Bottom Hat
love working on a project that's like
- nobody I work with is familiar with all of the third-party services that drive our business logic, nor is anybody able to access all of those services.
- there is no documentation telling how these ten different microservices fit together, and all of the connective tissue between them is in the aforementioned third-party services that nobody can access.
- there's no documentation at all, really.
- the only people who understand the third-party stuff are offshore contractors who log out at 9 AM, and they've had about 60% attrition since the project started anyway.
- the only one who fully understands the big picture disappeared mysteriously a month ago and we're not sure if he's coming back.
- there's a single person on our side who at least understands what all the individual pieces are and what they do, and as a result he's so swamped with questions that getting an answer takes 5-10 business days
- I cannot run significant parts of this code locally because the third-party services reject the calls for reasons that nobody remembers.
- oh and go-live is in about 6 weeks
The thing about car-dependency is that… it sucks for people without a car. Big news, right. But, it’s not like that incentive curve is something we can just ignore. When our desire or ability to leave our house at all is conditional on being in a car, that affects all of our behaviour on every level.
Kids are the prototypical ‘person without a car’, and in a car-dependent area, they become dependent on their parents. In a normal, walkable city or suburb, children walk on their own to school, they cycle, they take the bus. Instead of needing to get parental approval - and enough enthusiasm to dedicate the time - to be shuttled around to any given activity, children walk to the park, or to a friend’s house. Even in rural areas, with the infrastructure, children will cycle to school. In a car-dependent suburb, a child is trapped in a single-family McMansion on the edge of town, forced to beg their parents to be able to go anywhere, always under supervision - is it any wonder they’d rather stay inside?
Even in a city, if it’s car-dependent, this is still an issue. When the roads are 100-decibel, 6-lane monstrosities, with cyclists expected to intermingle with traffic, and the busses stuck in the exact same jam, kids aren’t going to be able to get anywhere, assuming their parents even let them cross the street. This isn’t just about proximity, it’s fundamentally related to safety. Car-dependent places are a lot more dangerous to be in, on account of all the cars, so parents feel it’s safer for their kid to be in one of those cars. To boot, when everyone’s in a car, there are less people around, less people who can notice someone in trouble, less people who can help. When places are built with the assumption that everyone will have a car, they become places for cars, which humans can stupidly venture into.
This doesn’t just apply to children. We are all, at some point or another, a ‘person without a car’ - in fact, we’re a ‘person without a car’ most of the time, until we get into one. A lot of people would prefer to remain that way; driving a car is stressful, it takes a lot of effort and concentration, and not everyone likes it at 6AM. But, when your environment is built with the assumption you’re inside a soundproof, crash-proof metal box, that becomes a requirement. The second you’re outside of those conditions, scurrying across deafening, hot tarmac, and dodging heavy-duty pickup trucks (carrying solely one guy and his starbucks order), of course you’d decide that not being in a car sucks. But, the thing is, it’s designing for cars that made it suck, even for the car-drivers.
A place designed for cars, a place that people cannot walk, or cycle, or take public transit through, is a place full of cars - you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Studies have shown that the average speed of car traffic, over sufficient time, is completely unrelated to the thoroughfare of roads. Eventually, because of induced demand, the new seven-lane arterial road will have exactly the same congestion as the two-lane it replaced. The one factor that sharply determines how slow road traffic gets is, listen to this, the speed of non-car travel. It is solely when alternatives become faster that people stop driving and free up traffic. Shutting down main street, only allowing buses through, would drastically increase the speed of the rest of the road network - because each of those buses is 40 cars not in traffic. If you like driving, you should want as many people as possible who don’t want to drive to stop doing it - and whoever you are, you should want to be able to travel without depending on cars.
When I was in the biggest depressive slump of my life, and I could barely get out of bed, I still went shopping for food nearly every day, and even traveled to visit my partner. The supermarket was 10 meters out the door of my apartment, and I could walk five minutes to either train station if I had to. It was peaceful and quiet outside. My disabled mother doesn’t like living in cities, but she loves public transit, and will always take a train ride over a long, tiring car journey - and when every store doesn’t need a parking lot twice as big as itself, whatever walking she does have to do is over a much shorter distance. When I’ve had to call an ambulance in a ‘car-hostile’ place, it has arrived inconceivably faster, on those clear roads, than when sitting in the traffic of the highway-lined carpark that makes up so many cities.
Car dependency sucks for everyone, including car drivers, but it sucks the worst for people already suffering. It strips you of independence, and forces you into a box you might not fit in - and I haven’t even touched on pollution. Car-dependency makes cities and suburbs into dangerous, stressful places, devoid of everyone except the most desperate. The only people it benefits are, really, the CEOs of car companies.
