Shit Wizard 420

Sure you could take a sentence in a reply explaining a very specific scenario and apply it to every situation, but that would be foolish and a waste of time.

Oh no I’m serious replying to a meme

Obviously this happens a lot but people get big mad at unions because they think this is happening and it isn’t necessarily.

The job may be posted internally and externally at the same time. All internal candidates who apply must be assessed first and replied to in order of what union they belong to depending on the job. If can take a long time because people kind of just apply to everything the same way you do as an external candidate.

Once they are all excluded then HR releases the external applicants for review. At no point are they compared with each other. Not all qualified candidates are contacted because there are probably dozens of them, so maybe the top 5 or so will be invited for the evaluation.

It’s shitty that there are people who don’t have work, but I get grumpy when people yell NEPOTISM and other things. If we wanted to hire an internal candidate unethically we could and it wouldn’t get posted externally. If we knew there were wrong internal candidates and we were doing things by the book we would post internal only. No one wants to deal with HR to get things posted externally, I promise.

Oh! Thanks for the correction.

Isn’t that what DDG uses?

I don’t agree with that take.

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/how-to-filter-out-ai-images-in-duckduckgo-search-results

We rely on publicly available lists to filter out AI-generated content, like those provided by uBlockOrigin & uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist, an open-source blocklist, manually curated by project contributors.

This is an open source block list, which is manually put together by volunteers. It’s not even reading metadata, presumably because that’s too resource intensive (or proprietary/unreliable).

Gemini was able to tell that was AI because it was able to read the image ID water mark and associated it with how Adobe sequences AI generated images. The image ID is in the file name, but if we wanted to catch it that way the filter would need to work on logic, not just keywords or site lists. Programming a filter to search the file names to identify if it belonged to the sequence would be more complex.

Alternatively, if you clicked though to the image you are immediately told if it is AI. Whenever I search for microbe photos I always click the source to determine if it’s a render or a stylized electron microscope capture, and I figure it’s always been good practice to get the image from the source to verify it’s not totally bullshit either in terms of the the search pulling up something unrelated or the image itself being misleading or even a humorous misrepresentation/meme.

I think it’s important to understand how the tools we rely on work.

Ironically, AI can tell me the adobe images are AI and why they don’t get flagged in image search:

Yes, this image is AI-generated.

While checking the image file shows it was not made using Google AI tools specifically, it bears the official “Adobe Stock” watermark directly over an image ID (961863094) that belongs to Adobe’s generative AI collection.

When downloaded directly from the official Adobe Stock platform, the full-resolution file contains embedded metadata acknowledging it as AI content, but this background data is lost when saving or extracting the preview image.

Fair, the adobe ones are labeled as AI if you click through to the link so that’s a pretty big miss in the search.

Edit: I retract my misinformed comment, I hadn’t looked at how the filter works.

Stock images have always included bullshit renders of microbes so maybe that’s just something I take for granted.

I’m not sure I understand, are you thinking they are all AI? At least some of them are not - I recognize them from the before times. Tardigrade images have always been goofy looking.

The adobe stock images are AI though. It’s probably a safe bet to avoid stock image sites although Alamy seems to have some good ones. Adding the photography filter helps a bit too, but I still got some stock images used on other websites.

Yes…someday…

Fun fact (?): The Thames being so gross is one of the reasons modern sewage treatment took off. One of the main tests is designed based on the behavior of the Thames: https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/labCert/BODAbout.html

You can put the water plant at the end of the sewage plant for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater but yeah the water body does some of the treatment too.

Thank you shark fucker 420! You will be pleased to know that I’m not even that unique among the turd herders. Plenty of us are ‘eccentric’.

No and yes.

Most regulations are based on the assimilation capacity of the receiving body which is nerd talk for “how much pollution the water can take before it starts showing signs of harm”. So you treat to that, nature does a bit more, and then the drinking water plant takes water from an ideal place.

Most wastewater plants just speed up nature.

The history of centralized treatment is super fascinating because it centred on what the problems were when it was established (very late 1800-early 1900s) whereas drinking water treatment really has changed more to deal with how our understanding of human health has changed. They don’t really match up!

Sorry, I have wastewater autism: direct potable reuse (turning sewage into drinking water) is super rare and they def don’t do that at NEORSD.

Almost every time I give a tour someone says something like that and I have to explain sewage is treated and put back into the water body, then a different plant takes the water, treats it, and puts it in the water pipes. (Yes that’s just for surface water, but same idea for septic/wells)

The more the merrier.