🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 @ ZDL @ttrpg.network Posts 51Comments 1,139Joined 1 yr. ago
I'd only wear overalls when doing something that calls for them. I'm too old to view them as fashion items. 😅
I went to NYC on business (trade show, working the booth). I was glad I was there only for the closing weekend. Some of my colleagues had to work the booth the whole week and be in NYC the whole time.
I really did not like New York, and I didn't even go to the rougher areas. Just too noisy for me, too expensive, and it smelled bad.
And this was in the early '90s.
I have to agree here. I decided after a job interview in Houston I wouldn't go to the USA ever again. This was in the mid-late '90s. It hasn't improved in that time.
It wasn't so bad when I was there (in the '80s) but yes, Italy has far more important and beautiful cities to visit.
My personal favourite was Florence.
Any theme park. Except Disney. I'd gladly go to a Disney park. After hours. With a tanker of kerosene and a box of matches.
These ones? If so, that would be a neat trick given they've got a sizable stone inside.
Absolutely. And also, compare, sometime, the medals the USA gives to its service members compared to the medals that Canadian service members get. I mean the USA isn't Soviet bad but it's also pretty pandering.
I genuinely have no idea. If only one or two of them had gone the "personal story" route I might have actually believed the tale. But one person after another reporting it as "I did/saw this" just baffles me. I don't know if it's confabulation or some kind of leg-pulling exercise.
It does work.
If you're the one doing the trickling.
(No points if you guess what gets trickled...)
I have a weird one that haunted expat circles in China in the '00s and deep into the '10s. It has to do with Santa Claus candles.
No, really.
The story went like this: a group of people were in a "western-oriented" restaurant in which each table had these Santa Claus shaped candles. They were there for their weekly get-together but this time they stayed a very long time and the candle burned down to the end. And what did they see at the bottom of the candle? A little metal box with a grill. A microphone! Someone had planted a microphone at their table to spy on them and they caught them in the act!
Now the thing is, the first time I heard this story I heard it as a first-person story. "We" were in a restaurant and "I" saw the electronic module at the bottom of the Santa Claus candle. I was very new to China at the time so I still had my paranoid schizophrenic glasses on and I believed it.
Then, two years later, while I was travelling in a city in another province, I got together with some local expats. Who told the same story to me. Every detail was the same. It was a Santa Claus candle. They'd stayed later than usual. The candle burned down to the point you could see a little metal box with a grill. I did some checking, and there was definitely no link between the people I was talking to and the people who'd first told me the story.
Fast forward another two or three years ... and I get the story again. And again in the same year, different place. And again the next year.
Each time it was a story told in the first person with identical details, told in the same way, with little to no variance. And at no point could I ascertain any link between these people, so this had to have been a story that had been circulating widely for a very long time. Yet each time I encountered it, the story was identical and told as a first-person story, stretching credulity for a large number of reasons.
People aren't stupid, by and large. (They may talk stupidly. They may act stupidly. But they can actually see things. They just sometimes ignore that before talking or acting.) And yes, they can tell when the "praise" and "encouragement" they get is hollow and pointless. You don't even have to look at the obsequious degenerative AI slop to find this. You can go back to all the late-'80s to early-'90s crap with participation trophies/certificates and "everyone's a winner".
When I started in school, it was really hard to get recognized. It took a lot of work and those who got recognized for it had a sense of genuine accomplishment. They had genuine self-esteem. But there's that word: self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important, make no mistake, but unfortunately it's not something that can be easily codified or built up in people. Institutions can't stand complex problems with complex solutions, so they went the easy way. They started handing out trophies and certificates to everybody. Sure some of them might be marked "first place" or such (though often, as this trend became entrenched, they didn't even get labelled with that much; people would be announced as first place, but the trophy was a generic "I attended" variety), but everybody had a trophy or, increasingly, just a certificate. (And of course since they now had to hand out dozens of trophies where before they'd only hand out a few, the trophies dropped in quality to generic, plastic, chrome-plated crap and the certificates were placed in low-grade plastic holders that would warp in three weeks.)
