Cosimo Galluzzi
EXPECTATIONS
trying on a metaphor
sheepfilms
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
gracie abrams
Origami Around
★
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
𓃗
The Stonewall Inn
untitled
Monterey Bay Aquarium
bliss lane
we're not kids anymore.
noise dept.
🪼
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Show & Tell
Game of Thrones Daily
seen from Canada
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seen from United States
seen from Colombia
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Romania
seen from United Kingdom
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@antarctica-starts-here
I was looking for photos of one physical condition that happens to penises and came across this photoset.
level 271 penismancer demonstrating his arcane might
Penismancy isn't a wizarding specialty which offers much in the way of dignity, but no man dares cross one.
Yes, I am spiteful
So, Monday was my official last day at Cisco. As luck would have it, I got the call from a company with which I'd been interviewing, verbally extending me an offer, while I was at FedEx shipping my Cisco laptop. Couldn't have asked for better timing. The new job has a longer commute (no shock; for the past ten years my commute has been measured in "steps from the breakfast table"), there are parts which cannot be done remotely, but it's also a very good career move for this area AND pays more (We'll see if that's eaten up by commuting costs and inflation).
That said, my former manager prognosticated that a lot of companies laying off folks like me right now will be panic-hiring in about six months when they realize they can't replace us. I think she's a bit optimistic about the timing - you can shamble along with zombie documentation for a really long time, and also I believe Cisco is basically abandoning the entire product I was working on. But they did lay off most of the people who could do the work I was doing, so I expect that's going to be a rude awakening in 1-3 years.
The thing about AI is, it produces exactly what you expect to see. It looks good. But it's firmly "garbage in - garbage out". If it doesn't have the input on how the product works, it cannot spit out documentation explaining the product, because that information simply does not exist. "Writing" is a very small part of tech writing: the actual job is sitting in meetings, talking to subject matter experts, modeling user behavior, and synthesizing an explanation of the product for a given audience. They've created a machine which hallucinates and does the smallest part of the job. But it'll look good, and that means it will take a while before they realize it's crap. They'll realize it because a customer - and many of Cisco's customers are very deeply entrenched, they won't be interested in moving to a different product, they just want the one they have to work - will complain that the information in the guides is wrong. Cisco will realize that the docs either haven't been updates in months or years; or have incorrect information. The system they have can't just fix it; no one left understands how the files are even structured: which is actually super complicated because it's topic-based authoring and I did a lot of things to automate stuff because there was one person [me] documenting a 1500+ endpoint REST API, which is absolutely ridiculous, and I was totally going to update my notes on how it's all done I swear, but you know after the third layoff in two years that just stopped being a priority for me, I wonder why?
So there's a chance that sometime in the next year or two I will get a call from my boss' boss' boss - marking the second time ever this person will have spoken to me - asking me to come back and fix it. Maybe on a contract basis, maybe perm, no idea. They will wave money at me, but it won't be enough, not if I have a decent job at the time. So they will try to hire someone. They'll have a hard time, because it's a rarified skillset. Eventually they will get someone, and that poor soul will not have been told the scope of the mess they're inheriting. They're probably going to have to rebuild from scratch.
And it won't be my problem.
Not long ago I found out that my former employers are probably in a spot of bother right now. If they've even noticed that the bioinformatics libraries they use have been infected.
I don't work for them anymore so I really don't care.
I confess that aside from the mawing uncertainty of needing a job, my main emotional reaction to being laid off was *relief*. Suddenly the dozens of issues I was working, the myriad of information I was hounding developers for... was Not My Problem. I closed all those emails and just didn't care. Cisco decided I would not be working on them, and so I didn't. No more Jira ticekts, no more Atlassian and Confluence, no more sprint notes and git merges.
And if it all sucks now, I'm not paid to give a single solitary fuck.
Heat waves.
