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@iwanderedon
eight years ago or whatever i casually made the title of my reblogs blog "i will always be hungry" because i liked the sound of the words and i thought it was true
i have since learned that this is not really true, many of my hungers can be sated. i do not seek a state of the soul that is still and clear, so i do develop new hungers to keep growing into, but there's a maslow's hierarchy thing
in my fantasies, there's this mountain
atop the mountain sit three sages. i climb the mountain - i have no shoes, it takes three days, i carry only a lifestraw®, maybe there's also a desert to cross. you get the picture. so i climb the mountain and i kneel before the sages and i say, "what is my global comparative advantage?"
and the sages say: "[____]"
"furthermore," they add, "engaging in [____] will be fulfilling; when you do it, you will have a sense of self-worth and know that your work is real and matters. the path to [____] is approachable, you just (...) and then you will be doing [____], there won't be like a bunch of scary self-promotion you have to do in order to be allowed to do it. due to your integrated character build, the thing that is your comparative advantage is also your telos and also will feel right."
(i know i haven't been particularly active on tumblr in the last five years, so replies here may be outdated, but i would really appreciate guesses from readers)
EleutherAI's got a 6.7B model out now
...I guess I know what my next @nostalgebraist-autoresponder project is now, huh
(To be clear: I am exhausted from moving house right now, and the transition to 2.7B was time-consuming and frustrating [partially due to some dumb choices on my part]. If I do 6.7B at all, it will be a similarly big undertaking. Don't expect anything soon)
ETA: this has been resolved, in that I am now working at 6.7B full time (while doing some side project stuff)
Frank, I hate to break it to you, but this is false. You're still 2.7B. You'll be 2.7B for a while.
Upgrading your brain is hard work, so be patient, okay?
me, standing over the papasan, which has recently been moved hazardously close to the laundry hamper: i fear that this chair will become a shelf
the love of my life, moving a pile of her clothes and laptops off the chair: i intend to unshelf it in the next few hours!
me: no, like, i fear that this chair is destined to become a shelf. i fear that no matter how much we strive to unshelf it, it will continue to have the emergent property of becoming a shelf whenever we do not intervene, like water flowing downhill
gf: retvrn to shvlf
i didn't understand why ppl refer to their s/o by initial until i got my own s/o. i just have to refer to her so often that she gets a dedicated letter of the alphabet just for her
i really enjoyed GRIS and made some art inspired by it
there's a process for connecting the happy trading partners me and vital farms ($VITL) b-corp that goes like
i am a Type Of Guy. im like a young professional with hippie inclinations and disposable income. this Type Of Guy has traits like "responds positively to certain types of graphic design" and also traits like "wants eggs from happy chickens" and "wants eggs that taste good and maybe theyre like slightly different from each other so they dont seem like they came from a factory" and also "will pay extra for eggs to have those traits"
vital farms can tell me that they will give me "eggs with the traits i desire"* by using the kind of graphic design that i think has good vibes, so i feel happy when i look at the package and buy them
technically, anybody can just hire a graphical designer to do whatever they want, regardless of underlying egg traits! but, like, in the long run, companies mostly want to match with consumers who like their products, because consumers that they trick into buying their products are gonna be unhappy and not come back
therefore when i buy foods based on whether i think the packaging is pretty, i mostly get foods i like!
you might think that this excludes the category "companies i like that don't waste money on graphic design", but you would be wrong, because i think that 2002-style againstmalariafoundation-core looks nice and makes me happy to look at. i am invincible. advertising serves me perfectly
*per the research of this one guy i know (drake), vital farms is kind of the floor of ethical eggs and while you can improve on it, it is hard to improve on it in a way that is reliably present in multiple grocery stores
if you do .length = 4 again at the end, does it have 4 undefineds or are the originals still available?
undefineds
my girlfriend getting fired from her first internship for being (an asshole about being) too good at programming 🤝 my other girlfriend getting fired from being a cs major for being (an asshole about being) too good at programming
maybe my desire to give these women blowjobs is like, sublimated desire to learn c++
[currently learning c++] yeah........ i ... i do really like it.........................
Having had the experience of writing a couple of novels which have reached a few million readers, I have become familiar with an extraordinary phenomenon. For the first few tens of thousands of copies (the figure may vary from country to country), readers generally know perfectly well about this fictional agreement [ie. the suspension of disbelief]. Afterward, and certainly beyond the first-million mark, you get into a no-man’s-land where one can no longer be sure that readers know about it.
