The wait is so draining. It dominates every part of your psyche and just makes your entire existence about itself. Don’t forget to exist during the wait.
For yourself, and for your wife - go do something fun that’ll demand your focus for a bit. Best of luck to you both. I hope for good news for you.
I hope he will be running from a psycho with a shank at ADX Florence in 2028. There’s a decent chance he will be dead in 2028 though. He’s not exactly the picture of fitness and good health. He’s an old, fat pig who lives on junk food.
More seriously, he has zero chance in 2028 if he loses in 2024, which is almost certainly what will happen. He’s been decisively rejected by voters once already. I find it hard to believe he has won over any new voters with his behavior since the last election.
Or maybe the government will step up and treat him like the terrorist that he is. If it was anyone else, they’d be waterboarding him with Diet Coke at Guantanamo right now. I mean, he’s openly calling for states to send the National Guard to Texas to fight the federal government. This fucker is on trial for insurrection and he’s out trying to incite another insurrection. Holy shit.
He’s had his deranged followers make threats against judges, prosecutors, federal agents, etc. He’s threatened his opponent in the primaries with a federal investigation if she doesn’t drop out of the race. He’s threatened her donors.
This dude is straight up nuts. I think it’s a legitimate question whether he’s eventually detained for the safety of the public pending his trials. At what point do the feds have an obligation to protect the country from this lunatic?
Forget about him and 2028. He might not even make it through 2024.
From what I’ve heard, the supreme court decision was mostly about the feds having access to the border, and the ability to cut down the razor wire, rather than any specific opposition to the razor wire existing in and of itself. I would wager this whole deal is mostly just a kind of political play, to try and egg biden into doing something stupid, while simultaneously keeping up the appearance that everyone at the head of these states is doing something dangerous, anti-institutional, and counter-cultural, even though they’re all kind of inherently unable to do anything along those lines just as a matter of their positions.
Everybody’s correct when they say that the political divides in this country are less clear-cut, but I also don’t think that the radicalization that we’ve seen, as a matter of perspective from being in online space, necessarily reflects reality. I think if you look at most people, most people want social security of some kind, and want healthcare of some kind, and want drug legalization of some kind, and want us to stop fighting wars in some form. Those are all kind of generalities, because the specific mechanism by which people want those things achieved differs from person to person. It’s very fractured as a matter of course, as a matter of how our political system and society is set up, and the ruling class has taken advantage of this to enact a divide and conquer strategy, where they can selectively promote whatever ideological positions benefit them the most, and cordon everyone off into a relatively small set of solutions over which they have a high amount of control. Rather than, you know, what a good democracy might do, which is come to a compromise solution, that everyone but the most extreme propagandized radicals might be kind of okay with. There is a reason why lots of conservatives like communism, as long as you use the right words. Both parties attempt to be mostly “populist” parties. This is all kind of obvious, right, but people understate the degree to which it’s a deliberate thing, and the overstate the degree to which it’s been successful, you know, which isn’t surprising, because, again, serves the interests of the powerful. People aren’t, broadly, morons, people have realized that this is all the case. That’s mostly what the “radicalization” that you’ve seen online has been, people just realizing that they hate these shitass solutions that aren’t really compromise solutions. See how everyone is cripplingly disappointed with the democratic party, and also how, likewise, conservatives are consistently disappointed with their own party, as well, and for many of the same reasons, barring the extreme radicals.
Most people are focused on how the internet divides people into radicalized swaths and conspiracy theorists, which is true, but even the mainstream monopolized internet is kind of a good tool for mass mobilization. See the occupy movement and the arab spring for older examples, for more recent examples, maybe the george floyd protests, or the french retirement protests. The only risk of these is kind of that they more easily get co-opted as a result of their visibility, i.e. “defund the police” gets turned into an argument for “fund the police”. If you were an asshole, you could cite charlottesville, or jan 6th, for examples of internet mobilization, but those are relatively smaller scales of things, compared to the others, which were more popular, they just got disproportionate media attention relative to their size, and had disproportionate political effects.
I think if we’re looking at the true, extreme political radicals, we’re seeing them come about as a result of a kind of well-oiled engine. I’m not gonna say that this is an institutional kind of thing, and it’s maybe more of a third level effect of active decisions, but it’s still something that, nonetheless, has been deliberately constructed. 4chan is funded by a japanese toy company and a hands off japanese internet techbro, and is administrated by some former american military freak who’s deliberately organized the site. The more radical offshoots, that use the same source code, tend to be funded by oil money, and political action committees, but through second-level effects, where they fund some small level conservative actor, and then they prop up the space. Which churns out some radical terrorists that are capable of your more fucked up bombings, and shootings, and controlled and coordinated protests. And then you kind of get military people at almost every level of this, in lower numbers, who act to control the space.
