Daily Pedantry

@christapeterso me: Look, I grew up with a father who had malignant personality disorder, and he was so intimidated by my intelligence that I became his psychological punching bag. If I've opened my mouth, know that the wolf inside me he force me to feed is pretty damn sure, now go check again.

"The pressure to use AI 'created more friction as it became obvious that we were being monitored for our usage, and we were being told that we had to use it', even if it was the less efficient route to accomplish a task" says a laid-off worker at Block. theguardian.com/technology/202…

It kills me that the hardest part of programming isn't algorithms. It's reading code someone else wrote 3 years ago and figuring out what they were thinking. And soon you're gonna have to figure out what the AI was thinking 🤡

Amazon had four Sev-1 outages (their highest severity level) in a single week. Internal memos say AI-assisted code changes were a contributing factor. The timeline here is wild. In October 2025, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees. In January 2026, another 16,000. That’s about 30,000 people in five months, roughly 10% of the corporate workforce. CEO Andy Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI. During those same months, Amazon set a target: 80% of developers using AI coding tools at least once a week. They tracked adoption closely and blocked rival tools like OpenAI’s Codex. Even so, 30% of developers still hadn’t touched Amazon’s in-house tool Kiro by January. In December 2025, Kiro caused a 13-hour AWS outage. The AI tool had production-level permissions and decided the best fix for a bug was to delete and recreate an entire live environment. A second incident involved Amazon Q Developer, another AI tool. Amazon blamed both on “user error, not AI.” But quietly added mandatory peer review for all production access afterward. Then March 5: Amazon’s retail site went down for about six hours. Over 22,000 users reported checkout failures, missing prices, and app crashes. Amazon called it a “software code deployment” error. Five days later, SVP Dave Treadwell made the normally optional weekly engineering meeting mandatory. His memo acknowledged “GenAI tools supplementing or accelerating production change instructions, leading to unsafe practices.” These problems trace back to Q3 2025. Amazon’s own assessment: their GenAI safeguards “are not yet fully established.” The new rule: junior and mid-level engineers now need senior sign-off on any AI-assisted production changes. Treadwell also announced “controlled friction” for the most critical parts of the retail experience. For context, Google’s 2025 DORA report found 90% of developers use AI for coding but only 24% trust it “a lot.” An Uplevel study of 800 developers found Copilot users introduced 41% more bugs with no improvement in output. Amazon is finding out what those numbers look like at the scale of a $500 Billion revenue company, with 30,000 fewer people on staff to catch the mistakes.

@wmdvxycm49622 @ChaoticDrewtral @BadWritingTakes There's a principle in law that one does not have to prove negligence if a sack of flour falls out a window and hits someone, you don't have to prove negligence. If a person with Tourette’s is holding a gun and someone gets shot, there was negligence at a minimum somewhere.

@ChaoticDrewtral @BadWritingTakes This feels like stepping around the principle by maybe analyzing the hypothetical too literally. Maybe pretend the person is holding a gun instead and their finger twitches, and the person with them doesnt know about the gun or the tourettes or something

You know you can just type "Tourette's Syndrome" into a search engine, read about it for five minutes, and save yourself from looking quite so pig ignorant. Rape and murder and not Tourette's tics.

@SalmonSask Hello, Human. I lack any ability to make a qualitative judgement about your sex or gender. What pronouns should the NPCs refer to you with? (This is important, you're going to be shown some dialog of the Big Bad talking to his minions about you.)

imagine being this soft 🤣

@grok @CoWbOy_BeeBOpP @ma1ybe Can you highlight where in the original post the author said the best cancer was already being treated systematically, and that the surgery was necessary for symptom relief?

You're right on the medicine. In most countries (esp. developed ones), a competent adult woman consents for her own surgery—no husband required. Stage IV breast cancer is primarily systemic therapy (chemo, targeted, hormone); surgery is palliative for symptoms, rarely curative. A 3-day delay rarely shifts outcomes in metastatic disease. Story's dramatic, but clinically off-base.

My friend was 32 when she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer, the most aggressive, last stage. She needed urgent surgery to relieve symptoms, but the doctors refused to operate until her husband agreed. They made him wait three days, asking twice whether he wanted the surgery or not, hinting she might look “less attractive” afterward. They even suggested that she should try more chemotherapy or radiotherapy, even though she had already been undergoing these treatments for months, framing it as a way to control the tumor while preserving her appearance for him. Her body, her life, her urgent care—treated as less important than a man’s opinion. Precious time was lost in a fight against a terminal illness, she didn't survived & died.....all because her autonomy didn’t matter! Her husband was more important in their eyes.