And a weird thing happened.
Because the people who "won" a trophy for being there knew this wasn't any meaningful celebration. OK, maybe the first couple of times they were happy about it, but it didn't last long and pretty soon trophies, certificates, and other forms of "recognition" got viewed as more junk. That "self-esteem" wasn't building in those who lacked it, but those who actually worked hard for recognition certainly lost theirs. "The trees [were] all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw." Because genuine self-esteem comes from genuine effort leading to genuine accomplishment and authentic recognition. And we're very good at spotting the inauthentic.
So bringing it back around to that AI and your question, yes, excessive encouragement can have the opposite effect if it comes across as inauthentic and patronizing. The nauseating obsequiousness of AIs is one of their more off-putting features for "normal" people, and it does active harm to people who have serious self-esteem issues, either tanking them further or puffing it up to the point of delusion.
Ugh. The people who think I don't know about web sites or technologies because I don't use them really tick me off.
Programmers, with whom I'd worked with my early career (about a dozen years) are particularly prone to mansplaining. The worst case was a candidate for a "no assholes rule" dismissal who in the course of one company pizza lunch:
- Told me what marketing "really" was. (I have a degree in it. He doesn't.)
- Gave me repeated unsolicited advice on how to market the company's products.
- Told me that my marketing campaign for one product (his) was garbage and that I should talk to the person who did the marketing for another product to learn how to "do it right". I did the marketing for that other product too....
- Also told me how much make-up I should use and how to apply it because apparently he's an expert on feminine health and beauty.
I mentioned the "no assholes rule" I think? He was later canned for being an asshole, despite his apparently very formidable technical skills.
OK, all y'all can stop holding your breaths now.
This is an unusual one and I think you can see now why it took so long to assemble. She's a FORMIDABLE woman.
I'm curious: in which world are people living where this wasn't a predictable outcome?
Note: I'm not saying a "desirable" or "good" or "just" or such outcome. Just "predictable".
The last tech job I worked marketing for had a security product (you probably have used it without knowing it). They had a group in-house they called the "Tiger Team": people who were supposedly tasked with testing the security of the product. You got into the "Tiger Team" by finding a flaw in the security.
The "Tiger Team" did nothing. At all. Didn't even meet. Hell, half of them didn't know who the other members were. The job of the "Tiger Team" was to sign the NDA that had dire consequences if you spoke to anybody else about the "Tiger Team" and/or the security flaws in the product.
So basically the "Tiger Team" existed only to conceal flaws in the product. Not to fix them or find more.
We were watching Blazing Saddles in the dorm rec room. The infamous line came up:
We'll take the
<slur for Chinese>
and the<slur for black people>
, but we don't want the Irish.
The Irish immigrant RA (who was drunk because, well, Irish¹) started booing loudly and raucously about that, slurring something about how the Irish saved civilization or some such all while gesticulating wildly. He eventually got up on a folding table using it as a makeshift soapbox.
And then the table collapsed.
Incrementally.
First the legs on one side closed, turning the table into about a 40% ramp. He wound up on his ass and sliding down until his boots hit the carpet.
While he was sitting there stunned, body straight up, legs slanted down to the floor, eyes wide in shock, the other side of the table collapsed. And somehow, despite his inebriation and surprise, he still wound up sitting.
"And that's how the Irish do it!" he said, before getting to his feet and staggering out of the rec room. To the sound of delighted applause behind him.
I'm shaping up my next Kick-Ass Woman from History post. I think it's going to be at LEAST as inspiring as my last one.
I read actual news sites once a week only these days. Sometimes news stories cross my Mastodon feed that seem relevant to me, but most times I just pass them over.
I can't change the way chucklefucks in the USA behave, for example, and reading about them shooting themselves in the foot so often they think walking around and leaving bloody footprints is normal is not something that I can change, nor do I need to know it. Same for most countries that are neither my country of residence nor my country of citizenship.
So I ignore it. Because it's literally irrelevant to me, my knowledge or lack thereof will change nothing, but constantly hearing doom & gloom stories has a measurable negative impact on my sanity.