I dunno what I mean to extrapolate from all of this, but yeah. There’s probably not going to be a civil war.
Apologies, but too verbose and meandering to gain insight/understanding from (and I tried). Also, its murder trying to read that on a phone (vs PC monitor) to boot.
Appreciate the attempt though, thank you for that.
I don’t even come to a conclusion in the thing itself, but the tl;dr is basically just that this is all political farce, political theater, and the nature of the opposition’s control is too like. granular, too atomized, to be able to co-ordinate a large scale war. What we see instead are discrete “events”, discrete attacks, civil unrest which is corralled and channeled towards political ends by political powers. That’s what we see, we don’t see like, large scale organized institutional conflict, because the institutions are (mostly) all on the same side.
If you read the popular opinions around 1860, we have the same “we are right and we’ll show them” attitude building up in the new poor-people-and-women slave states.
The US Regular Army (RA) was founded in 1775. State militias supported the RA through the various wars fought on what is now US soil (including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). In the Civil War, the RA was supported by volunteers and fought on the side that ultimately won. The Confederate Army was similar to the RA at the time. Currently, the RA has been absorbed into the US Army (including Army Reserve and National Guard).
So… yes there was a federal military, but it was a different thing than the US Army is now. How that would play out if things went bonkers in 2025… who knows. There are a LOT of people around the world watching VERY closely though… and really hoping (not that confidently though) that sanity will prevail.
Ain’t no way this is actually going to happen, any attempt at succession will be put down by the much larger national military. There will be no civil war.
If they vote on it Brexit style it will be one thing. If 51% of the population shows up and votes 51% to leave we can consider it. Wait until that happens.
Eh there won’t be an organized civil war of large standing armies, but I can definitely see the Redneck militias doing some damage. If it dragged on long enough they could theoretically get organized somehow.
I really doubt that the politicians in the GOP states want a Civil war though, it is gonna be hard to extract wealth from the poor if the whole system explodes.
i also notice nobody mentions the possibility that cartels could try to take advantage of any significant unrest in some states. i doubt states or feds want that mess.
Not so much software as an element that needs to be part of so much software but, for some unfathomable reason, is not:
Picklists which work properly. If I type “U”, do not give me a screen full of Ts with the first U at the bottom. And let me type more than one letter to get to exactly where I need to be in the list. It can be done but it rarely is done and it does my head in.
Also, if you must include a scroll wheel to enter numbers, make it possible to just fucking type the numbers instead.
This is probably not what you intended this thread for but I’ll take any chance I get to ask UI designers to get a fucking grip…
Software developers who never have, and never will have to, use the software for real. I think every coder should be forced to use their own software for one month out of every year they work on it (and be able to do the job that goes with it because how the fuck else are they going to get a clue?).
And fucking stop making PC software that looks like it was designed to be used on a phone. I cannot do my job on a phone, no one would ever do my job on a phone, everyone who does my job has at least two large screens. We do not want to click a million times to do one simple task, and we do want to be able to see masses of information at the same time.
I think every coder should be forced to use their own software for one month out of every year they work on it (and be able to do the job that goes with it because how the fuck else are they going to get a clue?).
At my company, all developers spend time every year in customer support. It gives us first hand experience with what our customers are running into and asking for. We also work directly with field consultants on their projects. It’s not exactly this, but it’s pretty close, and it works really well.
That must help a lot. But often, when I am quietly cursing them, I just want to make them shadow me for a day to see, and feel, the impact of their ridiculous decisions. We have given them written explanations, had meetings, shown screenshots. But nothing gets through. If they had to spend a day a week using it, they might actually do something about it.
Software developers who never have, and never will have to, use the software for real.
Yes. The customer doesn’t necessarily know what’s possible or know how to articulate what features they want. I spent one week in a position where I was using my own software for production and immediately made several simple enhancements once I had hands on experience with the expected business process.
Every programmer should go through an exercise like this at least once in a while.
I am quite old, so remember the transition from scientists writing their own software to systems analysts who specialised in writing software that was fit for purpose. And that was exactly the ideal: the systems analyst was supposed to be someone who could code as well as their programmers could and understand the job the software was designed for as well as the customer did.
