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Messages - Frumple

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11131
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: May 26, 2016, 11:37:23 am »
snip
More like no need :P

The staggering amount of memorization was pretty impressive, but, y'know. Both you and me have gigantic chunks of the entirety of humanity's collective intellectual and cultural efforts at our fingertips, now. The bards were impressive, no doubt, no argument; our external storage (print/digital mediums, etc., etc.) is orders of magnitude more so, and available to significantly more people to boot. It's not that humanity has declined (though it's definitely changed a bit, sure, perhaps even notably to adapt old biological systems to new tools), it's that the machines are just... better at what they do, at least in a lot of areas. They do come with problems, but the consistent picture I, at least, have seen is that we almost always take those problems over the ones they're replacing for tremendously good reasons. Even at our best -- and we're very much aware of those limits, both past and current, and that those'll only change with bloody genetic engineering any time soon -- we're kinda' only so-so at a lot of things, and only so many of us are particularly capable of being that best, thanks to how much biology and genetics loves to screw us. Machines trend towards being a lot more consistent, even when they're inconsistent.

Though yeah, be fine with holding companies accountable for not keeping an eye on the software they're using, or something along those lines. That's badly needed, in all honesty, both for the company using it and whoever made it. Give us a legal incentive to make sure our shit is working, yeah?* And substantiative recourse for those impacted when it doesn't, not the teeth-pulling bullshit that characterizes everything, computer related or not, we have now. Those kinds of software are just as, if not even more, important as that basic spreadsheet and database software, but if the companies are allowed to be lazy with 'em, they'll go back to being barely any better than the years previous, and bugger that with a cactus. We're not just doing this to save time, damnit.

*Maybe not necessarily punitive if it's found that the error is, in fact, error and not deliberately skimping on paying attention, but as per cases noted, if it's causing all sorts of irritation and distress, even if it's being made with conceptual best intentions (i.e. following the information the company had at hand), there should be some of renumeration involved. And exempt FOSS projects, of course -- let burden fall solely on the company in those cases.

11132
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: May 26, 2016, 10:40:21 am »
Eh, the snafus'll happen, it's just they're most likely happen considerably less than they already do with human control if things end up being implemented as expected, which still seems fairly likely from everything I've noticed, m'self. Which is kinda' the point for most of it, insofar as screwups go.

Same thing with the accounting error, really... everything I've heard talkin' to folks that actually did that sort of bookkeeping back when it was basically entirely handwritten is that th'sort of errors like the one linked were considerably more common. And I'll say this on behalf of probably 90+% of accountants in the world right now: You try to take away our spreadsheets and databases and we are going to find you, and the budget for the police department that ends up looking for your body will mysteriously get reallocated. Not you in particular true, mind, but... anyone. Been taught and talked to folks that have been doing bookkeeping throughout the last few decades, who's been part of the slow transition... you'd take their arms faster than you'd take their computers. Having done a fair amount of bookkeeping either way myself, if mostly for practice, and, uh. I'm the same way. I'll take the occasional misplaced comma in a heartbeat if it means not taking hours/days/weeks longer, having dozens of other errors, and significantly worse off wrists to boot.

And yeah, it'll be pulling teeth to fine anyone, but... is that really that different now? Not so rhetorical question, mind... you'd know much better than me, true, whether the stuff you hear on TV about decade long cases to dig stuff out of companies that are incredibly clearly at fault are particularly accurate.

The job loss thing's a thing, though. Problem with or without full automation just due to steadily increasing production per worker, and you're not going have a very good time legally mandating inefficiencies in job positions, nevermind that you seriously don't want to considering our current and oncoming issues regarding resource use and conservation.

... though eeehhh, sonli, some database/accounting software gets pretty wonky. Sometimes they do. You double/triple check that stuff for a reason, heh. Is half the reason we're digitizing things like that so much; that double/triple checking can be the work of minutes/hours instead of days/weeks, heh.

E: Though apologies if any of that came off as particularly aggressive, true. That sort of thing's pretty close to the heart to me; I've been personally helping people dealing with folks resistant to digitalization and automation for a long while now, mostly related to education. It's incredibly frustrating to come back year after year to a half-week or better job of going through filing cabinets and hundreds of paper records checking attendance and whatnot, when you're entirely damn sure the entire process could take literally minutes if the bastards a position or two above would pull their head out their ass and let people put that crap to spreadsheet or database. I've literally offered to volunteer to do that work for a school system before, just to be rejected mostly because the administration was basically bloody luddites.