Addition: The amount of bombs that Israel and the US have dropped on Gaza in the pursuit of genocide and settler-colonialism have significantly contributed to climate change over the past couple years and is directly linked to so many “once in a century” and “never before seen” weather and temperatures.
i have a suggestion
I would like to share the story of a very understandable but unfortunate mistake i made at work recently
So I'm weeding our ancient and terrible collection of children's books for the first time in possibly ever, and I'm making a decision about a book about migrant workers by Sandra Weiner, called Small Hands, Big Hands. And I'm not 100% sure and I go to just see if there's anything out there about this book's being notable in any way so I do an open web search for
"small hands big hands weiner"
And then I look at my results for a moment
and then at last I somberly add to the end of my search, "BOOK"
I have one like that:
In mathematics, you often consider the two-dimensional plane - you know, the idealised flat two-dimensional object that extends infinitely - which can be real or complex (doesn't matter what that means)
On this, you can perform a mathematical operation called a "blow-up" (resulting in a more complicated geometry)
I needed to look up a formula related to this, so I confidently typed into the search bar:
"Blow up real plane"
The results were not what I wanted and I am not sure if I'm on a terror watchlist now.
This reminds me of my corsetmaker days when i found myself searching for "extra thick boning."
I recall fondly one of Ursula Vernon's LJ posts where she was looking for references for a black rooster for one of her paintings (this one, iirc), and very nearly hit Enter on a search for "black cock"
I gotta tell you, I searched for "saucy walker leg" for my mom in the late 90s and got some *interesting* results
As a tech writer, when my company moved from Framemaker to structured XML authoring, I needed information about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
Looking up "DITA" did not yield what I was after.
For a time, I worked for a company that sells system and web application security software. This meant that I would occasionally be asked to help troubleshoot problems customers were encountering.
This occasionally lead to being told to browse porn sites at work.
"You have reached the backdoor of the NEW Manhole..."
I still wish I had video of your face for that one.
<cackle!>
Yes, I am spiteful
So, Monday was my official last day at Cisco. As luck would have it, I got the call from a company with which I'd been interviewing, verbally extending me an offer, while I was at FedEx shipping my Cisco laptop. Couldn't have asked for better timing. The new job has a longer commute (no shock; for the past ten years my commute has been measured in "steps from the breakfast table"), there are parts which cannot be done remotely, but it's also a very good career move for this area AND pays more (We'll see if that's eaten up by commuting costs and inflation).
That said, my former manager prognosticated that a lot of companies laying off folks like me right now will be panic-hiring in about six months when they realize they can't replace us. I think she's a bit optimistic about the timing - you can shamble along with zombie documentation for a really long time, and also I believe Cisco is basically abandoning the entire product I was working on. But they did lay off most of the people who could do the work I was doing, so I expect that's going to be a rude awakening in 1-3 years.
The thing about AI is, it produces exactly what you expect to see. It looks good. But it's firmly "garbage in - garbage out". If it doesn't have the input on how the product works, it cannot spit out documentation explaining the product, because that information simply does not exist. "Writing" is a very small part of tech writing: the actual job is sitting in meetings, talking to subject matter experts, modeling user behavior, and synthesizing an explanation of the product for a given audience. They've created a machine which hallucinates and does the smallest part of the job. But it'll look good, and that means it will take a while before they realize it's crap. They'll realize it because a customer - and many of Cisco's customers are very deeply entrenched, they won't be interested in moving to a different product, they just want the one they have to work - will complain that the information in the guides is wrong. Cisco will realize that the docs either haven't been updates in months or years; or have incorrect information. The system they have can't just fix it; no one left understands how the files are even structured: which is actually super complicated because it's topic-based authoring and I did a lot of things to automate stuff because there was one person [me] documenting a 1500+ endpoint REST API, which is absolutely ridiculous, and I was totally going to update my notes on how it's all done I swear, but you know after the third layoff in two years that just stopped being a priority for me, I wonder why?
So there's a chance that sometime in the next year or two I will get a call from my boss' boss' boss - marking the second time ever this person will have spoken to me - asking me to come back and fix it. Maybe on a contract basis, maybe perm, no idea. They will wave money at me, but it won't be enough, not if I have a decent job at the time. So they will try to hire someone. They'll have a hard time, because it's a rarified skillset. Eventually they will get someone, and that poor soul will not have been told the scope of the mess they're inheriting. They're probably going to have to rebuild from scratch.
