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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • This whole case has collapsed into a handful of choices:

    1. Judge doesn’t declare the Trump admin in Contempt of Court (i.e. does nothing). This sets precedent that Trump’s administration enjoys full immunity from the judiciary, officially turning the US into a dictatorship. This is what has been happening for weeks and remains by far the most likely scenario.
    2. Judge declares Trump in Contempt of Court, but is unable to enforce it. This is equivalent to scenario 1.
    3. Judge declares the Trump admin in Contempt of Court and deputizes state police to enforce the ruling and arrest, if not Trump, at least some officials. This would be legal and remains the only constitutional solution, but would almost certainly trigger an armed response from the regime. Democracy doesn’t go down without a fight, but the end result is uncertain.
    4. Pro-democracy factions use illegal/violent means to force Trump to comply (military coup, sudden Luigi’s Mansion remake, etc.). However it would seem that the masks fell off and despite decades of propaganda to the contrary, literally not a single living American is willing to put their life on the line to protect Democracy.

  • I just thought of a reason why trying to explain the downsides of solar power generation always goes so poorly for me.

    Where I live, solar=good is a given. No amount of oil lobbying can overcome the simple fact that thanks to historically heavy subsidies, PV is free money and therefore anti-solar sentiment is fringe because everyone loves free money.

    (Which is its own can of worms because ungoverned PV has externalities which the owners may not be bearing or only partially, while people who can’t install PV are essentially using up some of their own taxes to give a tax break to the bourgeois down the street with a solar mansion, and sure that’s more solar which is environmentally good but it’s also another indirect tax on the poor which is socially deleterious).

    Anyway my point is that in a country where nearly everyone has PV or wishes they did, I don’t see any issue with plainly stating “PV is causing major headaches to grid operators”. Because pragmatically we need to justify solutions like dynamic pricing, solar taxes, and the phaseout net metering which are predictably unpopular policies with PV owners who were promised endless riches.
    But I suppose from a North American perspective where “renewable energy is good” is somehow the fringe opinion and PV deployment is pathetic, then it makes sense to push back against such messaging.



  • Lol at everyone in the replies inventing crazy conspiracy theories.

    As someone who has microwaved tea a bunch of times because my workplace didn’t have a kettle, let me bestow upon you the ~~~truth~~~:

    Microwaved water is slow to boil (especially compared to a 2500 W kettle for us chad 230V enjoyers), about 2:30 for one cup IIRC and the cup will be uniformly heated including the handle which is annoyingly hot to the touch (and I’m not particularly squeamish with hot things).

    Tastes the same though.



  • I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power

    I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person being mad at satire of a politician. Like maybe it’s a cultural divide and I’m not American so I don’t view politics as team sports and my country has a stronger history of political satire than the often pathetically meek American political cartoons, but you can make a satirical deepfake of the politicians I voted in last election if you want.

    If the deepfake was not obviously related to current political events or wasn’t obviously fake, the point could be arguable at least as a matter of good taste. As it stands, the satire is obvious, harmless, and topical. It is therefore terrifying that censoring it is even a question. How far the concept of free speech has fallen that it refers to Seig Heiling but a 2s gif of Trump sucking some toes apparently crosses a line.



  • There’s plenty of legal precedent for newsworthiness to supersede some rules in the name of the freedom of the Press. It makes sense that I’m not allowed (at least where I live) to post a non-consensual pictures of someone off the street. But it would not make sense if I was forbidden from posting a picture of the Prime Minister visiting a school for example. That’s newsworthy and therefore the public interest outweighs his right to privacy.

    The AI video of Trump/Musk made a bunch of headlines because it was hacked onto a government building. On top of that it’s satire of public figures and – I can’t believe that needs saying – is clearly not meant to provide sexual gratification.

    Corpos and bureaucracies would have you believe nuance doesn’t belong in moderation decisions, but that’s a fallacy and an flimsy shield to hide behind to justify making absolutely terrible braindead decisions at best, and political instrumentation of rules at worst. We should celebrate any time when moderators are given latitude to not stick to dumb rules (as long as this latitude is not being used for evil), and shame any company that censors legitimate satire of the elites based on bullshit rules meant to protect the little people.


  • I’ve mostly got experience with Battlefield in that genre but if you’re getting repeatedly killed by “campers” you’re playing the game wrong, aka aiming for KDR instead of PTFO.

    Believe it or not devs are aware of the mechanical advantages of long-range weapons, so in-game objectives are intentionally littered with crates and boxes and walls to provide cover from “camping spots”. The ones getting repeatedly killed are noobs who keep walking around the objective, in the open, because they are scared of all the cover positions which might hide an enemy.

    Well too fucking bad sugarlips, stop being a little bitch and rush in. Better to die clearing out the cover spots for your teammates to capture the objective than to a useless game of skeet that doesn’t generate any benefit for either team. I don’t care that you have a KDR of 1.2 and “you would have gotten more if it wasn’t for the campers”, you captured exactly zero flags and so as far as I’m concerned you’re dead weight.