None of that seems to have happened. Some of the kids who could code got lucky with billion dollar jackpots from very low hanging fruit. And ever since, we’ve just been hit by waves of kids who can code going straight into software development with absolutely no experience of how work works.
It’s a difficult problem to solve. I have an aunt who developed software in the '60s and '70s who had to retire early because the languages she used became obsolete (apart from a brief bounce running up to Y2K). But it is a problem we absolutely have to solve. So much shitty software, wasting so much effort, for the developers and users alike.
Here’s a basic UI thing that needs to happen: spatially stable navigation.
When I scroll up, something should not appear unless it was just hidden by my scrolling down.
When I hit “back”, I should always be where I just was.
These are, in some ways, the same thing. Scrolling up on a webpage is, quite often, intended as an “undo” for the previous scrolling-down action. When I scroll up, I want to see the last thing that disappeared under the upper fold. I don’t want to see your menu, which wasn’t there before.
No, but I’d vote for him over any republican traitor shitbag, no question. And he’s better than a lot of career politicians. I just don’t want our politics devolving further into celebrity popularity contests. Do you want President Ye?
If I recall correctly (and it’s been over a decade since I read that one), Zinn is quite clear from the onset about his stance. (Even the title makes it evident that his perspective isn’t going to follow the traditional USA history narrative.) He sustains his points with empirical evidence, so I would hesitate to call it prejudiced. But there are some issues with some of his sources. (I think Matthew Restall may address some of those.)
How about trying out James Loewen’s Lies My Teachers Told Me? That book explains what I think Zinn was attempting to problematize: the blind acceptance of the biases within historical texts. Loewen aims directly at the USA secondary educational system in particular. You will learn a lot about USA history and why it has been written from a specific angle.
At this point I’ve just blocked every AI art community that I come across. The art itself is rarely interesting and it’s really easy to spot. Kinda wish lemmy had more artists, would love some human-made stuff to balance it out.
Some of us are a lot more hesitant about internet-publicly sharing work now, since it’ll likely be scraped and used for someone else’s profit.
Rational worry or not, I know I just don’t post what I’ve been working on because of that. I know I’m not some artistic genius, but I still don’t like my data being hoovered up for any purpose, be they privacy concerns or training models without my explicit consent. Same way when I show my work IRL I wouldn’t be happy if someone was dragging around a photocopier, or taking high-res photos of everything I do. Granted, I have the same concerns about even posting comments, but that’s had the upside of my posting less.
I totally get this concern. Copyright law seems to barely benefit the small artist when a large tech company can “train” their AI on others work without their consent. I personally would love to see all the LLM producers be held accountable for the IP theft they have perpetrated on such a massive scale.
Its just concentrating power in large tech companies who are stealing to profit. The great job they’ve done is find yet another loophole in an already broken system. They are not “showing everyone” anything… People, largely, dont give a shit about that kind of thing. Thats why there are loopholes to exploit in the first place.
If the law is unjust does that mean the criminal is good? No.
If the law is unjust doesn’t that mean the criminal is bad? No.
Take the worst most vile corporation in human history, partner them with thirty other of the most disgusting inhuman monsters of a corporation. A true legend of doom! Then have your legion of doom take advantage of a small legal hole in the copyright system. Is the copyright system now a good just system because very bad people got around it? Was it a good justice system before that?
The moral character of a person and how good the law is are seperate independent facts. I don’t care that some big tech is exploiting the hole I don’t care if the nicest person whomever lived was. The law is shit and I won’t defend a shit system. Me attacking a bad law is not me defending a lawbreaker.
The good news is because it is groups with deep pockets breaking this shit system is regular folks have a shot of being free of it. Me vs a giant media company? I will lose. A billionaire against one? They might win. Once it is understood that running something thru an AI removes the copyright the rest of us can gain.
Oh sorry I forgot to ask. How is copying the same as stealing? If I take your money you no longer have it, and I do. If I copy your idea do you still have your idea?
Religions are sort of like mind viruses. The ones that have survived have done so because they are very good at taking root and multiplying in the human mind. Sort of a natural selection of ideas. They develop the necessary features like a way to ignore contrary evidence and severe consequences for not believing
What’s “wrong” in your question is the assumption that a) the only reason religions exist is the lack of knowledge and b) that the knowledge we have answers all the questions that people seek answers to when they turn to religion. I think if you question these assumptions then you’ll easily start to find the answers. Otherwise see all the other comments.
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