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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Certainly. I’m not saying soap is bad by any means. It’s a tool for bathing just like any other. Not using soap to wash your body doesn’t imply unhygienic anymore than not using a scrub brush makes you unhygienic.

    What matters is that you wash regularly, get rid of grime, dirt, excess oils and dead skin buildup.
    There’s many paths to hygiene. For most people, the one with soap is the easiest and the only downside is “now moisturize”.

    Persistent advertising from cleaning product companies since the 50s have heavily pushed a level of cleaning and perfuming well beyond what’s actually necessary for hygiene.
    My body wash company would like me to use a silver dollar sized portion. I get better results from a dime sized portion and a moderate firmness silicone brush.


  • You’re taking “it’s possible to be clean after bathing without soap” as a way stronger statement than it is.
    Do you think I’m saying soap is bad?
    No one is talking about hygienic hand washing practices for medicine, food prep, after defecation, or after being coated in tough substances.
    We’re in a giant pile of people talking about routing bathing to prevent body odor and the skin issues caused by poor bodily hygiene.
    Washing with running water and a scrubbing action is sufficient for that purpose for many people. Bathing without soap is not a guarantee that you will have BO, a rash, skin lesions, or acne.

    The Africa point isn’t really the gotcha you think it is. Soap working better faster doesn’t mean that a lack of soap doesn’t work. As you said, when they didn’t have soap they still washed. People are generally interested in being clean, and pragmatic. They’ll clean themselves, and if something helps them get cleaner faster, they’ll use it.

    And yup, that passage does document that the Roman empire eschewed soap for personal hygiene until roughly year zero.


  • The primary action that soap has for fighting bacteria is breaking down oils and making it easier for debris and bacteria to be removed. Less food for the bacteria, and faster removal.
    Bacteria will be destroyed by this process, but that’s coincidental to why soap works and provides benefit.
    It’s why we don’t tell people to wash their hands by squirting soap on them, spreading it around and then rinsing it off. The critical step is the mechanical action that facilitates removal of debris with running water.

    Yes, soap is necessary for hand washing because we need to maximize bacteria removal after defecation or before preparing foods or medical activities.

    In the context of bathing however, you don’t need to sterilize your torso. You will also be rinsing your body far longer than you’re typically going to be washing your hands, which when combined with scrubbing results in a clean torso.

    I’m not one of those people who’s opposed to using soap or anything, but that’s not the same as recognizing that it’s possible to wash and be clean without it.


  • Did I say pure luxury, or did I say it makes it easier?

    I did forget that something is obviously 100% vital and indispensable or entirely worthless and void of functionality.

    Early soaps were used for the preparation of textiles rather than personal hygiene.
    As early as we invented soap, we actually had the notion that festering in your own rancid body oils is bad far, far earlier. As such, we had ways of dealing with that well before we had soap and people didn’t just immediately switch.

    So go ahead and use soap. I certainly do. But if you’re looking to have your mind blown, take a shower and just scrub your skin with a brush, loofah or the palm of your hand and be amazed when you still get clean. If you’re really grimey, you can do what the Romans did and rub yourself with olive oil and scrape it off with a scraper before doing that.


  • Phrasing it like that is weird, but you don’t actually need soap. It just makes the oils and grime come off easier, so without it you just need to scrub more diligently.

    If you’re cleaning yourself properly your skin is gonna be the same cleanliness afterwards either way. Cheap soap will dry your skin though, so use decent soap.

    Cleaning regularly and effectively is the key, not the specifics. Soap just lowers the bar for effectiveness, and maybe adds “and also moisturize”.








  • As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.

    You can certainly argue that “downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training” should be treated differently from “downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder”, but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.

    Personally, I think it’s a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can’t copy it and share the copy with others.


  • So, you’re correct that active emergencies take priority.

    That being said, in essentially every place that has 911, both numbers connect to the same place and the only real difference is pick-up order and default response.
    It’s the emergency number not simply because it’s only for emergencies but because it’s the number that’s the same everywhere that you need to know in the event of an emergency.

    It should be used in any situation where it should be dealt with by someone now, and that someone isn’t you. Finding a serious crime has occurred is an emergency, even if the perpetrator is gone and the situation is stable.
    A dead person, particularly a potential murder, generally needs to be handled quickly.

    It’s also usually better to err on the side of 911, just in case it is an emergency that really needs the fancy features 911 often gives, like location lookups.



  • "I, like so many Americans, worked in a fast food service job. Unlike so many Americans I was able to pursue a career in the field my degree was in, which is an opportunity not given to far too many of our younger citizens. While pursuing those opportunities I tried to focus my resume on the achievements most relevant to the jobs I was applying for. Only after working in law and politics for years did I see that a dozen things needing your immediate attention with a constant time sensitive to-do list was a bit more relevant than those hiring managers would have been able to see. " Then some chatter about not expecting her time working there to come up as an attack, since resume writing and a job not aligned with your aspirational career are pretty normal occurrences, and not knowing that is kinda weird.

    I don’t think it’s too hard to politely say that McDonald’s was not the career she was aiming for. It’s basically an acknowledgement that her parents weren’t rich and hiring managers get picky about resumes. Which is honestly a relatable narrative to a lot of people.