11133
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: May 26, 2016, 08:50:01 am »
To be fair, it kinda' seems like 3nder isn't particularly cognizant of basic letter replacement, either. Calling your relationship building site "Ender" seems to be of... dubious intelligence.

Unless it's one explicitly for finding people to overtly cheat on your partner with, I guess. Then it'd be a really good name.

E: Though now I'm kinda' wondering how that sort of site would work. Link it to your facebook page, have it send a message or whathaveyou when confirmed by the other person? Flag e-mails to get updates after confirmation of congress? VIP service could be a town crier or something. Maybe a singing telegram, that'd be pretty classy.

E2: "Hello, hello, hello!
We are here to inform you,
that your wife has gone to screw,
a random latinoooo!"

I'm pretty sure you could work that as a zippty-do-dah parody fairly easily, tbh. That last line could fit where the lyrics go "pass it on to you", or thereabouts.

11134
There's... a lot of stuff in politics that nobody disagrees is a problem that still is an issue. Disagreement over implementation is a thing.

11135
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: May 26, 2016, 08:27:19 am »
The WTF for me there is that they thought the natural pronunciation of 3nder was thrinder. The natural pronunciation of that is pretty obviously ender.

11136
... ant, I just edited in a link to a page with a lot of transcripts from stuff hillary's said, in case you missed it. You can check that, then hunt down the videos of the events. Some of these are definitely making statements that are pretty explicit; not as detailed as the issues pages, but I'm seeing explicit support for raising the federal minimum wage, explicit dollar amounts for Alzheimer's research, etc., etc. It's usually a relatively small portion of her speeches, but they're definitely there.

E: Definitely definitely. I've been reading over it a bit more, and something like better than half of those speeches on the first page alone have pretty bloody explicit policy statements in them. She almost seems outright fond of straight up enumerating and stating what she physically intends to do if/when elected.

11137
... honestly, though, some kind of post indexing links to any of the remaining candidates where they make explicit policy statements/detail plans of implementation to any extent, on camera, would probably be pretty nice for a thread like this to have.

E: Though, uh, for clinton specifically, you might want to check this page, which is transcripts of stuff she's explicitly said to the public. Some of the ones I've checked so far (an alzheimer one, ferex) do indeed straight up say exactly what the issues page said.

11138
... it's called persistent social narrative, mostly. Your in group repeats the message until you automatically reject contrary narratives. There just happens to be a fairly sizable group that believes various alternate explanations.

Also it's not exactly collective. Common-ish for certain areas, enough so it's definitely easy to run into them, but most Americans would respond to "what was the civil war fought over" with "slavery".

11139
The usual? Friends, family, media. That's... not really much of a question...

11140
... no? There's not many parts of the US education system that aren't pretty clear on why the civil war was fought. The influence in that area is coming from other directions.

S'not a small number of th'noted incredulous folks that have actually read parts of those original documents that explicitly stated what was going down.

11141
You're getting it! His perfidies know not mere temporal boundaries.

11142
Always knew roosevelt was up to no good. You can't have things named after you in the bed of that many children and not be some kind of evil.

11143
snip
No, no, sorry. Knew what they were in that sense. Post was directed at S. I guess I got a singular response to the plural inquisitive, which is something. Didn't quite answer how positive answers to the question provided wouldn't have involved prescience, but eh.

11144
Soooo... kay. What were they, anyway? I can never manage to remember much about those hearings, m'self, save the whole pointless waste of many people's time part.

11145
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« on: May 25, 2016, 09:46:46 pm »
This art portfolio. "Draw a portrait of your favourite comic book hero or villain. Do not include works of pre-existing or copywritten characters, such as Disney, Looney Tunes, Anime or Manga characters."

Okay. So either I'm going to set up a poll to crowdsource the shittiest OC possible or I'll just do a Hitler.
See, what I want to know is how it can be a comic book character if it's not in a comic book at all. Since everything actually published in a comic book would have been copywritten in one way or another. And anything that's your favorite would be pre-existing. Wouldn't the correct answer just be a... hell, blank page?

Or wait, wait. Waaaiiiiit. You could maybe get away with copyleft ones? It's still run afoul of the existence issue, but at least it'd be half on point.

... any way you can ask whoever's asking for the portfolio how they expect that prompt to be physically possible? Because I'm actually curious, now.

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