I was coming home from work on my bike very late a few years ago, and I was on the side of the lane where your car tire would be -- not in the center. It was a good thing, too, because there was a full size ladder in the road, lined up exactly in the direction of traffic. Cars could safely drive 'over' it. I missed it by maybe a foot. If I were in middle of the lane, I would have taken a serious spill.
> when you went looking for room 2352, you didn’t know what color wing it was in.
I worked in building 6 for a while. That was frustrating because the two halves of the building were mirror images. If I had to go to the other side of the building for a meeting, I got disoriented and thought I knew the way back to my office, but I kept getting it wrong. It's like the Upside Down.
Microsoft campuses were always impossible to navigate. The buildings are numbered in the Japanese style, i.e. chronologically.
Why not number buildings on a battleship grid? Building B6 must be adjacent to A6 and B7, as opposed to building 40 being adjacent to 27. Why not prefix the office numbers of an X-wing building with cardinal directions? If you see office N202, and you need office W107, head to the core, down the stairs, and one hallway to the left.
Not to mention that some people always used the golf course code names for clusters of buildings, too... which were never "official" so there wasn't even any signage or anything to refer to for those. I remember being pointed to a pile of "stuff new people ought to know but HR won't tell you" on some random share in NTDEV when I started and it had a map with those marked on it.
The main Redmond campus was shared with other tech companies originally.
Microsoft grew outwards from the original 4, then 6, buildings. I guess they didn't think it'd be worthwhile to rename the buildings once they expanded beyond 4 or 6.
Similarly, buildings 40 and 41 were (at least pre-remodel) roughly mirror images of each other. Roughly a week after moving from 41 to 40 -- long enough to start navigating based on "caveman memory" but not long enough to override a year's worth of previous memories -- I accidentally went into the women's restroom instead of the men's because they too were mirrored.
After working late, I decided to cut through building 17. I had to wash my hands so I went to the men's washroom, assuming the same layout in 17 as in 16.
Hmmm... They painted the washroom walls pink for some reason.
Oh. They've got a condom dispenser in the washroom?!
Ooooh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. That's NOT a condom dispenser!
I looked around wildly for any indications besides the dispenser of which washroom I was in. Quickly scrambled for the exit and looked at the door on my way out to discover that building 17 did NOT have the same exact layout as building 16.
Another exasperating thing is that the signs on the wall that were supposed to provide directions by listing which office number range was down which direction were somehow of no help whatsoever. I'd be looking for office number xxx or whatever and following the signs and somehow they'd never take me to the right hallway. People can smirk and say "skill issue" if they want but I swear it's true. Judging by the number of other people who had problems navigating those buildings, I wasn't alone.
Sure, and there are systems that work to prevent or those people from practicing. Imperfect systems, to be sure, but at least I as a citizen can look up the training and practice standards for therapists in my state, and I have some recourse if I encounter a bad therapist.
What safety systems exist to catch bad AI therapists? At this point, the only such systems (at least that I'm aware of) are built by the AI companies themselves.
Surely they're vastly outnumbered by A) legitimate therapists; and B) the sheer number of people carrying around their own personal sycophants in their pockets.
> Do you really think you're going to send 1,000,000 nudes to your wife without accidentally sending one to the wrong person!?
That seems like the wrong way to spin this hypothetical probability.
A quick search says there are 1.38B iPhone users worldwide. According to[0], 87.8% of 18+ year olds have sexted, so let's estimate that to mean 1.21B users. Even if we assume users only ever send one nude, that means 1,210 gaffes if you assume one in a million.
Just to make this concrete: I keep spreadsheets for all my vehicles, and I enter every single fuel up. My family's CRV costs $0.161/mile to drive.
I bought a VW ID.4 in January, and I also track its recharges. That car costs $0.030/mile. I don't know yet about maintenance, but just for the daily driving, gas costs 5.36x that of an EV. What would be a $45 fill-up of gas is an $8.40 electric bill.
On a per-mile basis, depreciation is a real killer.
I just (like an hour ago) sold the car that I’ve been driving for the past 12 years. I paid $11k in cash for it, and sold it for $3k. Unless you do a lot of driving, it’s tough for an EV to make up that kind of difference based on cheaper fuel.
Among many other things, I'm formatting many of my recipes and working on generating LaTeX to make a physical recipe book.
My son has inherited my love of cooking and baking, so we'll refine the book, add comments and photos, and eventually print and bind copies for our family and friends.
I also am hoping to laser engrave some old cookie sheets with one of my grandma's hand-written recipes. The problem I have is that it's rather faded, and I don't know yet how to make it pop for a good contrast.
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