I hope the ultra-rich lose everything. I hope they weep.

I thought this was the onion. This is real? What’s the opposite of eating the onion? Crying?

Anyone else read Roadside Picnic?

The title of the novel derives from an analogy that is proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind… And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.[7]

In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors have left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who have discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to the earthlings. The explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to or even noticed Earth’s inhabitants during their visit, just as many humans do not notice or pay attention to insects and wildlife during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena that are left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, which are discarded and forgotten without any intentions to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again because for them it was a brief stop, for reasons unknown, on the way to their actual destination.

It’s a big multiplier on incompetence. It lets someone who’s kind of bad at their job produce a lot more bad than they could before.

When I was young and that video was new, one weekend I went to hang out with a bunch of friends. They were all quoting it and I hadn’t seen it. I was real worried about Al’s butt until someone showed me the video.

Does signal do like team meetings anyone can join with a link?

Apparently yes: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/7860719423002-How-to-create-and-share-call-links

But I’ve never tried it for that.

I use it for text voice and video with friends though.

$3 million. Averaging 10% returns is plenty of money without touching the principle.

Then there’s sliding “hmm this is risky” down to maybe $2million. Far below that I don’t know if it could tank a market dip or sudden expense.

Mandated in office is a climate crime. Send the leadership to do climate repair and seize their wealth. /Bangs judge gavel

You can use uv to manage python versions and deps now. You shouldn’t fuck around with your system python much.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/

Ghost jobs should be illegal. Any org found posting a ghost job should be required to pay a year’s salary to every applicant, and everyone involved in authorizing the post should be barred from working in HR for life.

I hope no one reads that top-down and comes away with “Don’t vote. Delay today”. That’d be a silly way to read it.

There are two main things that change people’s minds: Peer pressure, and trauma.

We’re social creatures and we take cues from people we trust. The right wing has done an excellent (and horrifying) job of creating unified in-groups for their followers. They have fox news. They have talk radio. They have churches. They have also demonized their opposition - “ivory tower elites”, “coastal elites”, queers, commies, etc. Many people will struggle to change their mind when everyone around them hasn’t.

There was a thing I was reading about a while ago, about flat-earthers. A bunch of them got shown a lot of evidence to contradict their beliefs. They all stuck to their flat-earth nonsense, except one of them. The guy who’d started dating someone sane, and hanging out with her friends. He changed his mind. In large part because he no longer saw the flat-earth community as such a vital part of his in-group. Or so the author argued.

The other way is trauma. If something really horrific happens to someone, they might reevaluate. But if they’re still in the same social groups, they’re likely to fall back into their old ways.

In the book “Dying of Whiteness”, the author interviewed a variety of people. Among them were gun violence survivors. There was one passage where a woman said something like, yeah, easy access to guns is why her son died. Maybe he shouldn’t have been able to just go get a gun and shoot himself. But, she said, she would never say that to her peers.

So, in short: No, not really. The social groups carrying maga identity are self-reinforcing. They’re all looking at their peers, who are all still maga.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about some of the same ideas, too.

They are prioritizing the financial interests

Sums of why a lot of things are bad

Don’t over think it. Meet other people.

I think that’s my least favorite brand of Christian. Ignore all the sheep and goats, good Samaritan, give to the poor, parts to be smug little shits.

Everywhere I’ve worked that did micro services it was kind of a pain. One of the places I’ve worked had a simple monolith backend and it was great.

I don’t really like the parroting of in-jokes thing. Probably any sufficiently long lived large group will probably have in-jokes, but reddit-isms always grated the most.

If there’s a good in-game group finder, where you can specify like “first time doing it” or “chill group” vs “speed runner” then it’s probably fine. If you can find players, that is.

I played a lot of guild wars 2. I’d start groups on the lfg with a message like “chill [content] run - I don’t care about your build” and people would join, and we’d have a fine time.

Some other MMO, I forget which, I’d end up sitting at the lfg for a long time and never got a full group

The other day one of the other devs messaged me with “you wanna see a dead body?”

He’d found some code that had been running in production since 2003, with so many problems and smells. Wasn’t in source control, either. Many hard coded plain text passwords.

Sadly, he had to touch it enough to fix a production outage.

People have foolish reasons for voting the way they do