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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Unfortunately it’s burned into my memory one way or another, yet it still blends into the surrounding years.

    One of my best friends moved out of state and we went to Colorado to send him off, I got back and my dad was sick (not COVID at least), he passed away exactly a week before my birthday. The next month I went on a trip to Vegas through work (I was encouraged to keep the plan despite the circumstances… Ultimately it was a positive experience overall).

    A remarkable year personally in good ways and bad, but another stone in the stream of upheavals in recent years overall.



  • A little bit of cultural linguistics going on really. Even though the texts are also calling OOP gay and queer, and doing so with the same amount of vitriol as with the f-slur, they aren’t recognized as emotionally charged in the same way. All the other cursing is not hate speech per se as it’s not directly targeting any immutable characteristics.











  • I have never strongly identified as any particular religion, so if that is where you’re coming from this answer might not be helpful.

    My parents both came from religious backgrounds, but they decided not to force me into any particular faith. When I was about 8, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church, which certainly has religious tones but is very specific about accepting all kinds of faiths, choosing instead to focus on community.

    As a result, I’ve been exposed to many different kinds of faith. I don’t tend to believe any creation myths or creators myself, at best I am agnostic. But I do believe that faith is an integral part of the human experience. Faith and hope are inextricably tied together, even if they don’t both show up to every family dinner, to strain a metaphor.

    I may not have faith in a god or gods, but I find that sometimes I have faith in my fellow man. I hope the goodness of humanity will prevail. In much smaller terms, I have faith in my friends; I know that they will have my back when I need it. Every time I take a risk, I have at least a little faith that I’ll be okay at the end, or at least that I can pick myself back up.

    Humans rely on faith for a lot of things, and in my opinion, that doesn’t have to look like God.



  • I feel like he addresses this quite well in the conclusion. In regards to cars, “this is not a new phenomenon” and admits to his reliance on salesmen and mechanics.

    Ultimately, he’s asking that the people who make decisions about how our world is shaped have some knowledge about the things that are going to shape the world. And that essential issue is still unaddressed. Remind me, how many years ago was it that US Congress was asking Google why the bad articles show up when you search their name?

    Oh, and our car-centric society in the US largely sucks. That may or may not have anything to do with our general understanding of a motor, but maybe it’s worth considering how much thought has really gone into the implications of these massively affecting technologies.



  • I don’t have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I’ll share an interesting fact from a buddy’s. It’s one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.

    This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.

    I wouldn’t be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn’t truly automated - it was federated.