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Cake day: June 29th, 2025

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  • I may only be in a respiratory therapy program, but I’ve been an EMT for 10 years prior to that. If that experience is worth anything, I’d say verifying information before making a clinical decision is a far more important habit to build than memorizing two obscure values for a test (that you’ll almost certainly forget by the time you’re a licensed physician).

    An AI study guide is liable to make mistakes, but the bigger problem here is a prospective physician who can’t be bothered to make sure that they had the correct information before acting on it. Ditto for the lawyers or researchers relying on AI to do the work for them (an inappropriate use of AI imo). Throwing a practice test together and drafting legal paperwork/writing an academic piece are planets apart


  • I get that, but to a degree it’s also on the student for not verifying the output either. One of my classmates has dyslexia (he does the flashcard sets) and makes frequent errors. Thankfully our class shares the burden of making study materials because we all act as a filter of sorts for him. Helping him notice the errors before he commits them to memory, and allowing us to have them edited with correct information. Same goes for AI stuff, you gotta double check it. Editing a few lines is still a lot quicker than creating these resources from scratch


  • Myself and my classmates (respiratory therapy) use AI to put together study guides, flash cards, and practice tests for us, using our lecture recordings, notes, and PowerPoints as reference material. It hasn’t hallucinated anything incorrect into our study guides. I’m no fan of LLMs and the like by any means but it’s been a huge time saver in this capacity. Less time spent formatting bullshit means more time for studying



  • The Linux propaganda here got to me about 2 years ago and I switched to Linux mint. Pretty smooth sailing for day-to-day stuff. However, a few days ago I decided that I wanted to try modding fallout new vegas on my computer and that’s been a pain in the ass (still trying to figure it out). The problem is that a lot of the default packages in the mint repositories are outdated and cause a lot of more recently updated programs to malfunction. So I’ve had to figure out how to get updated packages by using the terminal (first time I’ve needed to open terminal this entire time) and update them one by one, figuring out which new thing is breaking one by one until everything is working.

    For that reason, I’d recommend going with a distro that doesn’t have as much of a lag between updates if you’re planning on doing anything like what I described. There’s almost certainly ways to do what I’m trying to do that are less tedious/frustrating in mint, but I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, dont understand most of what I’m reading, and there just isn’t much out there for my specific issues.

    Despite my gripes, I’m still enjoying Linux more than windows. If something didn’t work on windows, and it couldn’t be solved with updating drivers or something similar, I’d just give up. Since everything is wide open in Linux, I know that the solution to my problems are achievable if I just do it right. Instead of being told no by my OS, I’m given a list of reasons why something isn’t working, and then I can just go and fix it



  • The elements of fascism could be construed as a childish/immature perception of reality, where the performance/aesthetics of maturity (particularly as perceived by chauvinistic men) is paramount. The examples listed in this post speak to uniformed (i.e childish) views on power, masculinity, and justice. These topics, among others, are sticking points of every flavor of fascism.

    I’m not necessarily saying that this means the american population is immature, but our current fascist regime utilizes these tropes (among other elements of american culture) in their rhetoric, propaganda, and policy decisions to influence the population in pursuit of fascist ends. Seeing fascism as immature/childish certainly has validity, but I think the OP fails to fully capture our current political context with this lens. It would be better to see the state of american politics through the perspective of a failing proto-fascist empire metastasizing into a full fledged fascist regime, informed and shaped by its own reactionary propaganda, of which a large amount appears childish upon first glance.





  • Most modern flat roofs (at least in my neck of the woods) aren’t actually flat. They’re at an incredibly shallow pitch. In residential applications (after underlayment) we use high density foam slats that get put together in a grid formation, each piece gets slightly narrower on one end until they can properly fit under a piece of bird stop around the fascia. Before the bird stop goes on, the foam is sealed with a waterproof self adhering material that comes in huge rolls. When properly installed, they can last 15-30 years. Just as long, if not longer, than any shingle roof. There’s also high density polyurethane foam flat roofs that can be sealed and are able to last up to 50 years. Many commercial operations use these methods as well as hot tar mopping, which can basically last forever. The one drawback to flat roofs is load bearing difficulties in places that snow. I don’t know much about that but seeing as flat roofs are everywhere in the north too, it must not be too difficult to work around.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love a good tile roof too, but there’s plenty of beautiful structures with flat roofs out there. And tile has considerable draw backs as well. Tile is incredibly heavy, they’re very fragile, they’re ludicrously expensive, and they’re expensive to maintain.

    On the rain, no roofer is working in the rain, and tile roofs are vulnerable to rain during construction too. When it’s down to the plywood, you’re as likely to have rain troubles as any other roof. You can lay shingles and foam for flat roofs when you’re dried in too, but no one will if it’s more than a drizzle. Tile becomes an active danger in the rain because most tiles get really slippery in the rain

    Replacing broken tiles is a bitch and a half, you have to carefully dance between tile joints and one slip of your foot (which is likely during repairs because tiles are slick and can become moldy/slimy when not maintained properly) you’re likely to break another tile, leading to more work and more chances of another broken tile. Even the process of removing a broken tile can break the tiles surrounding it

    Tile in general is really finicky, high maintenance, and requires unique tools, methods, and skilled laborers that are capable of doing the work. That is by no means a bad thing but it’s really easy to get a flat roof that does the job perfectly fine. Tile, not so much