TheAvaliEngineer

"how dare you say we piss on the poor" in response to someone misinterpreting your post

"_ isnt gonna fuck you" for suck up behavior

"woah. should we tell everyone? should we throw a party?" for who the fuck cares

"and what if the world was made of pudding" for when would this ever matter.

"and sharks are smooth both ways" for a group of people heatedly arguing with 1 guy who is fucking with them all

“30-50 wild hogs” for someone making ABSURD excuses for violence.

“what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament” for how do you know that without being a part of it.

“anyone in this thread smoke weed” for the shit you people are saying is so off topic this might as well be a general discussion forum

“dogs are boys and cats are girls” for ooh ur mindset did not grow past 4th grade, huh

“color theory in a childrens hospital” for bending over backwards to not agree that YEA, that thing Came Off Weird

“you are a tar pit” for someone finding any reason to respond with outrage.

“is the __ in the room with us right now?” for I Don’t Think That’s Real.

“bean soup? im allergic to beans!” for ik this doesn’t work for you, but that’s not a flaw. not everything can be for you.

You read about airlines accidents attributed to pilot error, and almost universally you find overworked, overtired people who have to deal with inadequate training, and poorly maintained equipment. Often investigations uncover a pattern of management ignoring problems that pilots regularly have to deal with. Out-of-date terrain data, false sensor readings, confusing systems presentation, fatigue.

The cargo airline industry fights to keep its pilots exempt from crew rest requirements and a fatigued crew crashes a mile short of the runway. Only the two crew on board die, so really it’s no big deal, right?

Amtrak builds a new bypass to cut 10 minutes off the travel time from Portland to Seattle but doesn’t give the engineers enough training to prepare them for it, nor installs adequate signage to warn of a 30mph curve, so on the inaugural run the engineer hits the curve at 80 mph.

Construction on a nuclear power plant runs into trouble and so to make a key pressure-bearing component fit, they install an S-bend around a pipe, which causes falsely water level readings. Operators open a valve to reduce what they think is excessively high pressure in the reactor and it melts down.

QC should have caught it.

if QC didn't/couldn't catch it, it should have been engineered redundantly so that one bad weld wouldn't cause total collapse, and it should have been subjected to regular inspections.

if there is no way to get around a single cracked weld as a failure mode, it should have been designed with the knowledge that eventual failure is effectively inevitable as stress fractures and corrosion weaken the joint over time, i.e., fail-safes should have been in place.

so if that's the case, if there are supposed to be reduncancies, why do welders keep taking the blame?

a) Welds are most often made by human welders, especially in critical applications like nuclear reactors, aerospace parts, pipelines, bridges and buildings, and repair/retrofitting of existing parts (e.g. automotive repair, though mostly not auto fab anymore) where the use of robots is unfeasible. this means that all the above issues re: "operator error" apply. There's a human being you can pass the buck to and say "he did it."

b) Welds (or, more often, the surrounding HAZ) are almost invariably the point of failure when a welded part is subjected to extreme stress. If you find your big important contraption (plane, boat, bridge, nuclear reactor, whatever) in pieces and it's cracked along the welds, the welder is going to logically be the person you blame. Not the engineer (or lack thereof), not the QC department (or lack thereof), not the boss that didn't provide adequate time, materials, or conditions to make a cleaner joint, not the fitter who left a huge gap in the fitup nor the project manager who didn't budget for redoing mis-cut parts, not the malfunctioning machine with dodgy voltage controls that the shop refuses to replace because "it still works," not the foreman who was rushing the workers to reduce the amount of billable time spent on each task so that his team metrics would look better - when you see a part fail, it's easiest to blame the person who physically made it, so that's who gets blamed.

Oh, I do not agree at all.

To start, yes, the kid absolutely shouldn’t have been in the cockpit.

But one, the kid disengaged the autopilot by putting too much control input, that should have set off an alarm. The autopilot disconnecting should always set off an alarm, even when it’s disengaged intentionally.

Second, the crew responded incorrectly to dive and actually stalled the airplane, putting it into a spin. They then managed to recover from that, but had lost enough altitude that they crashed into a mountain.

Stall and spin recovery are both extremely basic things to teach pilots! They are fundamental to safety flying a private Cessna, let alone a commercial aircraft.

Aeroflot 593 ultimately crashed because of bad training, and because there was a single-point failure (the crew failing to notice the autopilot had disengaged)

So, I won't go again about why I don't trust the changes they are doing and why. I wanna go into something deeper, and worse, I've found out during my conversation with @ms-demeanor.