And it won't be my problem.
Not long ago I found out that my former employers are probably in a spot of bother right now. If they've even noticed that the bioinformatics libraries they use have been infected.
I don't work for them anymore so I really don't care.
I confess that aside from the mawing uncertainty of needing a job, my main emotional reaction to being laid off was *relief*. Suddenly the dozens of issues I was working, the myriad of information I was hounding developers for... was Not My Problem. I closed all those emails and just didn't care. Cisco decided I would not be working on them, and so I didn't. No more Jira ticekts, no more Atlassian and Confluence, no more sprint notes and git merges.
And if it all sucks now, I'm not paid to give a single solitary fuck.
Exactly.
you might think the worst type of adaptation that can happen to a fandom is a bad one. but in truth, i find that's rarely the case. usually the world at large doesn't pay attention, the fandom unites around the piece's badness, and otherwise continues along as usual. hell, if the adaptation is so-bad-it's-good then it really can evolve into quite a nice treat, once the sting has worn off.
no, what you actually gotta look out for is the mediocre adaptations. the pretty but soulless adaptations. the technically-competent-but-misses-the-point adaptations. because there will be enough folks who think that the new Adaptation is Good, Actually, and no matter how politely you word your disagreement, they will resent you for saying as much.
People just casually posting Canadian military secrets online. What is this, the WarThunder forums?
Aerodynamic Beaver is the name of my Gloryhammer cover band.
Yes, I am spiteful
So, Monday was my official last day at Cisco. As luck would have it, I got the call from a company with which I'd been interviewing, verbally extending me an offer, while I was at FedEx shipping my Cisco laptop. Couldn't have asked for better timing. The new job has a longer commute (no shock; for the past ten years my commute has been measured in "steps from the breakfast table"), there are parts which cannot be done remotely, but it's also a very good career move for this area AND pays more (We'll see if that's eaten up by commuting costs and inflation).
That said, my former manager prognosticated that a lot of companies laying off folks like me right now will be panic-hiring in about six months when they realize they can't replace us. I think she's a bit optimistic about the timing - you can shamble along with zombie documentation for a really long time, and also I believe Cisco is basically abandoning the entire product I was working on. But they did lay off most of the people who could do the work I was doing, so I expect that's going to be a rude awakening in 1-3 years.
The thing about AI is, it produces exactly what you expect to see. It looks good. But it's firmly "garbage in - garbage out". If it doesn't have the input on how the product works, it cannot spit out documentation explaining the product, because that information simply does not exist. "Writing" is a very small part of tech writing: the actual job is sitting in meetings, talking to subject matter experts, modeling user behavior, and synthesizing an explanation of the product for a given audience. They've created a machine which hallucinates and does the smallest part of the job. But it'll look good, and that means it will take a while before they realize it's crap. They'll realize it because a customer - and many of Cisco's customers are very deeply entrenched, they won't be interested in moving to a different product, they just want the one they have to work - will complain that the information in the guides is wrong. Cisco will realize that the docs either haven't been updates in months or years; or have incorrect information. The system they have can't just fix it; no one left understands how the files are even structured: which is actually super complicated because it's topic-based authoring and I did a lot of things to automate stuff because there was one person [me] documenting a 1500+ endpoint REST API, which is absolutely ridiculous, and I was totally going to update my notes on how it's all done I swear, but you know after the third layoff in two years that just stopped being a priority for me, I wonder why?
So there's a chance that sometime in the next year or two I will get a call from my boss' boss' boss - marking the second time ever this person will have spoken to me - asking me to come back and fix it. Maybe on a contract basis, maybe perm, no idea. They will wave money at me, but it won't be enough, not if I have a decent job at the time. So they will try to hire someone. They'll have a hard time, because it's a rarified skillset. Eventually they will get someone, and that poor soul will not have been told the scope of the mess they're inheriting. They're probably going to have to rebuild from scratch.
