Tokyo has giant underground tunnels for flood waters that look like an ancient Egyptian temple



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Underground_Discharge_Channel

Many people call themselves "software engineers"...

I hate this.

There is no accountability for bad programming beyond lawsuits...

Welcome to marketplace economics, bay-bee!  Given the choice between purchasing accountable labour and cheap labour, we've been picking cheap every time.  "Choose two of: good, fast, cheap" and good loses nearly every time.  The computer-touchers that picked 'good and fast' are shunned for those that are cheap.  The computer touchers that picked 'good and cheap' arrive in a marketplace where people have already wasted their funds on 'fast and cheap' and there's nothing left over; hell they usually arrive in a marketplace that's hostile because
of all the pissed-off customers.  I think that's where your dissatisfaction is coming from -- you've had to deal with a marketplace where the only options that survived are the ones that didn't pick 'good' for their two, and I'd bet you wouldn't trust a vendor who says "I did pick 'good', cross my heart" because you've already been lied to.

Town hall June 2023

standard found a way to hack the system -- goes on a lesbian dating site   to ask for a math tutor in exchange for cuddles.

Is the bounties page up-to-date?
  rachel: "it is, two exceptions:  pastebin claimed by emergence, and captcha changes are in testing."

pdonghole: "if someone's literally a nazi, are they allowed in?"
  rachel: "I know who you're talking about.  some of the things they said in wetfish was against the rules.  Typical Nazi stuff, blaming Jews, unironically."
  pdonghole: "and dog-whistle nazi stuff like claiming lineage from Hyperborea"
  meleeman: "Are we banning someone just because one person hates them?"
  mozai: "people have complained about him since 2018"
  rachel: "he'd low-effort hit on me in PMs, and harass kate."
  meleeman: "oh."
The person is banned, g-lined with "being a neo-Nazi"

- Spidey came to Colorado
- Killdozer party on June 4th
- rachel did more code review for docker-ization project, working   with goos
- Anomaly is working on new forum paperdoll props and has stuff to   show off
- new wetfish homepage, including for mobile browswers
- want to get away from web stuff, it's a saturated market; the NASA  contract was the most lucrative thing yet.  more nature conservation,   more industrual prototype stuff, goos and rachel talking about what   to bring to trade shows
- nature conservation, Spidey helping with nature photos and beavering,   rachel using Josie's camera for videos
- designs for a solar power array in the mountain with Colin; we have   the pieces just need to make a frame to affix them to
- new production server should overcome neptun's trouble uploading music   and meleeman's trouble making captcha stuff

standard: want to go to neolipcon with me?  mid-July in Washington DC.
rachel: sorry, I'll be in Spain.

"Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.
"Teach a man to fish, buy the pond, tell him he can't use the pond but he can fish for you and you sell the fish in the market and give him a very small cut and he'll say stuff like he's hungry and his teeth hurt.  Nobody wants to work anymore."

fukkin Japan.

This video gave me a good understanding of clocks, despite it being in Japanese.



Bonus video, containing one of the coolest mechanical mechanics I've ever seen:

Cool boardgame well built for your 3D printer.

Labor Union posters made by Studio Ghibli's chara-designer Katsuya Kondo

"Like, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it's kind of bleakly entertaining how over the course of my life my skill set as an online researcher has gone from being:

• 1. Hugely valuable in the late 1990s and early 2000s because the discoverability of information in public-facing databases was fucking terrible and nobody knew how to organise anything; to
• 2. Effectively useless throughout the 2010s because search engines enormously and rapidly improved and computer literacy was at an all-time high; and 
• 3. Back to being hugely valuable once again because SEO bullshit and the proliferation of AI-generated content have degraded online discoverability back to pre-2000 levels and computer literacy is in accelerating decline due to mobile devices deliberately obfuscating basic functionality so that app vendors can sell it back to you with embedded advertising.