So, long story short, when Mozilla announced they were acquiring a "privacy" startup called Anonym several months ago, I didn't think much about it. Tech companies acquire startups all the time when they want to do something this or that early stage startup does already. They buy the company, sometimes even for token amounts, and the entire startup joins them as their new "division of Whatever". So, as I said, when Moz announced their acquisition of Anonym, I barely paid attention: sure, sure, mozilla just acqui-hired a bunch of privacy-focused engineers, great.

But ... this morning I started looking in deep, and holly shit. Before I even started looking into the Anonym, I just saw who founded it:

Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood. Two ex-facebook executives, who had been top heads on facebook's advertising and marketing divisions. These are the people who founded Anonym and now work for Mozilla. WHAT. THE. FUCK. These are people who has lead the worst division of Facebook in the worst years of the company. The years that made Zuck to entirely change the name, because "facebook" was considered too toxic. These are the guys who spearheaded converting the entire internet in a surveillance capitalism subproduct. These are THE BAD GUYS of the internet. If enshittification had a face, it would be those two guys up there.

So! Maybe they regret being an absolutely waste of human beings deserving to go to hell a thosand times over and now they want to redeem themselves?? ok let's look at what anonym do.

Mozilla let our guy Brad to write a blog post about this, nice! I can't totally trust his words, but hey, there has to be some kernel of truth in what they are trying to sell, right? so let's check! here's the post:

Holly fuck. HOLLY, FUCKING, FUCK.

Let me copy paste an excerpt:

First, it’s important for us to be clear about the specific problem we’re trying to address. Digital advertising is highly reliant on user level data sharing between various industry participants. A simple example: Ad platforms collect information about the browsing and buying behavior of individuals from millions of websites and apps. That information is often associated with a user’s  “profile” and then is used to determine which ads to show that user. This practice is referred to by a number of terms – tracking, profiling, cross-site sharing, etc. Whatever the term, this approach typically isn’t aligned with people’s reasonable expectation of privacy. And it’s actually not even necessary to drive ad performance. Anonym’s goal is to develop a better approach for the industry.

ok, not bad start, yeah, we all want more privacy, for sure. But then THIS happens:

excuse me, WHAT? so your approach to "better privacy" is:

We shouldn't leak the private data we have from you

The data we mine from you should be anonymized and not linked your personal information when we sell it

We have to be transparent with advertisers so they trust us

We have to be able to met any demand from advertisers

WHAT THE FUCK?

So, 1 & 2 ARE FUCKING LEGAL REQUIREMENTS, at least in the EU (and I think in some states of the US, too). And 3&4 have NOTHING to do with user privacy, but with them being trustable for the people who pays for the ads.

This is FUCKING FACEBOOK. They have created an startup so anyone can use the facebook model for advertisement (data mining, anonymized data selling, scalable to the infinite). They left the monster they build to create a smaller version of that monster that anyone could use for their own company. And then, Mozilla bought them and put them, and their mini facebook, as their new advertisement division.

What the fuck. What THE FUCK.

This is WAY WORSE than what the terms of service changes seemed to point to. They have put the fucking wolves in charge of the sheep.

Hard work amidst the accumulated destruction. We try to find some clothes to warm us in the bitter cold or a blanket to warm us when sleeping, but unfortunately we could not find anything. Here we are working and we have not eaten for two days because we did not receive donations. We can buy food from donations. Help me, my friend, by sending a donation to me and my family to buy the necessary food and medicine and buy clothes that cover us and warm us and provide a few simple means of life so that we can live with the bad situation. Imagine my situation, my friend, and help me as much as you can.

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #402 )✅️

@gazavetters @hoedameron @mensweardog @cjk5camo-blog @abod-gaza @gazavetters @free @freepeople @free-universe @free-your-mind @freeindie @qazastra @quacula @quotes @gjmpesadillas @movedthechangingman @marsdemo @zxcvbnmlove @fjiwejfewochkdme @njwight @billymayslesbian @humansofnewyork

If the laws allow for any class of people to be stripped of their rights, then any person could be stripped of their rights. And the State has an active incentive to criminalize its critics (like Briana Boston, who was arrested for terrorism despite never having committed a crime.)

if there are fewer nonbinary people medically transitioning (which I don't even know is the case) I would sooner attribute that to the longstanding history of having to preform a specific kind of cis-palatable gender to access healthcare, leading to people who need said healthcare being more likely to identify as binary on forms that might be used to collect statistics. There are so many transfems out there who show up as trans women on forms who are nonbinary and out as such while in community with trusted people, for example.

I just find it extremely unlikely that given the resources to alter the body, a population of trans people would be inherently less likely to do so, especially when the only defining characteristic of that population is not experiencing their gendered position as substantively matching "man" or "woman."