I mean, generally speaking, I do think it’s better not to publicly humiliate anyone if you can avoid it. The fact that some people think this doesn’t apply to “underlings” doesn’t make it any less true as a general rule.

So one day, the build was broken. The guy that was running the project freaked the fuck out. He said the client needed to have a nightly build or really bad things would happen.

Now, to manually produce a build of this project was an intense undertaking. It usually ran overnight and it was a long, fiddly process that took several hours. I proposed to him that I just fix the builder instead, and they’d get a build tomorrow. No, he said. It has to be today.

I spent the entire goddamned day making a new build. Finally, at the end of the day, I got a build. We could give it to the client.

He said, good news, I got you some extra time. I told the client we’ve got some new features we really want to show you, and they’ll be in tomorrow’s build.

You can see where this is going.

Four days in a row this happened. Four days of making a new build by hand, never with the time or permission to just fix the builder. The client never received the build they kept getting promised, because there were always new features waiting, tantalizingly close, that they absolutely had to witness for themselves. But alas, these features had just been implemented, brand new, and we had to make a build that would include them. Tomorrow. It was always just in the works, tomorrow. And yet… tomorrow, when everyone came in, the build was broken! This was a surprise to no one, except the guy running the project. He seemed genuinely not to grasp the idea that if no one fixed the autobuilder, the autobuilder would continue not working. He lived in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety, driven to wild agony by the prospect of an unhappy client. I wasn’t privy to the conversations, but I suspect the client was genuinely unhappy with whatever he was telling them. I have no idea.

Finally, on the fourth day, I happened to talk with one of the higher-ups, and filled him in one what was going on on my project. His conversation about it with me was fairly brief, but it was fairly clear that he wasn’t happy.

Within a few minutes, I was officially told that I had permission to take some time to fix the autobuilder. Oh joyous day it was.

Once the project was over, there was a very, very short delay before the guy who’d been running the project had been offered an exciting new opportunity at some other company and we all wished him the best.

If only everyone else would agree with him and do exactly what he says at all times immediately, we wouldn’t have problems like this. He specifically told them how unreasonable it is that they’re out of soy milk. Several times.

Fast forward 3.5 hours to his local Starbucks

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE OUT OF SOY MILK LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING

Disclaimer: I have no real qualification on this. But it seems like this whole technology is pretty sensitive to the specific model being used and the specific details of the pixels; the whole thing is written like there’s some silver-bullet image alteration that can fool “machine vision” in general, but what it demonstrates is nothing like that.

I asked Midjourney to identify the altered images that machines are supposed to identify as a sheep or a cat or whatever, and it said:

• A bouquet of flowers sitting on the table in a brown vase
• Some bright colored flowers in a circular vase
• An omelette and sandwiches on the table
• An omelet with hash browns

… which is what they are.

The last two images were actually a little more interesting – they’re distorted to the point that it’s visually obvious that they’ve been altered, and Midjourney actually picks up that the image is distorted a little, and includes that in the style part of its description, while mostly-accurately describing what’s in the image. These are its full descriptions:

“a red bridge, traffic lights, and a fencedin section of street, in the style of digital mixed media, thermal camera, american realism, found object sculpture, stipple, ricoh r1, xbox 360 graphics”

“a pole with a traffic light and a van, in the style of distorted, fragmented images, manapunk, found objects, webcam photography, suburban ennui capturer, hyper-realistic bird studies, 19th century american art”

Hunter S. Thompson was right all along…

The stuff about ibogaine in “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72” was in a rare category where I genuinely couldn’t tell if he was being serious or making up nonsense. Maybe it was real.

Makes sense. I don’t use Tor for much of anything, just have an awareness of it, but I do donate money to lemmy.world and SDF for pretty much exactly this reason.

Tor Browser is both free, and a hell of a lot more secure.