But my friends call me Spray.

Many of my friends are in critical condition after an incident involving my father and some bees. The pest control guy was not helpful. I spent many hours on the phone with him explaining the situation already, so please do not suggest I call him for advice.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • One of my friends had steady access to penis envy mushrooms when I was in my freshman year of college. I remember taking them with another friend of mine and had the weirdest goddamn trip of my life. I took about 1.5g, and he took 3g.

    We were walking in the woods when we came up, and he fell completely silent for like 3 hours. I tried asking him if he wanted to go back to the dorm several times, but he would just look at me for a minute, then go back to staring at the ground and continue walking.

    Eventually, it got dark and I turned on my flashlight (thank God I decided to bring one). As it got darker, his walk got more and more frantic. I thought he was trying to run away from me, like maybe he was mad that I gave him the mushrooms. If we weren’t in the woods in the dark, I would have tried giving him a little space, but I didn’t want him to wander out too far without a source of light. So I slowed my pace and walked behind him, giving him the same buffer I would give a stranger walking behind me on the sidewalk.

    After a while of giving him his space, he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to me. I came up beside him and asked if he was feeling alright, but he was silent still. I decided that if he was mad at me for the mushrooms, I could fix it by dumping the rest on the ground. So I did exactly that, all while he was watching silently. As soon as they were on the ground, he started walking again, but this time much slower. I followed behind.

    While walking, I was swinging my arms slightly. Since my friend was a bit in front of me, the light from the flashlight was moving around a lot more for him than it was for me. This must have been messing with him, because he stopped walking, grabbed my arm, and finally broke his silence with a stern, “stop”. I was mostly just relieved he said something.

    “All good?”, I asked. He looked at the ground, then back at me, then back at the ground, then back at me. He looked super confused, so I asked again, “Hey man, are you all good?”

    “Yeah, yeah…” he said, looking at the ground. He looked up again and asked, “Hey, man… why did you dump out the mushrooms???”

    When I explained my thought process behind everything, he laughed really hard. He had no clue he wasn’t communicating with me that whole time. He said he was walking fast so he could get back to the dorm before it got dark. When he stopped, it was because he realized it was already dark and I wasn’t next to him anymore and my flashlight was the light source. Then when he saw me dump out the mushrooms, he thought I was laying out bait for an animal. He figured I thought we had walked for so long that we were fully in the wilderness and needed to hunt to survive. He knew we were near(ish) the dorms, so he kept going. When he remembered that I didn’t leave the dorms with hunting/camping stuff, he realized they were the mushrooms and stopped to ask me why I dumped them lol.

    Weird time.



  • I work at a small company of <100 people, and fortunately the CEO is a human that treats his employees like other humans and recognizes that without us, there would be no company anymore. However, all of his emails sound like the most heavily sanitized corpo-marketing-speak. If you were to judge him by his emails alone, you would never guess that. As it turns out, he uses Copilot to draft emails. When I found that out, it made so much more sense.

    On a certain level, I get it. I hate writing emails. But the AI slop emails make him seem like a corporate goon and they ultimately dehumanize him to new employees. I don’t know if he realizes how impersonal the AI makes him seem. He probably has become slop-blind from using it too much.

    Sorry, only tangentially related. Just kind of ranting here.









  • I think you’re right about the international standardization. Also, I think another important factor is that the average American has a concept of how long a foot is, how hot 70°F is, how much a pound weighs, etc. These are easily to visualize because these measurements are used in everyday life outside of engineering applications. Most people don’t have a concept of the units we use to measure the invisible magic force in our walls.


  • I’m a civil engineer in the US, and can confirm that my industry uses US Customary units. I have some mechanical engineer friends, and most also use US Customary units, with certain exceptions. While in school, the intro classes I took used metric more often than not because it allowed for easier understanding of the source material. By the 3rd year, classes started employing more examples and problems in US Customary units. By year 4, it was almost exclusively US Customary units.

    Forgive my lack of understanding here, but for electrical engineering, what are the alternatives to metric units? I know BTUs can be used instead of Joules, hp can be used instead of Watts, and AWG can be used instead of… Whatever the metric measurement is. BTUs and hp seem to be mainly used for specific industries and consumer products (let’s be honest nobody likes them anyway). AWG is used because that’s the standard that commonly available wires in the US are measured to.

    Temperature and length are obvious. More specifically, I am thinking of volts, amps, and ohms (my understanding caps out at what I learned in my physics classes).


  • Thank you. I was looking at it thinking, “but 100m is only 10% of the other distance”.

    BTW for any curious non-muricans, miles is abbreviated “mi” so it doesn’t get confused with meters. The only slight exception is when you are dealing with transportation, where none of the units are abbreviated properly:

    • miles per hour = “mph” (should be mi/hr)
    • miles per gallon = “mpg” (should be mi/gal)


  • At least around me, I feel like the drive-thru is often noticeably slower than parking and going inside. The last time I got McDonald’s at the drive-thru, I was waiting for over a half hour to get my order. To make it worse, I was stuck in the inner lane, so I couldn’t even say “fuck it” and drive off until I was third in line. At that point, I had spent a good 25 minutes waiting, so the sunk cost fallacy kicked in and I waited some more. When I got to the window to pick up my order, it wasn’t even warm.

    I don’t get fast food as much anymore, but when I do, I order through the app and go inside to pick it up. At least then it doesn’t feel like I’m stuck in gridlocked traffic.



  • Yes, but the specific type of irony that this situation fits the definition of does not come from whether or not the tool they used worked for the intended purpose. The irony comes from the fact that they are relying on the output from LLM-generated content (ISBN checksum calculator) to determine the reliability of other LLM-generated content (hallucinated ISBN numbers).

    Irony is a word that has a somewhat vague meaning and is often interpreted differently. If the tool they used did not work as intended and flagged a bunch of real ISBNs as being AI generated, the situation would (I think) be more ironic. They are still using AI to try and police AI, but with the additional layer of the outcome being the opposite of their intention.



  • I am a millennial and grew up in the time of the family computer being the one computer in the house. My father had an IBM Thinkpad with windows 98 on it, which he replaced some time around 2001/2 (it was a beast of a laptop for its time, but was from before track pads were a thing, so it had the red nub as the built-in mouse). When he replaced it, he let me have the old Thinkpad.

    When he was showing me all the cool game demos he collected from mail-in floppys, one of them was for Duke Nukem 3D. It had the entire LA Meltdown part of the game on it. I remember him going into the adult theater, turning to me, and saying, “check this out”. He pressed the space bar, Duke whipped out a few dollars, and said, “shake it baby”. I didn’t understand why a few dollars and a one-liner from an overgrown Bart Simpson would cause a woman to bounce her boobs around, but I think I showed every friend I had those pixelated nipple tassels.

    It may have been the first sexualized breasts I had seen in my entire life.