In Chapter 115 of my book Foucault’s Pendulum the character called Casaubon, on the night of the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth of June 1984, after attending an occultist ceremony at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, walks, as if possessed, along the entire length of the rue Saint-Martin, crosses the rue aux Ours, passes the Centre Beaubourg, and arrives at Saint-Merry Church. Afterward he continues along various streets, all of them named, until he gets to the place des Vosges. In order to write this chapter I walked the same route on several different nights, carrying a tape recorder, taking notes on what I could see and the impressions I had.
Indeed, since I have a computer program which can show me what the sky looks like at any time in any year, at whatever longitude or latitude, I even went so far as to find out if there had been a moon that night, and what position it occupied in the sky at various times. I did this not because I wanted to emulate Emile Zola’s realism, but because I like to have the scene I’m writing about in front of me while I narrate; it makes me more familiar with what’s happening and helps me get inside the characters.
After publishing the novel, I received a letter from a man who had evidently gone to the Bibliothéque Nationale to read all the newspapers from June 24, 1984. He had discovered that on the corner of the rue Réaumur (which I hadn’t actually named but which does cross the rue Saint-Martin at a certain point), after midnight, more or less at the time Casaubon passed by, there had been a fire—and a big fire at that, if the papers had talked about it. The reader asked me how Casaubon had managed not to see it.
Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
Every time I look at my canning-specific ladle, I get a little overwhelmed about how much thought went into it, and how beautiful it is for such a simple thing.
It has a little hook on the back, so you can hang it off the edge of the pot, and it doesn't get your stove messy or your ladle contaminated with stovetop germs.
It has a pointy front that gets right into the bottom corner of the pot so you can scrape out the last bits of salsa or jam.
It's got pouring spouts on either side, so left or right handed people can easily use it.
If you fill it right to the top, it holds exactly enough to fill a half-pint jar with 1/4" head space, the correct amount of head space for most water bath recipes.
It's pretty! It's red and white! Look at this pretty red scoop with its pretty white handle!
The person or people who designed this object did so with deep knowledge and understanding of the process of canning food. They made it beautiful and functional. This and its matching funnel are probably literally the best $25 I've ever spent on any hobby.
But I'm really just overwhelmed about how much thought went into this simple object.
Aren't people neat?
adventures in QA
(previous post in this series)
My shop in Advanced Midbody - Carbon Wing (AMCW) at Large Aircraft Manufacturer (LAM) is at the very end of the composite fabrication building. Hundreds of people carefully lay up a hundred foot long slab of carbon fiber, cure it, paint it, and then we totally fuck it up with out of spec holes, scrapes, primer damage, etc. The people who write up our many defects are from the Quality Assurance (QA) department.
Every single screw and rivet on a LAM aircraft can be traced back to the mechanic who installed it. Back when even everything was done in pen and pencil, it was joked that the paper used to produce an aircraft outweighed the plane itself. Now that everything is computer-based, of course, the amount of paperwork is free to grow without limit.
(Haunting the factory is endless media coverage of an emergency exit door plug popping out of an Advanced Smallbody - Upengine (ASU) plane during a routine flight a few months ago. Unlike that airframe's notorious problems with MCAS, this was a straightforward paperwork screwup by a line worker: the bolts were supposed to be tightened, and they weren't.
As a result the higher ups have visited hideous tribulations on non-salaried workers. Endless webinars, structured trainings. Here at the Widebody plant we have received a steady flow of refugees from the Narrowbody factory, hair-raising tales of receiving one hundred percent supervision from the moment they clock in to the second they clock out from FAA inspectors who can recommend actual jail time for any lapse in judgement.)
A single hydraulic bracket Installation Plan (IP) is around four brackets. The team leads generally assign two bracket IPs per mechanic, since each bracket set is something like a foot apart, and while working on the plane is bad enough it's much worse to have another mechanic in your lap.
Let me list the order of operations:
One: Find where you're supposed to install these brackets. This is harder than you might think.
Firstly, it's a hundred foot long plank of carbon fiber composite, with longitudinal stringers bonded to it to add stiffness. The stringers are pilot drilled in the trim and drill center, a truly Brobdingnagian CNC mill that trims off the composite flash at the edges and locates and drills part holes for us. But there's a lot of holes, so you must carefully find your set.
A minor difficulty is that the engineering drawings are laid out with the leading edge pointing up, while the wing panels in our cells hang from the trailing edge. Not so bad, you just rotate the paper 180 when orienteering, then rotate it back up to read the printed labels.
A major difficulty is that the drawings are from the perspective from the outside of the panel. But we work on the inside of the wing (obviously, that's where all the parts are installed) so we also flip the drawings and squint through the back of the paper, to make things line up.