“Haha isn’t it funny that Neil Gaiman is the only celebrity we haven’t run off this site?” Actually no, it isn’t funny that tumblr has repeatedly launched harassment campaigns against every vaguely popular person who dared to be accessible and no, we didn’t “decide to let Neil stay”, he’s received a metric shitton of harassment he just refuses to be bullied off of social media by a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do than to be shitty to people online just because they’re there
When I was 17 my appendix ruptured because I thought I was just having period cramps and didn’t go to the hospital so don’t tell me PMS symptoms are no big deal
one-lastmiracle
this actually happened to me during my math final and i didn’t think anything of it and when i was later admitted to the hospital my math prof was asking me ‘you didn’t have to take the final! why didn’t you tell me it hurt?!?!’ and i told him i’ve had cramps worse.
he gave me 100
bitch-jerk-assbutt-teamfreewill
This is actually an extremely common occurrence simply because in sex ed they don’t teach you how to tell the difference between menstrual cramps and other more serious pains. The way to tell the difference between cramps and appendicitis is that while menstrual cramps are generalized toward the middle of the stomach below the belly button, pain from a swollen or burst appendix will start in the middle of the stomach and relocate to only the lower right side, even lower than menstrual cramps, and is a very localized pain. It also comes on extremely suddenly and will worsen over time or when you make a sudden movement, like a cough or a sneeze.
Basically, if you’re feeling any sort of pain, even if it’s menstrual cramps, don’t hesitate to tell the school nurse or a parent, or if you’re out of school and home even make a doctor’s appointment. Chances are if your cramps are that bad there’s something they can do to improve that as well.
vandigo
I am boosting the shit out of that reply, because I am twenty-fucking-five years old and did not know how to tell the two pains apart
Adding another diagnostic tool! This is something we use in the ER called the rebound test. Basically, appendicitis and cramps react differently to certain things. If you’re still not sure if you have cramps or appendicitis, take two fingers and press them into your abdomen where the pain is (try repeating this on the lower right quadrant of the abdomen just to be sure.)
When you press in firmly, it will probably hurt. Here’s the test: LET GO. Does it get better or get worse? Appendicitis will immediately hurt worse when you let go. Cramps will not. Go to the ER if the rebound test makes it worse!
THE REBOUND TEST IS REALLY IMPORTANT.
My husband got sent home from the ER with a rupturing appendix. When he came back and was rushed into surgery, the surgeon was super angry – “Why didn’t anyone do the rebound test?!”
All great info, but there is another lesson to be learned here: if you’re in major pain, it’s probably important - so don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. There is a documented pattern of women who go to the ER with complaints of pain being dismissed as overreacting…when in reality women have an incredibly high tolerance for pain, to the point that some don’t even realize exactly how serious their condition is. These stories only serve to illustrate this point.
Reblog to literally save a life.
Every time I see this..
^the women have a high pain tolerance thing…my orthopedic surgeon, the first day I met him laid me down and messed with my shoulder. At this point I had been told by doctors and another orthopedic surgeon I was overreacting and making my pain up…for months. There were days I missed class because I couldn’t get dressed. Anyways, he laid me down and messed with my shoulder. When he was done he helped me sit up, and went and sat down across the room from me. He looked me dead in the eye and said “I just dislocated your shoulder, put it back in, and you didn’t flinch. You needed surgery four months ago.” He was pissed. Seriously, don’t take major pains lightly, in the abdomen or otherwise.
did you know you could turn off labels on google maps? it's so quiet
did you know you could
turn off labels on google
maps? it’s so quiet
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
The humanities are wonderful and valuable and I understand humanities students feeling under appreciated but every time one of them suggests you need college level humanity courses to understand that murder is bad I roll my eyes so hard.
There’s this thing I noticed on Twitter back when I used Twitter where a lot of people thought making CS majors take ethics classes was gonna solve some sort of major societal problem
Academic ethics gives you a framework to talk about how people should behave. It doesn’t motivate you to behave better. It especially doesn’t change the systemic incentives under capitalism to do harmful things in the name of profits, or give a junior programmer the power to make their employer have better business practices
If you went to a bar and the bartender was a mousegirl you could ask for a drink and she would balance it on her head and say "for you, it's on the mouse"
She makes a mean whisker sour
Does she have anything non alcoholic?
Just putting all these pics together in one post
And, because this series wasn't cheesy enough:
I need a cooking show with these three as the judges. Please.
