confused but still an optimist

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

I love how it doesn't matter what expedition it is.

They all turn into excited kids when they meet penguins.

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 what is interesting in what happened in the escalating conflict between lewis and nico is that it divided the garage. toto found himself in a situation where the engineers, team personnel and mechanics were being pitted against one another as much as lewis and nico were, hence the infamous whole side swap. engineers were refusing to share data with the other side of the garage etc. literally mercedes was tearing itself apart and devolving into tribalism over whether they were with nico or with lewis. the last thing you want is the team trying to get one over on itself and that's a very scary thing to be at the helm of. you have to trust your personnel completely or things can not only get illegal (in both a sporting and an actual law sense) very quickly, but they can also get dangerous very quickly. you can't avoid a rivalry between people who are legitimately competing but race engineers shouldn't be coming to blows that's absolutely bonkers. i think toto was eager to diffuse any allegations of sabotage or preferential upgrading etc. before the whole garage went up like a barrel of gunpowder. the faintest whiff of something stinking would have been enough. i honestly don't think toto would have had time to gaslight anyone on purpose, he was busy running around with a fire extinguisher.

now i don't want to imply here that george is being purposefully sabotaged - i don't think we have the data to back up that kind of allegation, and i'm not sure who it would actually serve to do that within mercedes. but i do see a difference in rhetoric between toto talking to kimi and toto talking to george, and i find it interesting that the real place this is having an effect is george's relationship with his engineers. if the driver can't trust that the technical team are being open and honest with them, then it limits the driver's ability to respond to a problem, or press an advantage, or weigh up a risky move. and likewise it limits their ability to give useful technical feedback that might improve the car. driving a wedge between george and the wider mercedes team is a truly baffling thing to do on purpose, unless you're trying to pressure him to leave. without any evidence that this is toto's aim here, one has to assume that it's carelessness, or possibly a reaction to a growing fear that the garage is once again becoming divided.

ultimately i think toto's a control freak. which is not a strange thing to be if you're team principal of a formula one team, and makes sense as a learned response to someone who got the baptism of fire of managing brocedes as his first driver pairing. he has a stick and carrot approach to handling drivers, which works well with rookies and junior drivers who aren't totally secure in their careers, but is the kind of strategy that breaks down the longer a driver is with the team and the more emotionally mature a person is. toto also has an obvious preference for a distinct 1-2 driver pairing because it makes for much easier management when there are clearly defined rules and expectations. the problem is that it's really difficult to enforce that when no one is a world champion or a rookie as how you define that 1-2 gets thrown up in the air and becomes even more complicated when a few races in both drivers are still real championship contenders. george has grown out of toto's driver management style but it still works on kimi, for now, i think. in this way toto has ceased to be helpful to george because he's unable to adapt to george's more mature mindset.

i explained to her why i was seeing her, and over the next couple sessions, she became fairly confident that I didn't have ocd, just very badly-managed anxiety symptoms due to some recent traumatic events and an extraordinarily stressful job that followed me home every night. but crucially, the symptoms i had needed to be managed with an awareness of ocd - namely, that reassurance wouldn't help. that the more i gave into the compulsion to get up and check things, the harder it would be to stop doing it, and the compulsion would only spread and spread and require me to check more stuff, and even get up multiple times, convinced i wasn't entirely sure of what I saw the first time (which was already happening to some degree).

it was very, very, very difficult to keep myself from checking every night, but with some tools from the therapist, i managed to stop those rituals. i didn't end up having ocd, but there are two things that are important:

it was a prior basic understanding of the core mechanics of OCD that allowed me to get help at a critical time when i needed it - that ocd is not even primarily about cleanliness or neatness, it's about control and compulsion turning into rituals that only grow more and more demanding without management

it was ocd management techniques that helped me stop the problem from getting worse, even though i don't actually have ocd.

Actual quotes from the Apollo 11 mission:

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.