ManofKulcha

@aixarizzo @lufthansa Lufthansa service generally ranges from professional but utterly cold, on a good day, to rude and abrasive, on a bad one, so yeah checks out. Avoid flying them.

worst flight of my life on @lufthansa attendant spills ginger ale on me at takeoff. ok, accidents happen hours later another attendant spills HOT tea on me. i get burned. clothes, seat, everything soaked i ask for a dry seat. crew manager arrives 30 min later YELLING at me i ask for compensation. she finger-points telling me to shut up and that she'll have me DETAINED on landing i start crying. she takes me to the galley to offer "a solution" the solution: a 5€ voucher to clean my clothes i tell her i'm recording. she switches to german to keep yelling and told me that i can't record i have video. but i'd rather not post me crying with my burnt leg out here then on my connection flight they charged me for the carry-on that was included and approved on my previous lufthansa flight. that lady was also rude seems like lufthansa only hires disrespectful people worst travel experience of my life. honestly not sure what to do

@konstructivizm What is this AI slop picture used? Such accounts should be banned.

Soyuz 1: The Mission That Was Never Meant to Return April 1967. The Soviet Union was desperate for a cosmic victory.The brand-new Soyuz spacecraft was riddled with problems—more than 200 documented design flaws, faulty systems, and rushed engineering. Engineers begged for delays. But the Kremlin had other plans: a spectacular spaceflight to honor Lenin’s birthday. Safety was secondary. Glory was mandatory.At the center of this political storm stood Colonel Vladimir Komarov, a brilliant and deeply respected cosmonaut. He knew the ship was a death trap. He had seen the reports. He had voiced his fears. Yet when the order came, he climbed aboard anyway.Why? Because his backup pilot was Yuri Gagarin—the first human in space and one of his closest friends. Komarov reportedly told friends and family that if he refused the flight, Gagarin would be sent instead. He chose to fly so his friend might live.The launch on April 23 went ahead. Almost immediately, disaster began to unfold.One solar panel refused to deploy, cutting the spacecraft’s power in half and crippling its systems. Navigation sensors went blind. The thermal control system started failing, turning the capsule into a flying oven. Komarov fought the broken machine with extraordinary skill, manually orienting it for re-entry when automated systems gave up.But the final blow came during descent.As Soyuz 1 streaked through the atmosphere, both the primary and reserve parachutes failed to deploy. A critical design flaw in the parachute container had doomed the system from the start. The capsule slammed into the steppe near Orenburg at more than 140 km/h (87 mph). The impact was so violent that the spacecraft was crushed into a flattened, mangled disc. It burst into flames on contact with the ground.Rescue teams found only charred wreckage and silence.Vladimir Komarov became the first human to die during a spaceflight. His courage, sacrifice, and the political pressure that sealed his fate turned Soyuz 1 into one of the darkest and most haunting chapters in space exploration history.A man who knowingly flew into fire so his friend wouldn’t have to.

🇮🇳 India’s Data Centers to Consume 358 Billion Liters of Water Just for Cooling by 2030.

there was something beautiful about library checkout cards because you could literally see the history of human curiosity attached to a book. like a tiny ghost trail of strangers connected by the same story.

AI is like one of the worst things that has ever happened to humanity and I’m not kidding

All vehicles pre 2023 are not E20 compatible. He is such a liar .

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.

The irony is that Jon Krakauer himself was a paying client and complicit in the very commercialization he criticized in Into Thin Air. So how did his book become the global bestseller, while The Climb, written by arguably the strongest high-altitude mountaineer of that era, Anatoli Boukreev remained far less celebrated?

Before ChatGPT, more than 98 per cent of all English-language articles published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

A Wharton economist ran a randomized controlled trial on almost a thousand high school students in Turkey. The result was so brutal for the AI-in-education narrative that it had to be peer-reviewed by PNAS before people would believe it. Her name is Hamsa Bastani. She teaches operations and information at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the study she published in 2025 alongside her co-authors is one of the cleanest experiments anyone has run on what AI actually does to learning when you remove it from the equation and check what is left. The setup was a randomized controlled trial, the same methodology used in clinical drug trials. Nearly a thousand high school math students in Turkey were split into three groups and put through four sessions of ninety minutes each. One group practiced with GPT Base, a standard ChatGPT-4 interface that could answer any question directly. One group practiced with GPT Tutor, a version of the same model that had been prompted to guide students with hints rather than hand them the answer. One group practiced with nothing but their textbook and their own head. During the practice sessions, the AI groups looked like a miracle. The GPT Base group solved 48% more problems than the students working alone. The GPT Tutor group solved 127% more. Every administrator looking at those numbers would have written a press release about the transformative power of AI in education and moved on. Then the actual exam came, and AI was not allowed. The students who had practiced with GPT Base scored 17% worse than the students who had practiced alone. Seventeen percent worse, despite having solved nearly half again as many problems in the sessions leading up to it. The students who had struggled the most, who had sat with the confusion and worked through it without a tool to rescue them, were now the only ones who could actually do the math when it counted. Bastani's team read through the chat logs to understand what had actually been happening during the practice sessions, and the answer was exactly what the exam results had already implied. The GPT Base group had not been learning. They had been extracting answers and moving on, and every moment that felt like understanding was actually the model doing the cognitive work while the student's brain waited for the next problem to arrive. The paper describes it precisely: without guardrails, students attempt to use GPT-4 as a crutch during practice, and subsequently perform worse on their own. The detail that should follow every conversation about AI in education is the one buried in the post-test survey results. The students who had relied on AI the most during practice were also the most confident they had understood the material. The tool had not just failed to teach them. It had convinced them they had learned something they had not, which is a different kind of failure entirely and a much harder one to correct because the student has no idea it is happening. The crutch had made them confident and weak at the same time.