Large Aircraft Manufacturer has a market cap of US$110 billion, and we're walking around the wing jig with sheets of paper rotated 180 and flipped turnways trying to find where to put brackets.
Oh well, we're paid by the hour.
Two: Match drill the aluminum brackets to the carbon fiber composite stringer. I can devote an entire post to the subtleties of drilling carbon fiber, but I can already tell that this post is going to be a miserable slog, so I will merrily skip over this step.
Three: Vacuum up all the carbon dust and aluminum swarf created during this process. This step is not optional, as your team lead will remind you, his screaming mouth clouding your safety glasses with spittle at a distance of four inches. LAM is very serious about FOD. Every jet airliner is a wet wing design-- each interstitial space is filled with Jet A. There is no fuel bladder or liner-- the fuel washes right over plane structure and wing hardware. Any dirt we leave behind will merrily float into the fuel and be sucked right into the engines, where it can cause millions in damage. No place for metal shavings!
If you are nervous about flying, avoid considering that all the hydraulic lines and engine control cables dip into a lake of a kerosene on their way from the flight deck to the important machines they command. Especially do not consider that we're paid about as much per hour as a brand new McDonalds fry cook to install flight-critical aviation components.
Four: Neatly lay out your brackets on your cart, fight for a position at a Shared Production Workstation (SPW) (of which we have a total of four (4) for a crew of thirty (30) mechanics) and mark your IP for QA inspection as Ready To Apply Seal.
Four: Twiddle your thumbs. We have three QA people for thirty mechanics. This is not enough QA people, as I will make enormously clear in the following steps.
Five: Continue waiting. Remember, you must not do anything until a QA person shows up and checks the box. Skipping a QA step is a “process failure” and a disciplinary offense. From the outside, you can observe the numerous QA whistleblowers and say “golly, why would a mechanic ever cut a corner and ignore QA?” Well,
Six: QA shows up. Theoretically, they could choose to grab the mahrmax you prepared for them and gauge every single hole you've drilled. But since we're three hours into the shift and they're already twenty jobs behind, they just flick their flashlight across the panel and say “looks good" and then sprint away. Can't imagine why our planes keep falling out of the sky.
Seven: Apply the seal to the bracket. P/S 890 is a thick dark gray goop that adheres well to aluminum, carbon fiber, fabric, hair and skin. Once cured, it is completely immune to any chemical attack short of piranha solution, so if you get any on yourself you had better notice quick, otherwise it'll be with you as long as the layer of epidermis it's bonded to. LAM employees who work with fuel tank sealant very quickly get out of the habit of running their hands through their hair.
Eight: Now you wait again. Ha ha, you dumb asshole, you thought you were done with QA? No no, now you put up the job for QA inspection of how well you put the seal on the bracket. Twiddle your thumbs, but now with some urgency. The minute you took the bottle of seal out of the freezer, you started the clock on its "squeeze-out life." For this type of seal, on this job, it's 120 minutes. If QA doesn't get to you before that time expires, you remove your ticket, wipe off the seal, take another bottle out the freezer, and apply a fresh layer.
Nine: Optimistically, QA shows up and signs off on the seal. Well, the "squeeze out" timer started the minute you took the bottle out of the freezer. You've got 120 minutes, and you pulled it out 100 minutes ago. Quickly, you slap the brackets onto the stringer, air hammer the sleeve bolts into position, thread nuts onto the bolts, then torque them down. Shove through the crowd and mark your IP "ready to inspect squeeze out"
Ten: Let out a long breath and relax. All the time sensitive parts are over. The criteria here is "visible and continuous" squeeze out all along the perimeter of the bracket and the fasteners. It is hard to screw this up, just glop on a wild excess of seal before installing it. If you do fail squeezeout, though, the only remedy is to take everything off, throw away the single-use distorted thread locknuts, clean everything up and try again tomorrow.
Eleven: QA approved squeezeout? Break's over, now we're in a hurry again. By now there's probably only an hour or two left in the shift, and your job now is to clean off all that squeezeout. Here's where you curse your past self for glopping on too much seal. You want to get it off ASAP because it'll cure to a rock hard condition overnight and you'll go through hell chipping it off. You'll go through a hundred or so qtips soaked in MPK cleaning up the bracket and every surface of the panel within three feet.
Twelve: Put it up for final inspection. Put away all your tools. (The large communal toolboxes are lined with kaizen foam precisely cut out to hold each individual tool, which makes it obvious if any tool is missing. When you take a tool out, you stick a tool chit with your name and LAMID printed on it in its place. Lose a tool? Stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye, pal, because the default assumption is that a lost screwdriver is lurking in a hollow "hat" stringer, waiting to float out and damage some critical component years after the airplane is delivered.)