And it won't be my problem.
Not long ago I found out that my former employers are probably in a spot of bother right now. If they've even noticed that the bioinformatics libraries they use have been infected.
I don't work for them anymore so I really don't care.
what the fuck is happening
They made a ruler detector, huh?
Yep, AI moderation is going just swimmingly.
I would like to share the story of a very understandable but unfortunate mistake i made at work recently
So I'm weeding our ancient and terrible collection of children's books for the first time in possibly ever, and I'm making a decision about a book about migrant workers by Sandra Weiner, called Small Hands, Big Hands. And I'm not 100% sure and I go to just see if there's anything out there about this book's being notable in any way so I do an open web search for
"small hands big hands weiner"
And then I look at my results for a moment
and then at last I somberly add to the end of my search, "BOOK"
I have one like that:
In mathematics, you often consider the two-dimensional plane - you know, the idealised flat two-dimensional object that extends infinitely - which can be real or complex (doesn't matter what that means)
On this, you can perform a mathematical operation called a "blow-up" (resulting in a more complicated geometry)
I needed to look up a formula related to this, so I confidently typed into the search bar:
"Blow up real plane"
The results were not what I wanted and I am not sure if I'm on a terror watchlist now.
This reminds me of my corsetmaker days when i found myself searching for "extra thick boning."
I recall fondly one of Ursula Vernon's LJ posts where she was looking for references for a black rooster for one of her paintings (this one, iirc), and very nearly hit Enter on a search for "black cock"
I gotta tell you, I searched for "saucy walker leg" for my mom in the late 90s and got some *interesting* results
As a tech writer, when my company moved from Framemaker to structured XML authoring, I needed information about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
Looking up "DITA" did not yield what I was after.
For a time, I worked for a company that sells system and web application security software. This meant that I would occasionally be asked to help troubleshoot problems customers were encountering.
This occasionally lead to being told to browse porn sites at work.
Hold on, this is fascinating. Reblog this and tell me in the notes how old you are and if you ever had typing lessons.
What in God’s good name is a “typing lesson”
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not
I’m serious what is a typing lesson? What would they teach you? To type? My brother in Christ it is like writing with a pen but technically easier.
Before home computers were very common, people typically only typed for business-related things, so the only people that actually knew how to use typewriters and word processors were authors, secretaries, accountants, etc. These people would take classes for typing bc it was seen as a skill. This gradually fell out of fashion, much like teaching kids cursive
Typing is only intuitive to gen y & z bc most of us learned through computer games or had someone tell us where to rest our fingers. People who never learned to type use just their index fingers, hit one key, take a long time to find the next letter, hit it with an index finger, and repeat until finished
34 i played this:
33 and i started with Mavis Beacon
34, had typing lessons in 3rd and 4th grade and Mavis Beacon as a kid and I’ve still never used home row except when I was forced to. I type everything with my left hand. The only thing my right is for is using the shift, backspace, and enter keys.
43, first had typing lessons in 4th grade on some type of Mac, then my mother bought me a book and a manual typewriter and made me learn to touch-type, for which I am still grateful 30+ years later. I remember how excited we were when we upgraded to an electric typewriter.
Of course, I got hit by nostalgia so hard that I recently bought a manual typewriter and have been writing letters to people with it! I love it to pieces.
28 and I learned to type through Type To Learn. I have severe dysgraphia to the point where I couldn’t keep up with writing in school early on, so the summer after second grade my parents trained me intensely on all the typing programs they could get, and found ways to help me learn to type fast.
I’m so nostalgic for those games.