  • Only for the sake of specific-ness: Crowdstrike forced the update, not the OS. :) and yeah, that’s generally unheard of. Like so unheard of that it’s a professional recommendation reversing occurrence based purely on how they could release a product that bypassed user expectations so aggressively and without any documentation that it was happening.
    I work in the security sector with computers, and before all this I would have said “yeah, crowdstrike is a widely deployed product and if it fits your requirements it’s reasonable to use”. Now I would strongly recommend against it, not because of this incident, but because of the engineering, product and safety culture that thought it was okay to design a product this way without user controls or even documentation around any part of it. Their after incident report is horrifying in testing it communicates they weren’t doing.

    I wouldn’t advise someone to use windows for a server, but that’s a preference thing, not a “hazard” thing. If they had a working windows setup I wouldn’t even comment on it.

    What sounds like happened to Delta is that they were set-up roughly like other companies. Maybe a little loose on different setups at different airports. That’s a forgivable level of slop. Where they differed was in having a piece of software that couldn’t handle being entirely shut off, and then immediately loaded to 100% with no ease in.
    Scheduling is a type of computer problem that’s very susceptible to getting increasingly difficult the bigger the number of things being worked with. Like exponentially more difficult, but it’s actually worse than exponential.
    I know nothing about they’re system, but I can guess that it worked fine when it was running because it needed to make a small number of scheduling decisions at a time, and could look at the existing state of things as a decided “fact”. Start the system fresh, and suddenly it needs to compare the hundreds of airports, more hundred of planes and crews, and thousands of possible routes to each other and is looking at literally billions of possible schedules which it needs to sort through to pick the best ones.
    Other airlines appear to have scheduling systems that were either developed using more modern techniques that can find “good enough” very efficiently, or the application was written to fail less easily or had better hardware so it could work faster.

    For whatever reason, delta was the only one that had the key bit of software fail to come back up.

    Delta has higher costs than the other airlines because there are regulations protecting travelers and ensuring they get appropriate refunds and accomodations if their flights are cancelled. Other airlines were able to shift people around and get going again before they had to pay out too much in ticket refunds, food, or hotels.
    Delta is arguing that crowdstrike is responsible for the total cost of the incident, which would include all the refunds and hotels, since they caused it.
    Crowdstrike recently responded that they think their liability is no greater than $10mil. They seem to be taking the position that they’re only responsible for the immediate effects, so things like diverting aircraft, needing to manually poke systems and all that.

    “Yeah I t-boned you when I ran a red light, so I owe you for the damage to your car, but your car was a dangerous piece of crap so I’m not responsible for your broken legs, hospital bills or lost wages”.
    I think the judge will find that running the red light means they are responsible for the extended consequences of their actions, even if they’re vastly in excess of what anyone would have predicted up front, but that the car was pretty dangerous so it was really only a matter of time so it’s not all on them.

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading about court cases, it’s that a civil suit like this will get really complicated with how they assess damages and responsibilities.

    And yeah, there’s no perfect answer for computer system stability. You can never get perfect stability, and each 9 you add to your 99.9% uptime costs more than the last one. Eventually you have teams of people whose full time job is keeping the system up for an additional second per year. And even with that, sometimes Google still goes down because it’s all a numbers game.

    I didn’t mean to ramble so long, but I have opinions and I get type-y before bed. :)



  • You are correct that Delta was an outlier, but it wasn’t with regards to the scale of the outage, it was that their scheduling software was down far longer and they handled a lot of the customer side of things significantly less well.

    Generally, your protection against operating system issues is the aforementioned restriction on changes and how they go out.
    If something is stable, you can expect it to remain stable unless something changes or random chance breaks something.
    The operational cost of running multiple operating systems in production like you describe would be high. Typically software is only written to work on one platform, and while it can be modified to work on others, it’s usually a cost with no benefit outside of a consumer environment.
    Different operating systems have different performance characteristics you need to factor in for load scaling, different security models, and different maintenance requirements.
    Often, but not always, server administrators will focus on one OS, so adding more to the mix can mean people are rusty with whichever is your backup, which can be worse than just focusing on fixing the issue with the primary.
    OS bugs are rare, and they usually manifest early or randomly. It’s why production deployments tend to use the OS as long as it’s supported: change means learning the new issues and you’ve probably already encountered all the bullshit with what you’re currently using. That’s why the Linux distros tend to have long term support versions, and windows server edition tends to just get support for a long time with terrible documentation.

    I’m a Linux guy, so defending windows feels weird, and I want to include that I don’t think anyone should use it, particularly for a server, but the professional in me acknowledges that it’s a perfectly functional hammer.

    As we’ve learned more, I’ve become more disparaging of deltas choice to not keep the scheduling system modernized in a way that could recover faster, and not investing enough in making systems homogeneous across different airports. I still think that these issues are largely independent of their actual disaster recovery or resiliency plans.
    Inevitably, the lawsuits will determine that the blame for the damage is split between the two of them. My bet is 70/30 crowdstrike/delta, since they can easily demonstrate that the issue was fundamentally caused by crowdstrike and negatively impacted other airlines and businesses in general. Some was clearly deltas fault for just failing to keep a system modernized to handle a massive shift like this, and would have been similarly disrupted by any outage with flight cancellations.


  • It’s particularly annoying because those are all AI. AI is the blanket term for the entire category of systems that are man made and exhibit some aspect of intelligence.

    So the marketing term isn’t wrong, but referring to everything by it’s most general category is error prone and makes people who know or work with the differences particularly frustrated.
    It’s easier to say “I made a little AI that learned how I like my tea”, but then people think of something that writes full sentences and tells me to put dogs in my tea. “I made a little machine learning based optimization engine that learned how I like my tea” conveys it much less well.