How about “make some fucking enemies”. Of course no one likes liberal positions - we’re living it and it sucks.

The people want change, not to carefully untangle the neo from the liberal over the course of decades to avoid stepping on any toes

Embrace absurdism. There is no other way

I’m thinking South America is the play. The anglosphere is all facing similar problems, the northern hemisphere is starting to really feel climate change, and the food is incredible

They have their own political issues, but they never shook the idea of socialism.

The quality of life is rapidly improving. They have tons of natural resources, great soil, they’ll be less impacted by climate change in the southern hemisphere, and most importantly they have Internet

As for me, I’m doubling down on my Spanish practice

I’m not saying it’s necessary for everyone… Even if most people don’t need it, some do. I do, despite what everyone has told me from childhood

Anecdotes aren’t good science, but they can point out bad science

People say that… And yet, in middle school they did a hearing screening, and said I had reduced hearing. I told my mom “that’s crazy, my hearing is incredible, I just had earwax in my ears”. We went to the doctor anyways, the PA said she couldn’t see any earwax even though I could hear it moving around when she put the scope in my ear

I was adamant I just needed to clean my ears, so my mom grabbed some qtips from the exam room when the PA left, I cleaned my ears, and I passed the test perfectly

In my 30s I can still hear those “teen repellants” that whine at a pitch most lose in their early 20s. People look at me weird when I say I heard someone’s voice on the wind, and yet I can pinpoint individuals talking normally within a half a mile in a forest

I don’t use qtips anymore, I use a metal loop to clean my ears, but for me it’s most certainly necessary to clean them somehow

I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick… I don’t want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for “suspicious activity”

At this point I just search the project name when it happens… I’m usually there to evaluate a project, and if that’s not enough I just drop it

For me it was a mix of that, plus “great, so you’re going to close everything maybe was using, sometimes restart some of it, and everything is going to be on the wrong screen and virtual desktop. Now that I’ve spent several minutes getting back to where I was yesterday, let’s see what garbage I don’t want that you’ve added”

Linux has its own inconveniences, but I don’t regret the switch… It gets better every day while windows gets worse

I hate group chats. I engage with people one on one - I can understand one, maybe two persons…

But people? Fuck that. Persons are complex, people are insane

I find it hilarious that my personal AI, that can run on even a budget gaming PC, is far more reliable than most of these corporate ones 100x the size

Or, you know, you could offer free unprocessed food to the unemployed? It’d be easy to lose weight and improve your health if you got nothing but veggies with a bit of meat

I heard a really great description of this the other day

Imagine you’re an ant. Your world is small and scent based, your life is simple and straightforward

Now imagine you experienced a human perspective. You feel the stress and anxiety of something as abstract as money, you know of events on the other side of the world - you understand that there is a world, and how walking in one direction long enough would bring you back here. You see the beauty of the sunset, and dream of traveling to space

You see how humans see ants

You also understand where food is stored, what ant traps are, and the layout of the surrounding area your colony has yet to explore - things incredibly useful for an ant

Now you’re an ant again. Your ant brain can’t hold onto this knowledge, but you have a notion of what you saw.

You know you found all the food everywhere, and learned of hidden dangers to your colony… But you can’t remember the knowledge. You saw impossible ways to travel, but they no longer make any sense. You know the humans see you as pests, just minor annoyances in lives filled with emotions you don’t understand. You know they were scared of something… But what could threaten such a being? Another ant touches you to see if you’re alright, and you want to scream and vomit using organs you don’t have

That’s cosmic horror

We all thought human creativity would separate us from the machines

It turns out, humans just aren’t very creative

… What? There are fully integrated Palestinians living in Israel right now, they could just integrate them or let them establish their own self rule in one form or another

All it takes is to improve conditions and slowly increase rights for Palestinians until they’re full citizens. Probably start by making it illegal to mow them down in the streets. If you cut off the flow of new recruits, Hamas will wither. If conditions are rapidly improving, it’s hard to convince people to martyr themselves

And Israel could do that… Just not with an unpopular administration that is using this conflict to stay in power

I realized the concept was making me hold myself back. Want to know my pronouns? That’s a you problem. There’s only one third person pronoun I’ll accept when I’m standing right there, and it’s “my client”

Because Disney didn’t own the restaurant, it was a private restaurant renting a building in a shopping center owned by Disney

Disney was just the landlord in this situation, and so they honestly had nothing to do with it

Why do you think C is the one true language? It’s a tool.

There’s a single very simple answer to “what tool should I use?”. Use the best tool for the job

The job is the objective - what are you trying to accomplish? What are your priorities? What compromise is best between time, cost, and quality? What are your abilities? What’s in your toolbox right now, and what could you obtain within the time frame?

For you, the best tool might always be C. I don’t know how you’ve specialized or what you do, but C is powerful. Maybe you have an orderly thought process code meticulously, maybe you struggle to learn new languages. Maybe there’s just no better option for the jobs you take on

For me, C is rarely the answer. Not never, but outside of school I can count on one hand how many times I’ve chosen it. I code intuitively and feel how the code fits together, I can pick up languages on the spot and switch even more easily. But I’m not meticulous, it’s against my nature. I make mistakes frequently - but I learn by doing, and I don’t need to understand to start doing

All that said, why do we keep making languages and frameworks? Because as programmers, we build the tools. We can also share them without losing them. The perfect tool for one job won’t be the same for any other job, but a pretty good tool for many jobs is a valuable tool

The trade-off with our tools is between power, versatility, and cost (generally being time). We all want powerful and versatile tools - but our time is limited, and so we can’t afford the cost

Ultimately, I think you’ve correctly spotted a recurring problem but misidentified the cause. The cause isn’t the tools, it’s the fact that the cost is someone else’s time. And the fact we have no way to translate money into their time

A corporation can fund a team to continuously develop a tool they rely on. An individual can’t - we could chip in a few bucks here and there, but we use a lot of tools. We don’t know good tools from bad ones until we use them, we don’t know what tools are used to build the ones we need either.

So everyone and their mom wants to build a service to fund work on their tools. I hate services, I don’t want to give them my data or my money - I want tools that will work on my devices, not because I don’t want to deny them pay for their work, but because I pick up, drop, and modify tools all the time

That’s the real problem - if I could donate x dollars a month to support the tools I use, I would. If I could choose for us all to pay more taxes to support the tools we all use, I would take that deal. Hell, I’d go through the effort to generalize my personal tools

Instead, the only real profit to be had in OSS comes from companies, because they can afford to fund them directly, or services, which individuals tend to hate but companies barely notice. The tools aren’t the problem - the economics are the problem

…are you implying that mass gas chambers aren’t an effective way to kill people?

The way I see it, it’s just a form of therapy. People don’t walk in and sit silently, they talk about their problems and get vague reassurance that everything is going to be alright - or occasional advice when they’re way out of bounds

I don’t think it’s unethical to do that, so long as you operate in good faith with good intentions

their fortunes

I think the term for that is “the economy”

They can definitely misfire, but humans are more likely to misfire

When the adrenaline is pumping, it’s real easy to squeeze slightly harder… That’s why your finger shouldn’t be on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot

You want to tell me your gun shot two rounds instead of one? I can believe that. You want to tell me a cold gun, with a round in the chamber for more than 5 seconds, suddenly decided to override the required mechanical safety because you waved it around?