Seems like a good initiative. It’s a rampant problem.

dem voters need to learn this is the exact perspective they are voting to support, and tolerating it coming along for the ride with the other things they prefer talking about leads inevitably - inevitably - to genocide

Definitely the most level-headedly psychotic thing I’ve seen in a long time. There is no coming back from where this person is.

Some good quotes in here:

The CSIS officer began with simple questions but soon turned to the agency’s true interest: whether the Innu were being influenced by communist countries in eastern Europe.

Up to that point, CSIS officials saw the unrest and violence rocking a few First Nations communities as “essentially criminal” in nature, thus an issue for the police rather than the security service, but Kanehsatà:ke changed their views.

“CSIS HQ decided Native activities had become ‘political’ and a level two targeting authorization was sought to ascertain the nature of violence associated with aboriginal land claims disputes,” SIRC reported on Jan. 30, 1991.

If you say the west has political police they’ll look at you like you grew an extra head, and yet -

Friend who keeps telling me to watch Steven Universe

I wear a mask on airplanes and public transit to protect against general respiratory illness. I do BJJ where it isn’t really viable to wear a mask, which is probably my highest exposure risk. For grocery stores I had always been wearing a mask until recently, when some undiscernible shift started making it feel pointless. But I’m thinking I’ll keep it as a flu season practice at least. Other than that I work from home; before I started working from home (pre-2020) I always picked up various illnesses from the office. I never wear a mask when just walking around outside on the street. Mostly I follow the lead of my spouse who is a doctor, although I’m more of a masker than they are outside of work.

One person I know professionally is still in total lockdown on a farm somewhere outside the city because of his immunocompromised wife. Another couple I know still wears masks everywhere, even just walking around outside. Nobody else I know wears a mask at all.

impossible to make me hate the NYT more than I already do but every day they roll up their sleeves and try their best

Depressive episodes go up for me any time after a long break from ordinary life (including vacation, even). For me, so much about depression revolves around being unable to summon the motivation to do anything, which causes further depressed thoughts, which further depresses motivation. Breaking out of that loop is hard, and it takes time to get back in a routine that supports good mental health. I guess what I’m saying is that “momentum” matters for doing things; if I’ve been doing things, it’s easier for me to do more things.

As far as things peaking in the evening, that’s a classic. My spouse calls it my “10 pm ruminations” where I’ll find myself staring at the wall for a while then say something like “maybe I should [action that would completely change the direction of my entire life]”. I don’t know if that’s depression necessarily, just ordinary human existential angst.

It is kind of sad that I have time to play at most one or two of these games in a year (this year, only silksong). I still haven’t even played Elden Ring ffs.

Was expecting worse. I’d say it’s a good definition of social democratic politics. Not democratic socialism because it explicitly denies socialism or communism as the end goal. Of course it abuses “democracy” as a positive thought-terminating term opposed to communism.

It didn’t play too large a role in the election as compared to NYC. People mostly don’t like how Harrell ran the city and even his supporters struggle to muster much to say in support of him. Her general campaign branding was about being a relatively young renter living in cap hill who has actually ridden a bus before. I hope she does well but like most cities, everything revolves around real estate which is an inherently reactionary force.

saw more than a couple olds waving one piece flags at the no kings protests

After seeing windows and chrome users loudly complain & then put up with the bullshit despite alternatives three orders of magnitude simpler to adopt than moving to an entirely foreign country, my prediction is that this basically does not matter.

SuperHot VR rises above tech demo (but only somewhat). It is very fun controlling your body movements to make time travel at certain rates. Surprisingly tiring!

I’m white so whatever I write here should be taken through that lens. I also work in programming.

Your situation honestly does suck. I’m not going to tell you to have a more holistic view of yourself because I know what it is like to really value a few talents you have. Giving that up is psychologically difficult and probably not the easiest way to address the situation.

Being talented and having decent opinions are basically orthogonal traits. Both extremes exist; people I know IRL can talk thoughtfully for hours about all sorts of topics but are demonstrably fucking useless at executive functioning to the point where they should not be in any position of leadership. And some people are just very talented but have absolutely shit opinions. However, the Dr. House style brilliant asshole archetype is not a desirable thing to be.

So for programming, we have this rather idiotic idea that our profession is about “hitting the high notes” or something and you either have the talent to do it or you don’t. Junior developers (I don’t know what phase of your career you’re in) are heavily inundated with this messaging. You have to be absolutely cracked, you have to be a hacker experimenting with all this random shit in side projects, whatever. The reality is very different. There is way, way more worthwhile work in this field than we have the labor power to do (speaking in terms of “software that I dream should exist” rather than present labor market conditions). If you’re an absolutely cracked programmer you can maybe do a few times as much work over your lifetime as someone else. Maybe even ten times; I’m not a denier that in particular contexts, some people are ten times more productive than their coworkers. I’ve been on both sides of that multiplier!

However, vanishingly little work in this field requires you to “hit the high notes”. The sort of work that does require it is largely sorted away for PhDs and researchers to handle. Even then, researchers are usually not anomalously talented; they’ve just worked at & thought about something for a very long time.

The world we try to address & automate with software is so unbelievably complicated that there is no substitute for just grinding away at the problem for a long time and addressing all the unforeseeable issues that arise. If you engage with a problem for long enough you will match or surpass your coworkers’ talents in this domain. Maybe they’ve just been wrestling with the problem for long enough that they have a brute force encyclopedic knowledge of all the possible ways things can go wrong. That’s the real thing you want to acquire, and you will acquire it. It comes over time.

As far as the injustice you feel with the present state of things, where your racist coworkers are more knowledgeable than you: understand that you have the same capabilities as them, and your knowledge will fill in with time. That is probably not much of a comfort. But truly, they are not inherently better than you in a way that matters.

definitely AI slop

Good to know, I edited the title thank you!

Oddly enough the stroke turning him zionist is not a unique phenomenon. A friend who works at a local hospital reports the same thing happened to their department head. Used to be a well-liked extremely empathetic lady, had a stroke, boom turbo-zionist right as the Gaza genocide started kicking off in earnest. Not saying all zionism is due to brain damage but it certainly seems to help!

It’s not amazing or anything but it is a cut above average sci-fi/action schlock

I read this entire comment thread thinking it was about The Edge of Tomorrow and was ready for some juicy stuff like theorizing the capitalists actually have time travel and that’s how they put down revolutions