Tar_Alcaran

I do workplace safety, and it’s incredibly hard to work with (manufactured) stone in a safe way. The dust gets everywhere, and you basically have to take the same safety precautions as with asbestos remediation.

Every resin-based material is friable after the resin decays. That’s one of the major problems with asbestos roofs, the resin holding the asbestos is breaking down after decades of sunlight.

What do you think most brake pads are made with?

Today I learned the US allowed asbestos brakepads till mid 2024. Jesus fucking christ people.

Aren’t the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years?

Sorta kinda. It was much easier to get prolonged asbestos exposure than repeated glyphosate exposure. We used it in everything, including carpets and roofs. The asbestos fibers in those roofs are fine, but the glue holding them together isn’t. It’s been falling on the ground since forever, but it’s accelerating more and more.

Meanwhile, the only people working unsafely with glyphosate are basically a subset of farmers. Now, I’ve basically NEVER seen a farmer handle chemicals according to the instructions, so within that group unsafe exposure is basically 100%, but it’s a much smaller fraction of the population.

For all the panicky people:

Microplastics are bad, but they’re not remotely close to asbestos bad. Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago. The effects absolutely exist, but they’re quite subtle and do not involve suffocating while you cough your lungs out in small pieces.

Gylphosate is bad, but it’s mostly bad for the people working directly with it and ignoring every safety precaution (the Venn diagram of those two groups is pretty much a circle). Eating food that was once treated with gylphosate will not be remotely bad for you on any measurable scale.

Source: am chemist, work as a safety professional (independent, no large company is paying me for anything but an occasional audit that is mostly unrelated to chemistry)

But, I’ll happily add something that’s bad, but not on the level of asbestos. Indoor cooking on fire and/or with poor ventilation. It creates combustion products, releases particulate and smoke and many complex volatiles that are just drifting around in your house for pretty much the entire evening.

Edit: and growing your own food on local soil in a city. That dirt has been collecting pollution for a century, and the odds are pretty decent that it might actually qualify for remediation if you live near anywhere industrial or a big road that’s been there for a while. Get your soil tested, or use raised beds if you’re growing food.

I found my first mosquito sting of the year this morning. Hurray…

Reminds of Kipling’s Hymn of Breaking Strain

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_strain.htm

Correct. I didn’t reply to the binary search post.

No, it’s very different.

When you have multiple allergies/intolerances, starting at zero and then adding one thing at a time is a lot more efficient than removing one thing at a time.

Removing one thing at a time will create many false negatives, where you remove a hit but don’t notice because you left another hit behind.

Not in tech, but LLMs have been great for my safety and compliance consulting business. I can honestly say LLMs have made me thousands of euros.

Before LLMs, I would spend quite a bit of my regular workday on creating safety plans and coming up with systems to improve conditions and ensure compliance.

Now, with the power of LLMs, management can generate those plans themselves. So instead of me spending my normal workday on it, I get to bill my emergency rate when the hallucinated slop gets rejected and they need something actually legal at the last minute.

The product would not be possible without AI,

has made developers acutely aware of just how flakey and unreliable AI is.

Sales must love you.

In fact, they could be allergic to some or all of the ingredients eliminated. Or to the delivery driver’s personal hygiene.

They’re fine with the second half most times

Exo-Squad from the 90s, didn’t have gay stuff. But damn if it wasn’t heavy on the politics.

Please God, I just ask that reviewer number 2 comes to their fucking senses for 17 minutes to approve my paper.

Thanks ChatGPT

Thanks!

I was born in Czechoslovakia, and I have a small collection of stuff that lists the country after it stopped existing.

For example, I have a helmet that was “Made in Czechoslovia” in 1998, 6 years after it stopped existing. I’d love to buy one of these

I understood that reference!

Yugoslavia was such a mess for such a long time, it was on maps LONG after it split up, but with dotted lines for borders.

Also, I’m from Czechoslovakia!