happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.

  • 0 Posts
  • 70 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 7th, 2020

help-circle
  • Thankfully it hasn’t made it into my workplace yet. We have a quarterly newsletter that someone tried to submit ChatGPT slop to. It was immediately identified and rejected by the rest of the horticulturists. My bosses are the kind of people who only talk about plants in Latin so there’s a big institutional focus on getting the right information from primary sources and then using multiple layers of expert review.

    However, we’re facing massive budget shortfalls over the next few years and I doubt that will get any better if the economy crashes. Outside of installing/maintaining plants, the bulk of the job is intellectual and creative labour that the public isn’t even aware of. I can absolutely see my workplace hollowing out the job and not hiring based on expertise. Instead of five people with scientific degrees debating a space for an hour, at some point it’s going to be someone who hasn’t seen that space feeding words they can’t pronounce into an LLM that doesn’t understand what space is. On paper it will look great for the metrics admins and other departments track. In practice it will immediately ratfuck everything that makes our urban forest function and drive away the really rare pool of overqualified people we have.







  • This appears to be supported by the findings of a 2022 paper, in which scientists describe the results of taking C. sphaerospermum into space and strapping it to the exterior of the ISS, exposing it to the full brunt of cosmic radiation.

    There, sensors placed beneath the petri dish showed that a smaller amount of radiation penetrated through the fungi than through an agar-only control.

    The aim of that paper was not to demonstrate or investigate radiosynthesis, but to explore the fungus’s potential as a radiation shield for space missions, which is a cool idea. But, as of that paper, we still don’t know what the fungus is actually doing.

    That’s where it seems really cool to me. If we have nuclear spacecraft or even just passive cosmic radiation exposure, what’s otherwise a waste/threat could become a factory. Reinforcing the hull with a regenerative radiation shield, genetically engineering it like E. coli to biosynthesise needed compounds, mass producing it as food for something we can eat- it’d be so useful to have something like that in space where you’re surrounded by energy you can’t use.



  • It’s so universal. Even when I ran /r/snackexchange there were beef companies trying to bribe me with steaks to astroturf a subreddit where people send boxes to each other. Probably dozens of companies over the years until I set a strict “offer a coupon code for your redditor-owned company on the sidebar” policy for anything I thought was branded content. The admins did a hostile takeover and handed it to a guy who used it once a decade prior and wanted to run his own third-party “verification website” farming personal information. /r/fifthworldproblems has a whole ecosystem of third-party offshoots because one of the mods tried to coup the subreddit to partner with Lovecraft slop brands off-site. /r/ebikes is nothing but brands stealth marketing, users stealth marketing their referral codes, and organic users asking why those shitty bikes keep breaking.


  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlWake up superstar
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    27 days ago

    I love how free the bike lane is all the way down, even if a painted line isn’t infrastructure. This hill would be so pleasant both ways on my ebike. Great view, urban forest, 5 minute access to what looks like downtown from the high density housing. The same density of commuters wouldn’t need more than a two lane bike path to not feel congested.


  • Healthy slop

    Start by sauteing a mirepoix. If you’re doing meat or mushrooms, saute those until browned as well. Then anything healthy goes in the slow cooker with some stock until it’s slop. If it’s something that gets sweeter when roasted, it’s roasted first. I season it with a bay leaf, mushroom powder, onion/garlic salt, black pepper, and whatever works for the protein. I like my soups/stews very earthy and comforting, with healthy slop ending up being like a non-acidic borscht or thicker chankonabe.


  • Give yourself time and space to distance yourself emotionally from it. Delve into something that lets you reestablish your identity and do independent personal growth, then use that regained confidence to find the kind of relationship you want. I just hike exhaustively until I no longer think about them or care what they’re doing, becoming more of a naturalist which helps my self-worth. In that community I can find people with similar politics who make better partners. If you try to rush your recovery from that relationship or turn to self-destruction instead of growth, you just further entrap yourself in the patterns that resulted in the last one.


  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.mljho
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    3 months ago

    I try to maintain good work relationships with managers because I want things to go easy for me. My time off requests, my ability to be promoted or transfer, the daily workload and its division, my ability to advocate for what I think is best- all of these are at the discretion of the manager regardless of my beliefs. When there’s no target on my back and I’m seen as a team player, the job is predictable and not unnecessarily difficult.

    For that reason I’d apologise and explain the situation. Work smarter, not harder. You’re making your job more difficult if she dislikes you and your coworkers like her.







  • With every snake I’ve handled, maybe a dozen species of domestic pets and wild ones, they’ve always been more afraid of me than I am of them. Even the rattlesnakes on hiking trails. One small part of their body is a defensive weapon while I have four limbs and tools. They can’t see well, they’re pretty dumb, and their mouth might not even be large enough to bite me.

    They don’t really have mammalian affection but snakes do seek warmth. My chainlink kingsnake was almost 2m long and he wanted nothing more than to hold onto me while I did things. He could have constricted but I wasn’t posing a threat and he was fed regularly on a predictable schedule. On feeding and shedding days I didn’t handle him to minimise that conflict. The reward of having that pet was peaceful coexistence with something I have a mild phobia of and being able to see the behaviours that humanise it. They’re all the fun of an aquarium but you can hold the fish.