“It is like writing with a pen but technically easier” my brother in Christ children also take writing lessons
#LMAO yeah^#i had computer class in 2001 where we eventually had to put paper over our hands to take a test to see if we could type without looking#we also played games#i hated the paper thing at the time. i knew i just needed MORE practice. i dont think i got GOOD at typing until a few years after that#also.. when you have a pen. you can just create the letter you need. with a keyboard you have to FIND IT. and its NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER#how is that easier??#but i guess i dont know any kids whove grown up with computers and could probably type before they could write….????? 😳
Modern kids can’t type before they can write. I mean, most kids understand how to use a keyboard, and pressing letters takes less coordination than writing them so can be started at a younger age for learning to spell, but I’ve worked a lot with kids in the 8-14 year age bracket and they’re usually FASCINATED by how fast I type. (My typing speed is… not impressive. If they made me take one of those speed/accuracy tests they used to do for admin or data entry jobs, I would NOT pass.) But many of the kids I’ve worked with take my comfort and familiarity with a keyboard (I’m a writer) as some impressive, magical skill, because an awful lot of them are letter-peckers.
24, learned actual touch-typing when I was maybe 4 or 5 with this, the sound effects still live rent-free in my brain:
The shift keys on our computer were broken, so up until high school I would type capitals by turning caps lock on for a single key and then back off again.
I’m 39. We had typing lessons every year throughout elementary school. I never really got good at it until I started playing mmos, though.
My kids are in 5th and 6th grade. They’ve never even seen a fingering chart. The 6th grader is expected to do nearly all of his schoolwork on a computer, and he doesn’t even know the term “home row”. I don’t know how they expect them to excel without giving them the skills they need to use the tools they have to use.
I’ve gone what I can to help them learn how to type, but I’m not a teacher.
Mid 50′s.
Typing classes were only availble to those taking the secretarial class, which was not open to boys.
It should be noted that there is a distinction between typing as it used to mean and word processing. Typewriters were unforgiving machines, not only could you not cut, paste or delete (for obvious reasons) so your spelling had to be very, VERY good, but the legibiity of each letter produced depended on how hard you hit the key (unless you went to a fancy school which had electric typewriters, which were not the norm).
Those of us who were subversive enough to learn keybaord skills through computing had a MUCH easier time of it. Though it was often offset by the shitty keyboards some computers had, and YES, I’m calling you out ZX81!
If you can’t see any depth to those keys, you are correct, they have none because the ZX81 keyboard was a damned membrane!
But believe me, if you could learn to typeat a decent speed on of these, then NOTHING could stop you, expcet for the fact that the odds were good you were typing faster than it could process input.
It’s successor, the ZX Spectrum had spongey keys, which whilst not great, were better than nothing.
Genuinely as a computing teacher in the 11-18 age group, I’m saying this now:
We need to bring back typing lessons to the curriculum. The kids will fly if you give them a tablet or smartphone but they have no clue on how to use a keyboard or keyboard shortcuts. If the senior PE class decides to be twats and pry up the keys and swap them round, I will still have 14/15 year olds unable to type because the keys are swapped. And I often don’t notice when helping them because I just.. touch type.
I legitimately broke a Higher Computing Science (so a 16 year old who had chosen to do computer stuff) by showing him how Ctrl+H let him find and replace because he’d made a consistent error in his code and I could see him going back and adding up all the time he’d spent trying to find all the incidences of a specific variable in his code and there I was showing him CTRL+F and all these things.
These kids might not pick a computer based subject after the age of 13 and half of them don’t understand file systems, version control, difference between cloud vs local storage, how to save, etc.
So many kids would just turn off the monitor and think that was the computer, usually leaving themselves logged in (to the point I locked the monitor power button and had multiple posters up reminding kids to press the spacebar on the keyboard to wake up the monitor first).
Basically, digital literacy is being fucking stolen by the appification of the digital platforms available to kids.
I’m in my 40s and I had typing classes in my second to last year of grade school, using some really ancient computers that took forever to boot and AFAIK only ran that one program. I still technically know how to touch type properly, though I never bother because my own hybrid system works well enough.
I’m 40 and I had to take a typing class in high school. I can still technically touch type, but I do it in a half-assed kind of way that isn’t very fast and results in a lot of mistakes.
40s and typing class was one of the required ones in the middle school rotation. (We also had a basic cooking skills class, basic sewing, wood shop, metal shop and foreign languages. For the languages, you took each one that would be offered in HS so you could pick what you would take. Everyone took all of these and other specials in a rotation that meant you had about 8 weeks of each.)