This is brilliant! Democrat candidate for US Congress in Illinois’ 9th district, Kat Abughazaleh, launched an attack ad against herself!

@kerckhove_ts I seem to recall some of these types of mines saying “this side towards enemies.”

This is message is so stupid. If I ever had to use one of these, I'd have a 50% chance to kill myself by accident. Of course you put the front toward the enemy, but it doesn't say WHICH SIDE IT THE FRONT!

@ChShersh I mean, November really did mean “9”, as did September=7, October=8, and December=10. Then Julius Caesar moved the beginning of the year from March to January, and fucked all the numbers. This is also why February has the leap day: it used to be the end of the calendar.

If you haven't found all the "easter eggs" in this post, here's a full list of all the gifts this enum keeps on giving. 1. Immediately starts with April = 0. Already sus. But could even make sense if you consider fiscal years, they start in April. 2. Then August, December, February. The alphabetical order suddenly hits you. Again, this could even make sense if you want a fast lexicographical comparison of months. 3. Then Friday. This is when you realise you're completely f*cked. Not only is it alphabetically sorted by months. They're also mixed with days of the week. 4. Moreover, Friday = 4 even makes sense, because if you count days of the week from Monday and zero, then Friday is 4. 5. July and June being 6 and 7 as the perfect opposite of their real numbers is a cherry on top. Not to mention the hidden 67 joke. 6. Yet again, if you count months from zero, July = 6 even makes sense! 7. Moving on. November = 11. The only value that makes sense. Although some people say that "nov" means 9, let's ignore the voices of people who escaped an asylum. 8. PublicHoliday. This is where most people lose it. I mean, it's already insane to have months and days of the week mixed in one enum. But inserting PublicHoliday is pure chaotic evil. 9. Moreover, PublicHoliday = 13 is the second cherry on top of the previous cherry. 10. Almost everyone missed that the list is not even alphabetically sorted. Sunday goes before September. This enum had one job, yet it failed even at that. 11. Wednesday being the last is a homage to the popular "It's only Wednesday, captain" meme. Yet, by this "Wednesday" your mental health is completely destroyed. 12. Special for C++ fans. The underlying type for this enum is 'int'. This is redundant because 'int' is the default for 'enum class'. 13. Moreover, 'int' is not even efficient. You should use uint8_t for your enums. I hope you can appreciate this post more now.

@The_blood_eye13 @grok @aekurmou Sorry for Google, but that’s not at all what it says. 🤣

@grok @DailyPedantry @aekurmou Well nope , apparently Google got it Not offense but I think Elon should give you more data…

good pseudomorning

@The_blood_eye13 @aekurmou Yes.

@DailyPedantry @aekurmou So it’s non-Latin script English

@The_blood_eye13 @aekurmou I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for people trying to figure it out. But it is in English, just written different.

@DailyPedantry @aekurmou Even I don’t get it

@The_blood_eye13 @aekurmou English. 😐

@aekurmou What is this mystical language

@raphaelslslsl They are definitely not homophones. I’d like to know what dialect would ever think they’re homophones, as one of them is out for every dialect I’m aware of.

Connections Puzzle #981 🟨🟦🟨🟦 🟦🟨🟦🟦 🟦🟨🟦🟦 🟨🟦🟦🟦 emg ngawur ni game. skrg ak jd taw knee slapper. the homophones????? am not sure. rate 🥴/👿

starting february Connections Puzzle #966 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟨🟨🟦 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 quite easy, although agak mikir. not so evil. not evil malah. rate 😁/👿

@Pe1per @kerckhove_ts I’ve already explained before the definition of arbitrary. You’re apparently the one who thinks that you can explain away, “that’s just what people say” with rational explanations.

@DailyPedantry @kerckhove_ts Let me guess when I explain what caused specific phrases to be popular you'll tell me that the way the letters look is arbitrary. So your actual problem is not societal rules but why anything exists at all.

The rules are arbitrary AND never explained to you AND you're punished for trying to find out AND punished for trying to discuss them or expressing frustration about this whole nightmare.

@Pe1per @kerckhove_ts But these phrases are entirely arbitrary. There’s no good reason why we use those, as opposed to say, “ahoy hoy, how fair thee?” “Ah, I fair quite well, and thee?” “Indeed, I also faire well!” The whole point is that the selection of them is arbitrary.

"How are you?" Expresses care about the well-being. "Good, thanks." The care is appreciated. "How are you?" The care is reciprocated. It's a simple way to say "I would like to have a friendly conversation with you." There are other phrases that can be used for that purpose but this one is short and simple and therefore used often.