lovers

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

So my grandma turned away from him and to the other mom and said “I have another daughter. She doesn’t go to this school and she’s a star softball player with her own bat. You can tell your daughter to stop bothering mine or you can drive her to the hospital with a shattered jaw. That’s your choice.” And walked out.

Few months later that girl stole a necklace from my aunt. My grandma called the cops and they all drove to her house to get it back. The cop came outside with it and said he told the family my grandma wouldn’t press charges if they gave it back. My grandma took the necklace and said “Then you’re going to have to go in and tell them you lied because I am pressing charges. She’s a thief and I want her treated like one.”

She was a nurse up until recently (finally retired after trying and failing 4 times)

She got into it a little later in life and worked as an army nurse for a while before working regularly as a hospital nurse.

Most of the other nurses were either also new and young and did what they were told or older and experienced and were used to being bullied by the doctors. As she had dealt with soldiers and had to learn to tell army dudes what to do, she had no interest in letting doctors treat her less than them.

At her hospital the doctors would go into a room looking for something, ransack it, then leave it messy for a nurse to clean up. The first time one tried that on her she stood in the door and said he wasn’t leaving until he cleaned his mess. He tried to say he was busy and couldn’t take the time to clean and she said if someone started dying she’d let him know, and didn’t move until he cleaned his mess.

She became a terror to the doctors who she did not let give any shit. If she paged a doctor and he didn’t come right away, he needed a good reason and lying wouldn’t work because the nurses would tattle and say he was doing a crossword and ignored her, so if she paged they had to go after her or else she’d yell at them.

One time in particular a doctor was chatting with a nurse and didn’t notice she’d paged him five times. When he realized he went running down the hall, saying “Out of my way, [name] is mad at me!”

When my moms gallbladder was inflamed and near bursting after my brother was born, she went to my grandmas hospital. They told her she was fine and to wait, while she was on the floor holding her stomach and crying. My dad called my grandma and told her the situation so she marched down to the ER and said “That’s my daughter, what time today can you get her in for surgery?” When they tried to say they thought she should go home my grandma wouldn’t let them. Luckily they got her into surgery in time to avoid it bursting.

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

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.

We had some absolutely criminal negligence in the building of the Quebec Bridge, with multiple engineering firms ignoring real signs of structural issues.

There is some debate about this, but most engineers in Canada agree this started a new ritual upon graduation with a B. Eng from any Canadian university. You attend a ceremony upon graduation and are given an Iron Ring.

You wear it on the pinky of your dominant hand, so it touches any paper you are asked to sign. Every time you sign off on something in your capacity as an engineer, you are reminded of your duties and obligations.

I have engineers in my family, and it is considered a sacred oath. Much like doctors, Canadian engineers have an ethos to do no harm.

This was the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea.

This happened due to a series of incidents that all came back to the same thing: the owner was not an engineer and made his own modifications to change the building from apartments into a mall and maximize floor space, a sentence that here means "removed a shitload of necessary visible support structures and weakened the remaining ones while skimping on or even skipping necessary interior structures."

The building collapsed only five years after completion.

There was a meeting going on during the collapse as to whether the mall should be evacuated, with its owner-slash-"designer" saying no because he didn't want to lose the sales revenue. He and the other executives, of course, left before terminal collapse. If you're wondering how they pulled that off: the warning signs started in April. The building collapsed on 29 June. The terminal collapse began circa 5p KST and became complete at 5:52p. In between those two times, the owner still refused to close the mall.

502 people died.

This is the second-deadliest non-deliberate building collapse in recorded history.

This is what happens when a greedy person who doesn't know engineering design is allowed to build and own a mall.

Something something Cybertruck....

Something something data center....

Something something AI.

An engineer DID actually try to stop the owner from doing this. He got fired for his pains, although when the courts got involved he was able to show he had no responsibility for the collapse.

Cue Ilya making a rare appearance at Bood's Barbeque because it's the team's chance to meet little Milo for the first time. Everyone congratulates the parents and oohs and aaws at Milo. Cue Bood asking "anyone want to hold him?"

And Ilya is the first to volunteer, already reaching out his hands. And Bood, like any new parent, starts the "Alright here we go, now be careful to support the head-" only to trail off because Ilya does not need any help. For some strange reason, Ilya fucking Rozanov is a pro at holding a baby, murmuring to him in Russian swaying him softly in his arms.

The Groupchat ("CenBros NO CAP") goes wild because how the fuck is Rozy so good with babies. And then one of the rookies is like "maybe he has a baby??" and at first everyone scoffs because, hello. This is Ilya Rozanov we're talking about.

On second thought, though.

Ilya did move to Ottawa seemingly out of nowhere.

He did buy a house in the suburbs.

He is strangely secretive about who he's texting all the time.

He is skipping almost every team event.

Suddenly it all makes sense. Ilya has a girlfriend (wife??) and he moved to Ottawa for her so that they could raise their child together. And of course he's almost never attending a team outing or leaving early, he has a child at home! Of course he's secretive about it, Ottawa or not he's still Ilya fucking Rozanov, papped every second day. It only makes sense that he'd want to protect the identiy of his girlfriend (wife??) and child.

The final piece of evidence is overheard by Holmberg and Young on a random Thurday after practice. Ilya clearly hasn't noticed them as he walks to his car, a fond smile on his face and obviously focused on his phone call. "Goodnight, I miss you very much. I will be home soon", he says. It's followed by laughter and Ilya adding that "Yes, of course is necessary! I have been away all day, my daughter must hear me say goodnight to her."

Holmberg and Young (standing next to Young's car and therefore hidden from Ilya's view) stare at each other with open mouths and wide eyes. Because holy fucking shit Rozy just confirmed he has a daughter?? And based on the conversation also a girlfriend/wife??

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

HE IS A DUDE!

2) Many vapes contain diacetyl, which, when inhaled causes popcorn lung, or scarring of the lung

3) Ultrafine particles, when being inhaled, can be lodged in the trachea (not good!)

4) Ultrafine particles can also constrict the arteries in the lungs potentially causing A HEART ATTACK

body language masterlist

a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

550 words to say instead of fuckin said

638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again