You Get Killed, Walk It Off

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.

So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!

"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.

For example, in English, you don't use the sound ɐ̃ (as in pão). I have yet to meet a native English speaker who can make that sound, usually they just default to a plain a. Even though, in Portuguese, pau (pau) and pão (pɐ̃ũ) are completely different words.

The name of the country Kiribati (kɪrɪbæs) is derived from the surname Gilberts. As in, it is literally the Gilbertese pronunciation of Gilberts. Because their language lacks phonemes for G/L, the name uses the best approximation possible.

And that's if you can actually, accurately find consistent answers when you do look it up. My own home county and its towns are mispronounced frequently on the local news and weather. They're getting that shit wrong one single county away.

If you're listening to someone mispronounce your native language, you might not even be able to accurately diagnose what the other person did wrong. Sometimes people will claim some phoneme was mispronounced when the problem was the stress was so wildly incorrect that that part of the word sounded wrong, so you assumed it was the phoneme itself. If a native speaker can't correct it, how is are people supposed to figure out the correct pronunciation themselves?

When people act like this is an English speaker only problem, they're telling on themselves. You're either not noticing when this happens in other languages, or you're not listening to other languages at all. Which isn't something to be ashamed of, until you're shaming people for being monolingual. I promise people are pulling the same "I hope I'm saying that right" in other languages. Are adding sounds they don't even hear themselves adding. Are saying something almost correct and then correcting themselves to something wildly wrong.

The legal theory in Kistler v. Eightfold AI is elegant: if Eightfold generates match scores based on harvested data, and those scores are used by employers to filter candidates, then Eightfold is functioning as a consumer reporting agency. Full stop. And every candidate it scored was entitled to disclosure, access, and dispute rights that they never received."

"When a candidate asks “why was I rejected?”, the system can’t answer. Not because it’s hiding something, but because it genuinely doesn’t know. The reasoning is non-deterministic. Run the same prompt twice and you might get different results. Change one word in the job description and the rankings shuffle. There’s no audit trail, no step-by-step log, no way to verify that a prohibited data point — like the candidate’s zip code acting as a proxy for race — didn’t influence the outcome."

"[M]ost enterprise AI systems have no rigorous chain of custody for their training and inference data. They can’t tell you where a data point came from, when it was collected, whether the subject consented, or whether it’s been modified since ingestion."

"Instead of engineering systems that could explain and defend their decisions, it built black boxes that produced convenient numbers. Instead of respecting candidate agency, it treated job seekers as data points to be harvested and scored. Instead of investing in the hard architectural work of compliance and transparency, it shipped wrappers and hoped nobody would ask hard questions.

Someone asked hard questions. Two people, actually — Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik — who had the standing and the persistence to file a lawsuit that could reshape the industry."

DST's late sunrises make the morning unsafe for everyone who's on the road. It screws with your sleep schedule because the late sunsets push bedtimes back, but you still have to get up early to align with the world's business hours. Your teens are even more miserable than without DST, with their biology pushing them one way and the world shoving even harder back.