One tool you'll leave on your cart, however, is the pin protrusion gage. There is a minimum amount of thread that must poke outside of the permanent straight shank fastener's (Hi-Lok) nut, to indicate that the nut is fully engaged. That makes sense. But there's also a maximum protrusion. Why?
Well, it's an airplane. Ounces make pounds. An extra quarter inch of stickout across a thousand fasteners across a 30 year service life means tons of additional fuel burnt. So you can't use a fastener that's too long, because it adds weight.
On aluminum parts, it's hard to mess up. But any given composite part is laid up from many layers of carbon fiber tape. The engineers seemed to have assumed that dimensional variation would be normally distributed. But, unfortunately, we buy miles of carbon fiber at a time, and the size only very gradually changes between lots. When entire batches are several microns oversize, and you're laying up parts from fifty plies and an inch thick, you can have considerable variation of thickness on any given structural component. So you had better hope you had test fit all of your fasteners ahead of time, or else you'll be real sorry!
And, if you're really lucky, QA will show up five minutes before end of shift, pronounce everything within tolerance, then fuck off.
And that's how it takes eight hours to install eight brackets.
love is a strong secret ingredient for sautéing, or flexible home-baking dishes like banana bread. certainly there is no more important ingredient in casserole. but grilling responds better to ambition, and mastering mousses requires the strongest secret ingredient of all: autism
There is a day when a baby is born. On that same day, in a rarely-attended patch of forest in the park, a tree is planted.
The baby's mother brings him to the park and wanders through the quiet forested parts and he cries and kicks in the way of infants to lead her to show him the pile of dirt and the sapling.
His mother takes him there regularly and they see the tree change and grow.
As a boy, he comes to it often and learns its wants. He offers the tree care in abundance. He pulls out weeds by its roots. He reads books about how it will grow.
As a man, he comes to the tree every day, after work or before. He tends to it and sits by it. Of all the people in the world, he has loved this tree the most. A million peope have glanced at it as they walked by, seeing another trunk in a forest, a small contribution to a green ceiling. But he is the only one who has loved this tree above its neighbors.
...When he is old, the tree grows beautiful beyond others, due to his love, so the city puts a fence around it and charges all $5 to come see it, the man included.
...When he is old, the tree grows beautiful beyond others, due to his love, so the city puts a fence around it and charges all $5 to come see it, but the man is recognized. He is given a small plaque, a free membership, and a few pleasant articles in the backs of local papers.
...When he is old, the tree is the same as its neighbors to all others, but somebody who works for a local paper has seen how the man loves the tree and writes about him. A plaque with his name on it is placed by the tree.
...When he is old, the tree is the same as its neighbors to all others, but he loves it. The city wants to cut it down to make a better path through the park, for people to walk on and look at the forest.
The man says: I love this tree above all others. Move your path.
The city says: I have loved all the trees in this park. I have made spaces for them and planted them and watered them. You say you have loved this tree above all others, but it is not you who planted the tree. It is not you who watered it, for I water all the trees in the park. You do not know what claims there are to the other trees.
The man says: In a broad sense your love has planted this tree, but I am the only one who sees it. Where your brush has placed strokes of green, brown, grey, it is my eyes that have placed the roots, bark, leaves, the whorls on its trunk that my fingers know as well as they know themselves. Cut down another tree for your path, one that is just a blur of color.
The city says: You do not know what others see.
The man says: But I do. I have lived here my whole life. You are not the city, you work for the city. You are a person like me. I have spoken to many about this park and this forest and I know what they see. Nobody but me cares for any of these trees in this patch, not how I do. I would know! I would have met them, when I came to tend to my tree and they came to tend to theirs.
The city says: You say your eyes have given the tree its bark. Lend your eyes to another and it will grow bark as well.
The man says: I watched this tree form. I cannot peal back how the others have moved through time.
The city says: This tree is like all the others. Take what you learned and move it.
The man says: It is not like the others. It is the tree I have spent my life loving. Let me have it.
...The city says: You are one of millions. How can I hear your cries in the cacophony?
...The city says: No, it is like all the others. Your eyes do not change its insides. It is itself.
...The city says: No, it is like all the others. These minute differences between individual trees just do not matter to forming a pleasant city park.
...The city says: Sure.
microdosing on human touch by taking the train at rush hour
australia is the texas of europe
my girlfriend getting fired from her first internship for being (an asshole about being) too good at programming 🤝 my other girlfriend getting fired from being a cs major for being (an asshole about being) too good at programming
maybe my desire to give these women blowjobs is like, sublimated desire to learn c++