My school was unusual because we had computers but they had a room full of actual typewriters for the typing class. So I learned to properly touch type on a typewriter even though it was the 90s. I happened to get involved in an online RP chat at the time that was on a website where it didn’t load what everyone else was saying until you hit send on your text or refreshed the page. So I had some incentive to learn to type fast and I did. (Steelsings I miss you!)
I’m a teacher now and kids still marvel at my ability to look at them and have a conversation and type something else. I also regularly teach high school seniors how to use things like CTRL F. I have been saying for pretty much my whole career that we need to stop assuming kids are naturally good at tech (fuck you concept of digital natives) and go back to teaching this stuff. It’s not better with the ipad generation- it’s worse. They only understand apps and not real computers.
Also, for the person upthread who mentioned the letters being not in order - there’s a reason for that! They invented the QWERTY keyboard arrangement to slow typists down because people were going too fast for the machines. There were other keyboard arrangements (DVORAK for example) that people can actually type faster at once they learn them but qwerty has stuck.
Huh… apparently that’s a myth! It was designed to speed up typing? TIL
QWERTY - Wikipedia
“Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[4]: 162 but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that to place often-used letter pairs farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands.”
Well there’s still a reason for it.
In my 50’s; typing was an elective in high school into which my parents forced me, rather than let me stay in small engine maintenance shop class I enrolled in because it was more fun and interesting.
This was doubly offensive, since I already knew how to type from writing school papers since second or third grade (ie: the early 80’s).
47 and I was taught to type in about third grade, encouraged to practice via a little computer game called Typing Derby where the faster you typed, the faster a little 8bit horse would run across the screen toward the finish line, and any mistakes would slow it down again.
I’m 46. By the time I was in high school I had been using computers for over a decade, so I had the sort of organic typing ability which you might see now on those who aren’t mostly reliant on phones/tablets; I was taking programming classes but I felt I could be better at typing. At the time typing speed was considered important for work, and I believed having a good typing speed might help me get better summer jobs (this was only theoretically true: no one wanted to hire a teenage boy to do office work in the summer).
So I wanted to take a typing class, but the guidance counselor dissuaded me. I’m still not sure if that was a good thing or not, but I’ve never bothered to become a really fast typist since, so I suppose at this point it’s not necessary.
I will say, I think folks don’t realize how fast a good secretary could type. They could easily keep up with someone talking, and I knew of some who could manage over 100WPM. (My own speed was somewhere between 60 and 70 WPM, which was respectable but not remarkable).
I am a statistical outlier and should not be counted.
I'm 48.
I learned to type on a Commodore-64 and a mechanical typewriter around the age of five or six. My mom was a secretary for most of her life, and she taught me to touch type while we played Infocom games together.
There are earlier commenters in the thread talking about the astoundingly lousy keyboards on the various models of Speccy. I feel you. It's hard to touch-type on a Commodore because the keyboards are idiosyncratic when compared to a standard PC keyboard. It's just as hard to touch-type on the keyboard of an Atari XEGS because they have more in common with the Speccy keyboard than not.
I don't remember what my typing speed clocked in at. Doesn't matter anymore. Fast enough to do what I need to do.
Check out this new album
Mitch McConnell has supposedly fallen again and is still alive. I think maybe he has resistance to bludgeoning damage and next we should try fire or electricity.
Lindsey Graham didn't have enough of a soul for McConnell to stay upright for very long. He's going to have to ditch the meat suit and find a new host body soon.
We're gonna have 72 hours, max, to destroy his phylactery before he reincarnates.
...maybe he can feed on a few more, and we can reclaim the Senate for the Dems?
A bold strategy, but I see the benefits.
I think the problem is, there aren't too many souls left in the Senate to sustain him.
Mitch McConnell has supposedly fallen again and is still alive. I think maybe he has resistance to bludgeoning damage and next we should try fire or electricity.
Lindsey Graham didn't have enough of a soul for McConnell to stay upright for very long. He's going to have to ditch the meat suit and find a new host body soon.