India is the only country where you get jailed for telling the truth !

If the higher judiciary is a public institution funded by public money, why should it be above public scrutiny?

Most of India does not travel in Vande Bharat but in general coaches like cattle. You show Vande Bharat because you want to hide this. No amount of paid propaganda is going to hide your failures.

@sabeer Delusion is a better word than denial here. We were in denial earlier - of the chaotic way much of India operates, so we squirmed in polite denial while trying to get the world to see our progress on other fronts. Now it's just straight-up cow dung energy chest-thumping delusion.

I’ve figured out India’s number one problem: false pride. When a society becomes more interested in defending its image than fixing its problems, progress stops. Pride without self-reflection is not strength-it’s denial.

Google Drive scanned this Manga artist's PRIVATE files and banned him. AI flagged, appeal rejected, private artwork gone. The AI is always watching.

do you understand what Google's AI just did to an artist.. His entire Google account got permanently banned. Not just Drive. Gmail.. YouTube.. Every single service.. His appeal was rejected. No human reviewed it. An algorithm decided his life's work was a violation. He never shared the files publicly. It was a private backup of his own creations. The AI flagged it anyway - probably the filename or art style - and that was enough. - Google banned a developer's 14-year-old Gmail account over a research dataset that contained no illegal content - Google expanded its automated ban policy in October 2025 - violations now trigger immediate termination with zero warning period - No lawsuit against Google for wrongful account termination has ever succeeded in US courts Your Google account is not yours. You are renting access to your own digital life from a company whose AI can end it in seconds - with no appeal, no human, and no recourse.

You can tell the people building AI systems fundamentally misunderstand art because they think creativity is primarily about output volume. That’s why every demo is: “Look, it made 4,000 images in 8 seconds.” Okay. And? Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling slowly because his hardware was bad. Human beings take time to create things because thought itself takes time. Taste takes time. Doubt takes time. Some of the greatest art ever made came from obsession, limitation, frustration, revision, failure. But Silicon Valley genuinely believes creativity is just a throughput problem. As if Shakespeare would've written Hamlet faster if he had GPU clusters. The people building these systems look at a forest and see lumber. They look at music and see audio data. They look at paintings and see training material. They look at human expression and see an industry waiting to be automated. That’s why all this AI-generated stuff feels so empty. It was built by people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing.

A major reason that it didn’t make sense to use AI to write an essay about a substantive topic is that until you write the essay you don’t actually know what you want to say or what you think. You think you do, but it is the writing itself that actually gets the thinking done.

Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate. The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn't incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it's going to become toxic. "Bottoms up" culture is a complete farce - it's just a way for leadership to offload accountability. The Tech Leads (TLs) have all the power - owning the relationships and tribal knowledge to gatekeep projects to their buddies. Managers are "people managers" with limited technical understanding, who basically aggregate TL feedback and create performance review packets to calibrate with other managers and IC7+. The takeaway is that your destiny is in the hands of the TLs, and TLs unlike managers have no responsibility for your career. There are no repercussions for unethical behavior. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it. The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to. That's why layoffs rarely impact directors/VPs or tenured IC7+ despite the fact that they're paid by far the most. Even this recent mass layoff that was supposed to "flatten" managers layers barely affected directors/VPs/IC7+, and fell predominantly on M1s - the lowest rung of the management chain. The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about PSC (the performance review system) and perception. This means tons of meetings, useless AI slop posts, and top-down initiatives that don't benefit anyone but maybe help tick off the impact box of some go-getter at the top. Impact is not enough - it has to have sufficient complexity. So complexity is added for complexity's sake. The org I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese. Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don't question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common. Naturally when an org is completely dominated by a single ethnicity that's notorious for not integrating, elements from their work culture seep in. Of the layoffs I witnessed in this org, 3/4 were not Chinese (just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don't take this as an attack. But it is a reality that I think most people outside this company are completely unaware of, and I question if leadership is even aware despite the fact that we're talking about the company HQ) I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety + depression, and getting them fired. Then he suddenly disappeared for 8 months, before leaving the company. I could go on and on, but this is already pretty long and I think you get the point. Yes there are a lot of great, kind people here. I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking. But the company has its Squid Game reputation for a reason. Company culture comes from the top. It seems leadership is either too removed to notice, or maybe don't really care anymore because I guess they already made their billions and us plebs are expendable these days.