in four languages and has a do not enter symbol. it completely blocks the doorway. the only way to enter is to look directly at the sign and either move it or climb over it.

almost every single time i shut down a bathroom so i can suit up and clean a biohazard, someone will enter the bathroom with a dead-eyed, slack-jawed expression and try to wordlessly walk past me to use a stall.

and every single time, i have to block their path and say, "this bathroom is closed. there is one directly down the hall, marked by signs. please leave," and they either try to argue that THEY specifically should be allowed to use this one, as if they are god's most special little guy, or express shock even though they, again, had to contend with the CLOSED sign to enter.

often, i am standing there in the middle of cleaning up bodily fluids having to firmly repeat myself. they always leave angry or confused.

anyways, you clicked this button to send me an ask about astrology:

if y’all hated the last tapestry I made I got something even better. happy pride!

also didn’t block this one so don’t even ask

https://shorturl.at/8VD8B

The articles below are free to access, they cite their sources if you wanna check out the studies themselves.