Good news, partially: Amaury has a show he judges and it is, hands down, the most wholesome competition show I've ever seen. No one goes home! The losers of the first of each pair of challenges just don't participate in the second. They, instead, get extra instruction time with him focused on their weakness that lost the round! The winners don't get a prize except being team captains for the second round, which is building a showpiece using some new technique he teaches in between. It's amazing.
the kids arent supposed to go in the cubbies unless they really need something but these 2 girls were sitting in there lookin mischievous so i go to investigate & theyre huddled around this like magnadoodle where one of them is writing “PISS” in big ass letters
artistic rendition
Listen, I’m not for a “TikTok is ruining literature” panic, and it’s FINE if you use tropes to describe your book, tropes are very useful, but I just.
I just run across a book claiming to be a dark retelling.
And the. The fucking summary. Reads.
“You can expect ‘touch her and I’ll unalive you’ vibes.”
THIS IS A BOOK SUMMARY. ON GOODREADS. YOU DON’T GOTTA CENSURE ‘KILL’. THIS IS A MOTHERFUCKING DARK RETELLING AND YOU’RE THREATENING TO ‘UNALIVE’ SOMEONE?
Maybe the dark part is that it’s set in a dystopian future where everyone’s speech is censored by the TikTok algorithm
(to the pope) so there’s this married couple and they’re enjoying a moment of conjugal intimacy in a manner that glorifies god by cleaving the husband to his wife so that they become one flesh and reflect the perfect union of christ and his church, without the use of any artificial contraception that contravenes natural law and perverts this holy act by severing it from procreation and thus reducing it to a mere outlet for the base lusts of the flesh, and it so happens that the husband reaches the peak of the mysterious and sacred experience of sexual and spiritual ecstasy before the wife is quite ready on this particular occasion, and in her love for him and for the lord she finds herself desirous of continuing a while longer that she too may experience the bliss that is the earthly reward for a holy and pious marriage, and while he is no longer the young man that he was when he gladly swore the vows to enter into the covenant of marriage with her, would it be right and proper for him to perhaps give her a hand, as it were? or perhaps to use the lips and tongue that the lord bestowed upon him so that she may lift her voice to the heavens in praise? and if he were late for work in this instance and his duty as a husband and provider required his prompt departure, would you say that if she gave herself a hand, perhaps with the assistance of an electromechanical device he thoughtfully purchased for her as a token of his love on the day of saint valentine – one of the new jobs with the suction for additional clitoral stimulation, I’m sure you’ve heard of them – would you say that they need have no doubt that this activity is simply a continuation of their blessed union that the lord smiles upon, and not a wanton act of self-abuse that inevitably leads to dissolution and–
(notices the waxy sheen of the decoy pope just as the first swiss guard grabs me from behind) oh fuck here we go again
weasleyan-university said: Flashbacks to CS Lewis’s description of how centaurs have both a human stomach and a horse stomach, so they need a metric fuckton of food
*scowling at the book* how are they going to eat grass with human teeth, Clive
grass-eating mouth located where human navel would be
we say centaurs are stupid but there’s really no way of fixing them without making it ever so much worse
The Andalites in Animorphs are basically centaurs without mouths. They eat grass through their hooves
You know, just in case you thought regular centaurs were weird
The Titanides in John Varley’s Gaea trilogy are also centaur-like aliens but Varley was more focused on the details of. uh. other body parts
“Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to work out. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas, in centre stage, and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines, wondering why we no longer have a part, or want a part, in the whole damn thing. So everybody’s experienced this. When it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling goes from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain, which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.”
— Leonard Cohen on why people enjoy listening to melancholy songs (from a BBC radio interview in 2007)
hishalo-deactivated20221128
not having the energy to reach out to ur mutuals so u like their posts and hope the telepathic love gets across
Having the energy to send your mutuals posts you think they’ll like, but not the energy to actually learn what they like
It’s like being back in elementary school. “I found this cool looking leaf and it reminded me of you.”
Reblog if you enjoy people sending you stuff like a kid giving you a cool leaf (even if it doesn’t line up neatly with the interests you blog about often)
SOMETIME IN THE LAST WEEK MY SCHOOL PUT UP A LARGE BANNER DEDICATED TO THE :-) EMOTICON
[id: a banner with a huge image of the :-) (smiley face with nose) emoticon captioned “smiley / first emoted here / 19 september 1982 / computer science department / www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley / carnegie mellon.” end id]
happy birthday :-) face
it’s that time of the year again everyone say happy 40th birthday :-)