astronaut_sloth @ astronaut_sloth @mander.xyz

Posts

23

Comments

265

Joined

3 yr. ago

This is the hard-hitting knowledge I'm here for!

He's right, but (and this is a huge but) it will get worse before it gets better.

Like others have said in here, there's a hard 30% that will always side with Trump, the Republicans, fascism, etc. That won't change. And in 2024, there was a swath of voters who just wanted change and voted for Trump (without realizing that the change would be bad and already attempted), and an even larger group was just apathetic.

The "change" people are the first to start to wake up. How many posts on Twitter, etc. can be summed up as "I didn't vote for this"? Eventually, as things get worse, the apathetic will start to care. That's when things will start turning but not a minute before. Trump and company are trying to consolidate power and can't help but be incredibly cruel, brazen, and stupid in the process.

They will cause an economic crisis, hurt untold numbers in all communities, and more. That's their undoing, though. If they left it to simple corruption, isolationism, pro-Russia, anti-trans etc. policies that only hurt small pockets of the country where it's easy enough to stick your head in the sand, then the apathetic will stay that way. But this administration can't help but generally immiserate everyone in pursuit of their fascist goals. When general immiseration arrives, that's when we'll see the reckoning. For now, it's still too easy to ignore what's happening if you want.

Like the apocryphal Churchill quote says, "Americans will always do the right thing, when they’ve exhausted all other options." We still haven't exhausted all other options, but we're getting there.

🤣 What an impractical, stupid line of vehicles. There's also something hilarious about being "built for the apocalypse" but also having a "luxury interior" and "premium audio." Anyone who'd buy one must be so deeply unserious, and I hope constantly made fun of.

Great personal write-up. When I was walking to work and taking the train everywhere a couple of years ago (because I wasn't living in the US), it was the best time of my life, and I am actively trying to recapture that. I also found myself being healthier, feeling better, etc. when not driving.

It's truly amazing how driving is the default in American society, and it gets accepted as such, but when you're able to break away from it, it feels like the world opens up. Despite the bitter cold of a Chicago winter, I'd much prefer to just walk somewhere than take a car, even if walking takes longer.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be more GOP reps who will be looking to "spend more time with their families" in the coming months.

Yep, I also have a directory for my programming projects on each of my machines, but mine is Programming. On my main desktop, I also have an ISOs folder to hold my OS ISOs for VMs and old CD-ROM game ISOs.

If God's mind were a soup of linear algebra doing stupid number tricks, then sure (with the assumption we're just talking about LLMs).

In reality, no.

Source: I study AI and work on it professionally.

I totally agree with this. Babylon 5 is by far my favorite show when it comes to plotting and structure. I wish more shows would be like B5 in having 22-episode seasons with an overall arc to the series but more-or-less self-contained episodes.

I think there are two possible reasons for this:

1. Winter is coming and these good ol' southern boys can't take a little bit of snow and ice from our own General Winter.
2. They're escaping before their brand of brutality is ruled completely unconstitutional, and they have to face the possibility of facing real consequences or openly defying the court.

Personally, I think it's mostly 2 with a little of 1. As lawless as the administration is, they really like to have a fig leaf of legitimacy by not openly defying the court, just flouting rulings and orders at the margins where they can pretend they're still abiding by what the courts say. I don't think the administration is quite ready to go full mask off just yet.

...That's perjury on top of acting in contempt of court. Is there some reason why he hasn't already been put in shackles for that?

On a separate note, Bovino is so stupid. He has no clue that he's being set up to be the fall guy. He's racking up all the points to get all of the excesses of this evil operation in Chicago pinned squarely on him. He's giving the ghouls at the top plausible deniability should accountability ever come.

That's a very fair point.

Bottom line is that I'm skeptical of this guy, but this is my take on his whole deal.

He reminds me of a lot of young, infantry people I've met in my time: young and full of stupid decisions. I genuinely believe that he got a Totenkopf without realizing what it was. That sounds like something an idiot, young infantryman would do. However, I don't for a second believe that he didn't know what it was until recently. That's a bald faced lie for someone who claims to be a student of history. My read of it is that he realized what he had on himself and he was too ashamed to actually do something about it and instead tried to just keep it a secret. That is, he tried to keep it a secret until he was outed for it. If this is the case, he should have just come clean about it when it came out and just said this, but he didn't.

As for everything else, I'll extend him some grace on some (except one) post. Being a trolly edgelord is whatever. Infantry, especially at the time, was very sheltered from the military sexual assault issues, and war is really hard on someone. It can send you to really dark places, especially if that's all you've known. So, apologizing for saying stupid, offensive things and demonstrating change is fine. The one thing I am having a hard time reconciling is the "black people don't tip" post. He's actually defending that, which...is a choice. If he disavowed it saying that it's something he observed but is obviously untrue, then fine, but he didn't.

I don't think he's a closet racist or a closet nazi. I think he might just be kind of dumb. If he's elected, at least he won't furrow his brow and vote with Trump on everything.

I'm cautiously optimistic after these polls and hoping that they learned their lesson after caving the last time. I think the potential for bad polling spooked them the last time, but with this, they might find their spines and get some concessions from the Republicans. At this point, we really need some sort of victory.

But I always leave room to be disappointed.

Same. At this point, I'm only buying stuff that's local to my community from small businesses. I don't want to help American mega-corps, and I don't want to contribute to any tariffs going to fund the government.

Everyone should have a strong base in STEM and the humanities. It irks me to no end when STEM majors can't write, communicate, or understand a wider historical context just as it irks me when humanities majors claim to not understand basic algebra or scientific concepts. It's fine to have a preference, but an expert engineer should have a passing familiarity with philosophy and ethics, just as a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics.

Then there's business majors who have no familiarity with anything at all. If I had my druthers, "business school" wouldn't even be an option at a university.

Yeah, I've found AI generated code to be hit or miss. It's been fine to good for boilerplate stuff that I'm too lazy to do myself, but is super easy CS 101 type stuff. Anything that's more specialized requires the LLM to be hand-held in the best case. More often than not, though, I just take the wheel and code the thing myself.

By the way, I think it's cool that you use Old English characters in your writing. In school I used to do the same in my notes to write faster and smaller.

I agree, but this does sound cool for a one off--like Picard s3. Ultimately, though, I want new adventures with new characters exploring the vastness of the universe.

I really like Open-Meteo. It's worked really well for my weather-related projects.

Isn’t it an international human rights violation to make somebody stateless?

Yes.

100% agreed. It should not be used as a replacement but rather as an augmentation to get the real benefits.