Meh, I would’ve given 3/5 stars to U.S. democracy since the Voting Rights Act. Stars taken away for FPTP, gerrymandering, campaign finance, “lobbying,” and the electoral college. I believe we’re going to go to 0/5 stars with completely rigged elections rather than just manufacturing consent and lightly tipping the scales like they’ve been doing.

Yeah, I think this could be the end of free and fair elections in the U.S., and there’s no coming back from that without a revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most of us will directly be killed by this change; our lives will just be shittier. It’ll be like living in Russia. Given how utterly incompetent the administration is looking, and the things they say they’re going to do (mass deportation of a significant part of our workforce, blanket tariffs, gutting social safety-nets), we may speed-run an economic and societal collapse. That could sow the seeds for a horrible and bloody revolution.

Or, maybe I’m wrong and the important institutions will somehow hold against a christo-fascist party controlling all branches of the federal government and a president with immunity. If there are still are free and fair elections, then congress could block a lot of things in 2026, and start repairing some of the damage in 2028.

Still, it does not bode well that the U.S. elected these people in the first place, and at best, the U.S. will slowly crumble for decades.

Do you remember when it was commonly advised to use fake names and birthdays on online forms, and when “spyware” was a term?

I’ve heard it said that chattel slavery was more expensive than it would’ve been to just pay people poverty wages and let them fend for their own food and shelter. Dunno if it’s true or not. I imagine it also damages the mental health of the slave owners, and society as a whole.

Severance is great. Silo is OK. For all Mankind was great in the earlier seasons. Foundation is good. Extrapolations is good, but too unrealistic for the subject matter, IMO. Dark Matter (2024) is pretty good, reminds me of Sliders from my childhood.

Edit: Oh, Sunny was good too.

Find your local state delegate.

Would this be “State Democratic Party chairs?” I’m not really sure how the party is structured and who votes. And apparently, the chair for my state resigned.

I remember liking Opposing Force and Blue Shift too.

know how to lobby the government.

I’m thinking this may be how it’ll work. More like “bribe” though, and Trump is probably doing this on purpose to coerce companies for bribes. Aka, racketeering on the highest level.

I don’t think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don’t really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don’t know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don’t people think, “I don’t know what instance to join, so I’m not going to choose any?”

Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don’t like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I’m extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there’s no option for an algo.

The UI seems fine to me. I guess I’m not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.

Idk. Maybe it’s because I learned OOP first that it makes more sense to me; but OOP is a good way to break down complex problems and encapsulate them into easily understable modules. Languages like Java almost force everyone on the project to use similar paradigms and styles, so it’s easier for everyone to understand the code base. Whenever I’ve worked on large non-OOP projects, it was a hard-to-maintain mess. I’ve never worked on projects such as the Linux kernel, and I’m hoping it’s not an unmaintainable mess, so I’m pretty sure it’s possible to not use OOP on large projects and still be maintainable. I am curious if they still use OOP concepts, even though they are not using strictly OOP.

I also like procedural python for quick small scripts. And although Rust isn’t strictly OOP, it obviously borrows heavily from it. Haskell is neat, but I haven’t used it enough to be proficient or develop good sense of application architecture.

I’ve done production work in C, but still used largely OOP concepts; and the code looks much different than code I’ve seen that was written before C++ was popular.

That’s not really good evidence. They could’ve made more money by just holding an SP 500 index fund. Their recent Visa trade is better evidence.

Ok, yes, I support actions like these, and they are good for community defense against small civilian fascist groups. There are not the numbers to counter organizations like FBI, DHS, or national guard though. Things are a bit different when the fascist group you’re trying to counter is the federal or state government with the will to kill and immunity from their actions.

The left is such a small population in the US, it’s irrelevant. If we are to believe Trump’s rhetoric, any group that becomes too much of a nuisance will be deemed “the enemy within,” and be shot.

Things are quite different. While Trump was in office, he did multiple things that were worse than what Nixon did, and was never forced to leave office. I think our institutions were stronger back then. We didn’t have a very good democracy when Hoover was president, and it took many decades for the Voting Rights Act to get passed (which has recently been weakened by SCOTUS, and will probably be weakened much more). I think we’ll regress quite a bit. Republicans obviously want more of an autocracy/oligarchy. I think it’s a very real possibility we have Russia-style “elections” in the future, and I don’t even know how you come back from that. Assuming democracy isn’t completely destroyed, it may take many decades of fighting and changing the minds of the people who aren’t disenfranchised to get back to where we were. Hell, even civil war is on the table if Trump follows through on some of his more egregious promises (i.e. if he deems Democratic state governments as the “enemy within” and tries to use the military to depose them).

Meh, startups and businesses are capitalist organizations, and I think the idea of patents is questionable outside capitalism, so these wouldn’t really be a good metrics. I’d guess the richest countries “innovate” the most because they can support more risky endeavors. The U.S. is the capitalist imperial core, so it probably innovates the most. Other capitalist nations like Haiti, probably not so much.

The best measure of innovation would probably be something like scientific publications. China wins by raw numbers, Vatican City wins per-capita (???).

Yeah, I mostly leave Harvestmen alone if they stay out of the way. I kill brown recluses though, because I’ve heard their bites can do some damage.

IMO, the U.S. will become similar to Russia. It’s not some sudden societal collapse scenario; just an oligarchy with high levels of corruption and incompetence. Most people will conform or keep their heads down to avoid the consequences of stepping out of line. If you’re in a possibly targeted group, you may want a valid passport though. And it’s always been a good idea to keep at least a months worth of non-perishable food on hand in case of supply chain disruptions. Possibly stuff like emergency propane heaters and a propane tank could be useful too (they’ve been useful for me in the past already without an authoritarian government or social unrest). Knowing your neighbors and helping eachother out in little ways is probably the most powerful thing though.

I use LLMs for multiple things, and it’s useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you’re trying to find or learn about something, but don’t know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don’t exist). It works OK for things like “translation” tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don’t use it anymore. I’ve had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.

Ideally, the Democrats would be unabashedly pro-immigration and advocate for solving the “problem” by making it much easier to immigrate legally and getting those currently undocumented, documented. This would make immigrants harder to exploit, address fears of immigrants under-cutting wages, and paying more taxes and social security. That addresses all the somewhat legitimate worries I can think of; the rest of the “problems” I can think of are just rooted in racism and lies. Immigration has been and is a net-positive for the U.S., and a pro-immigration stance should be an easy argument to sell to voters that’s also backed up by many studies and data; including conservative think-tanks like Cato. Pro-immigration sentiments were very popular in the U.S. until this recent bout of anti-immigration propaganda. Even now, Americans hold contradictory opinions, like being pro-mass-deportation while being in favor of expanding pathways to citizenship: https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/polling-around-mass-deportation-far-more-complicated-right-wing-media-let