    … Wow sorry about that, I guess I got post-traumatic gamer rage on this topic lol


  • All Russia did was give a nudge to the literal trillions of dollars in capital held by elites who wanted nothing more than full-blown fascism. All the Kremlin had to do was finance whoever could sow the most distrust in democratic institutions and wedge themselves in existing divides within the US. It’s the most boring coup in history, people voting for Hitler not because of Bolshevism of whatever but because they’re triggered by fucking vaccines and pronouns.

    Conversely even if the EU went full hybrid warfare (which we aren’t because we can’t even do anything about the open fascists in our own Union), the counterplay is rebuilding trust which is harder by orders of magnitude than just buying up a social media, deleting moderation, and promoting the Nazi stuff.

    Best we could hypothetically do is sanction y’all into autarchy and hope the subsequent recession/depression acts as an electroshock to the population, but you’re already doing it to yourselves and besides I see no reason why the two thirds of y’all who either don’t care or actively support fascism would change their minds. It will be just like Putin Orban or Erdogan, 15 years from now shit will be worse than ever for the 99 % but Republicans will still win elections without even needing to cheat much thanks to their complete control over state propaganda. Your democracy is dead, you should be moving through the stages of grief and planning your next move.

    I’d love to be proven wrong but there’s too much historical precedent, and zero precedent to Americans being even remotely close to politically conscious enough to engage in “forceful” political change (unless the force is being exerted on Black people, then the “well regulated militia” comes out the woodwork). Hell, the videos from “protests” I’ve been seeing this week in your major cities look so pathetic it makes Denver look like a large village.


  • Yeah that’s the gender-radical answer. I’m all for it but we’re certainly not there yet despite being on the very progressive side of gender rights.

    There are also the positive discrimination laws to take into account (in Belgium it’s illegal for companies to have a pay gap between men and wonen in equivalent positions) but IMO those should not rely on a central government database to be enforced.

    Then there’s the fact that people usually change their names if they change their legal gender… When Robert becomes Julia there’s no need for a gender marker to guess what happened.


  • Side-note but this is exactly the reason why my country never asked for my ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation (and AFAIK is not legally allowed to do so). We learned from WWII that this is too great of a liability to entrust to future, potentially hostile governments. The Nazis poured over every written registry of Jewish population census to make a handy murder list, maybe we shouldn’t facilitate their job next time?

    (Side-side note: because of what I just said it is very surprising that Germany keeps a registry of everyone’s religion for tax purposes, like maybe just find any other way to allocate subsidies?)

    (Side³ note: I’m going to guess unfortunately my government does have “legally trans” people in a database due to the logistics of changing legal gender)



  • Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.


  • One of these literally shows a dead soldier in a field of flowers so, yeah.

    It’s idle longing. I could give up my career, move to a deeply rural area, and break my back doing menial jobs until I die of health complications at 64. I won’t, but it’s nice to long for the imagined simplicity sometimes y’know?

    See also:

    twitter caption "Why do men keep saying they want to bleed out here what does that mean" over a picture of a desert urban area at night covered in fresh snow


  • Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of “youth these days”?

    The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

    The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it’s same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that’s not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

    Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck’s horror show.


  • Cease&desist every casino would be a good first step. Casinos are well outside the original intended purpose and if the ToS don’t prohibit their existence that can easily be changed. Valve doesn’t owe anyone the right to gamble their items, especially not with the weird third party escrow system that casinos use IIRC.

    But if we’re touching on the subject then we need to reopen the contentious subject of the lootboxes themselves, which are gambling. Which Valve (and the video game industry) has an enormous stake in. To fix that whole mess, I expect a government crackdown will be required.


  • You’ll have a hard time finding a jurisdiction where minors gambling (even behind the veil of “we don’t check who our customers are”) is legal. The “IRL item gambling” site in the video was in fact blatantly illegal in Denmark despite the lengths to which they went to pretend “it’s not gambling because the house always loses”.

    Asking Valve to police gambling is the next best thing to do if governments won’t step in. You say it like it’s an impossibility, ignoring the fact that “state-run gambling” is quite a common setup. In France for instance all money games are run by la française des jeux, a state-owned monopoly whose profits are meant to go to charity. In the US it wouldn’t be a crazy idea either, given how many US states already have state-run monopolies for alcohol sales for example. It’s not like historical precedent is lacking to show that regulating a parasitic industry is possible…

    Maybe you can find examples of other industries that are heavily infected with gambling bullshit, but that’s whataboutism and in no way relevant to the discussion.



  • I was there Gandalf…

    Before that date their algorithm was soft-locked to around 5k upvotes. If a post was extremely, massively popular it would climb to maybe a bit over 10k but that was insane. There was clearly a logarithmic scaling effect that kicked in after a few thousand upvotes. Not entirely sure why, perhaps to prevent the super-popular stuff from ballooning in some kind of horrible feedback loop.

    The change was to uncap the vote counts. One day posts just kept climbing well beyond the 5k mark. Now what they also did was recalculate old posts in order not to fuck up the /top rankings. Kinda. Took a while and I’m not sure they got to every post.

    I don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation, but this ain’t proof and I don’t see how it is unbelievable that a website with tens of millions MOA would occasionally have a post with 100k+ upvotes.