I’m looking at a listing for a ¼” to ⅝” screw adapter, for which the seller warns that I should “please allow 1-3cm error”.
A 3cm error would mean that a ⅝” screw could result in a screw thread anywhere between 1⅘” and… minus half an inch, I guess? (I don’t even know how to make the concept of negative lengths fit into my brain.)
I suppose this seller could send me an empty envelope and declare that it contained an infinitesimally small adapter. At which point… I’d be the one that was screwed!
A special level of accessibility failure on Egencia‘s mailing list subscription management page: the labels for choosing which individual mailing lists to subscribe to are properly-configured, but the “unsubscribe all” one isn’t. Click the words “unsubscribe all” and… nothing happens.
But it gets better: try keyboard-navigating through the form, and it’s hard not to unsubscribe from everything, even if you didn’t want to! As soon as the “unsubscribe all” checkbox gets focus, you get instantly unsubscribed: no interaction necessary.
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…
“OK,” the young man said, “but what can we do about the crash?” He was clearly very worried.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that. I think it’s already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they’d fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don’t think Trump’ll do that, so –”
“But what can we do?“
We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.
I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming.
…
I’m not sure I entirely agree with Doctorow on this one. I’ll probably read his upcoming book on the subject, though.
I agree that, based on the ways in which AI is being used, financed, and marketed… we’re absolutely in an unsustainable bubble. There’s a lot of fishy accounting, dubious business models, and overpromised marketing. I’m not saying AI’s useless: it’s not! But it’s yet proven itself to be revolutionary, nor even on the path to being so, and it’s so expensive that it seems unlikely that the current “first dose is free” business model is almost-certainly unsustainable.
But I’m not convinced that a resulting catastrophic economic collapse is inevitable. Maybe I’m over-optimistic, but I like to imagine that the bubble can fizzle-out gradually and the actually-valuable uses of AI can continue to be used in a sustainable way. (I’m less-optimistic that we’ll find a happy-solution to prevent AI from being used to rip off artists, but that’s another story.)
But we’ll see.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
We made it to the end of another Bleptember, with a photo every day of my especially-bleppy young doggo.
Thanks for coming along for the ride. See you next year!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Somehow, even when she’s alert and focussed, our dog’s bleppy tongue makes her look at least a little bit dopey.
It’s the Twenty-Ninth of Bleptember; we’re almost done for another year!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s a little wet and miserable this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember, but what really perturbed this bleppy doggo was somebody she didn’t recognise moving a wheelie-bin outside their house. What could they want? Can they be trusted? Might they have ham? 🐶
Sometimes people connect my unusual name to popular culture. They say things like “Oh, Q like James Bond?” or “Oh, Q like Star Trek?”.
I think their choice of franchise tells me more about them than they learn from my answer, which is usually “No, Q like the set of rational numbers.”
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Sometimes you’re Just Tired. It’s been a long week. Happy Twenty-Seventh of Bleptember.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Just a mini-blep this Twenty-Sixth of Bleptember, from a certain attention-seeking doggo who insisted on a cuddle from me while I sat in a Zoom meeting.
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Checked on on this cache as part of a routine maintenance schedule. All is well, nothing needed here!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been away for a couple of days and she’s missed me… but this bleppy dog wanted lots of cuddles and reassurance as we prepared for the school run, this Twenty-Fifth of Bleptember.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
I’ve spent most of the Twenty-Fourth of Bleptember travelling, but my bleppy doggo got to go out and play with her best dogfriend.
Photo courtesy of Lisa from Muddy Paws.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
“What’chu lookin’ at?” I’m away from home this Twenty-Third of Bleptember, but managed to snap this epic blep before I left.
Attempt #2 to get to Belfast starts… at 3:30am in a Premier Inn in Gatwick. 🥱 Today, perhaps, I’ll catch a plane! 🤞
After standing completely stationary on the M25 for over an hour and a half and with no end in sight, I’m getting increasingly confident that I’m not going to catch my flight from Gatwick whose gate closes… in half an hour. 😢
Well, fuck.