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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If the electoral college had worked as intended, Trump would not have won in 2016*.

    So, yeah, get rid of it. It’s not working anyway.

    • You could, of course, consider the attitudes and biases of the founding fathers and come to the conclusion that they would have preferred to see a man win instead of a woman. However, I don’t think that’s fair. Even in their lifetimes they were shifting their views based on their experiences. If you are going to ask them what they would do today, then you have to give them the benefit of having experienced the events of the last 248 years. You have to assume they would have continued to grow.

  • If you don’t have a car that can drive in snow, don’t drive in snow.

    Last blizzard I was in, I had to pull over to try to help two people get up a small hill.

    The first woman was afraid to steer while me and and a tow truck driver pushed her up. She wanted one of us to steer her car, but that just couldn’t happen. She ended up paying the tow truck driver more than $300 to tow her.

    While that was going on, a Honda Civic ended up sliding backwards down the hill. I pushed that one about 100ft along the road until it leveled out enough to move on its own.

    We have a Civic, but it sits in the driveway for blizzards.

    If you get serious snow where you’re moving, and you have to drive, get something with all wheel drive. Just remember that all wheel drive doesn’t mean you can stop. You still need to drive like a Granny in Sunday church traffic.








  • I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.

    Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they’re just tools we use without thinking about them.

    I’m sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it’s just the keyboard app on my phone.


  • Many, many years ago, the hospital where I work had a medical transcription company to transcribe dictated radiology results.

    At the time, users would access the server via DEC terminals or a terminal application on their computer.

    One radiologist set up a script in the terminal application to sign off all his reports with one click. Another radiologist liked it so the first let the second copy it.

    Later, the second radiologist opened a ticket with IT because all his reports were being signed by the first radiologist. Yeah, because he didn’t update the script to change the username and password being used to sign the reports.

    That’s an amusing anecdote, but the terror comes from the fact that NEITHER RADIOLOGIST WAS READING THEIR REPORTS. BEFORE SIGNING THEM.

    The reason they are supposed to sign the report is to confirm that they reviewed the work of the transcriptionist and verified that the report was correct.

    No matter what the tool is, doctors will assume the results are correct and sign off on them without checking.