Tadpole9181

Machine elves as a specific is probably closer to a mass psychosis. Someone named them that at some point, then everybody talks about them, so everybody saw "machine elves" and future people interpret what they see that way because that's what they heard before they tripped.

Really, DMT trips kinda go like an acid trip but you've taken 100x times the dose and died in the process. Reality itself kind of dissolves away and you forget what you are frequently.

In that state, there's a lot going on, with a fair bit of synesthesia and trying to decipher exactly what's happening. Things breath in and out rapidly, but it feels like lifetimes.

Anyway, the "machine elves" aren't really elves... Or machines. Even on sub-breakthrough doses, you start seeing eyes and mouths in the spaces around you, you may even hear voices/singing - IME often a beckoning. Once you break through, those hallucinations have been ramped up and your brain is filling in so many gaps (at this point your eyes will have closed) they come across almost like deities that exist in between time and space. They don't have consistent forms; they speak in tongues / songs that you can sometimes "understand". They tend to be "neutral / neutral", so to speak.

It's profoundly difficult to explain, since language wasn't really designed to capture that state of mind and lacks the adjectives. But someone tried to make something relatable with "machine elves" at some point and it stuck because "yeah, that's weird enough to capture the essence of it".

Some people do take these experiences as more than what they are, though, and act like machine elves are "real" lore or that they are something that actually exists "beyond the veil" or whatever. And now that so many people learn about it well before tripping, they may be seeing more concretely "machine elves". But that's way more... Pedestrian(?) than what I experienced without that bias.

Anyone who can read the above and interpret it as charitable to the administration cannot possibly be a serious person.

You asked a question and I told you the actual answer.

If you're presented with the option to resist and force their hand so you can try to challenge it legally, please do, I respect that idea. But not everyone is willing to make personal sacrifices like that. Of course, everyone should still make sure to vote.

But at the end of the day, we only have representation because of the implied threat of violence if we didn't. And it very much seems like that threat being implied is not effective in this administration.

I got "rated limited" by HN after 2 whole comments. Rediculous.

Anyway, I agree with you fully. And I firmly believe the world would be a better place had we actually weighed each of those conflicts and voted to officially declare war or not. Those presidents knew what they were doing and should be tried for it.

Just like Trump should be today.

He's not special, but I'm not sure I can bring LBJ or Nixon back from the dead and stop the Vietnam War. Meanwhile this is an active conflict that can be stopped now.

Though I would argue that, yes, this time is different. At least those pretended to have a justification.

The president does not have the right to make trade deals or tariff. Trump has tariffed basically the entire world, and is now paying that money back to... The family of his cabinet.

The president does not have the power to declare war. We are at war with Iran.

The president does not have the power to unilaterally dissolve agencies or reproportion or refuse their funds or budgeting. Yet the department of education is being shuttered and numerous agencies are in ongoing lawsuits for DOGE.

It is illegal for the president to use the office for advertisement or personal gain. Yet he openly allows bribes to advertise products from the white House, creates cryptocurrencies, gives high-level positions to family.

The president is not allowed to direct an angry crowd to the capital with the express intent to stop the wheels of democracy and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And yet.

The DOJ announced they will not prosecute the predators from Epstein's list after explicitly violating a law from Congress repeatedly for months on disclosing related files.

Congress is too afraid of his power to hurt their reelection. 33% of SCOTUS are his picks, with another 33% being aligned with the party, creating a supermajority. We've seen the majority of military leadership replaced this year. We've seen a plurality of agencies institute loyalty tests, most importantly the FBI. ICE has been repurposed to a private military / secret police.

You seem to believe there is some divine mandate that enforces the constitution. That the president must follow the rules.

There is not. He is not. He got away with it and continues to get away with it. We no longer live in a polite, rule-based society.

Because, fundamentally, might makes right. And the president of the United States has consolidated enough power that there is basically nothing to stop them but how far their cronies are willing to go.

So why can he do this? Because he can. And there's nothing you can do about it. And if you fight back there will be repercussions.

Its an astounding level of naivity from people who have undoubtedly read textbooks filled cover to cover with a human history almost entirely consisting of subjugation through violence.

I feel like you didn't really read my comment.

Oh good God, I can't listen to this intellectual rot a single second longer.

This is not a gray area unless you're intentionally pretending to be an idiot to steal power.

Congress is the only branch allowed to declare war. Taking targeted military actions against another country repeatedly on their own soil with no provocation is not a "special military action" it's a fucking war.

It's not funny or coy or clever to pretend otherwise. The intent is abundantly clear and it is abundantly clear it is being violated.

You're arrested for trespassing. Remember, the president also effectively controls the security team, the DoJ and the military. It's just a king again, and you're asking the sane question:

"Why would anyone follow the mad, old king?"

And the answer is around the same:

"Because he will hurt you."

You technically can, but you really shouldn't. The general knowledge is that you can make a game or you can make an engine - not both.

There's just so much you don't know until you do, and there's a reason even all those "render engine" libraries have fallen kinda defunct (Ogre, Irlicht, etc). It's hard and distracts from the real goal.

Just grab an engine and get started on the game day 1 with a tool that can guarantee any game can be made with studio-quality tooling and compatibility.

It's the same reason you grab a date time library. It sure seems totally doable to "just handle times" right up until you try.

If making an engine was really that easy, studios wouldn't pay tens of millions to avoid doing it. Godot 3D would be solved by now.

I haven't read the patch notes, so I may be wrong, but they probably don't upgrade the engine across any major versions? The developers just load up an old version of Unity to work in.

See Satisfactory for how much of a pain it can be to actually go through major versions, and how long it can take a more complex game.

Although, I will say that newer versions have made it a lot less annoying to keep up to date.

As someone who prefers PHP in general and find the TC39 committee has kneecapped the JS language in the past few years...

> PHP has a vastly simpler toolchain

Firmly disagree.

You can install Node and have a basic server running in a few seconds.

PHP requires installing and setting up a server tied into FPM and then reconfiguring a slurry of bad defaults. If you don't avoid the footgun of "traditional" deployments, you get to deal with mixed versions of source. If you don't avoid the footgun of "native" sessions, you get to deal with INCOMPLETE_CLASS errors galore.

And if you want a dynamic frontend, you're still going to want to bust out JS.

> I can't find any reason why I wouldn't use PHP instead

Using a single language for both frontend and backend with (largely) the same availability of tooling and the ability to share code (i.e. type definitions).

> generally better runtime performance

I find this hard to believe? Intuitively, I would assume that the Node / Bun engines are significantly faster than PHP - which doesn't even come with it's JIT enabled by default on the (perfectly valid) note that backends are almost always constrained by DB times.

> a package ecosystem with Composer that isn't overrun with inane vanity projects and supply-chain vulnerabilities.

Functionally, Composer is worse than any of the NPM package managers IMO. PHP's global, shared namespaces preventing monkey patching and nested dependencies is a huge burden when you need to use Lib A and Lib B, but both have conflicting dependencies on Lib C.

But the only reason it doesn't suffer (as many) supply chain issues is two-fold:

1. Packagist's source of truth is the repo and tags. It's much easier to notice a Github account being compromised, which is already harder because it's always had better account security expectations, than NPM. But this comes at costs - such as being unable to rename a package in-place, because Composer gets really confused when it clones a trunk that has a different name than what you asked for. And it's not intrinsically more secure, since tags are not immutable and people can host on less secure VCS platforms.

2. But more than that... it's just less used? The PHP ecosystem is noticeably smaller and has way less happening.

So its very much trade-offs.

Can you explain to me how this isn't considered outright fraud? The SEC has rules specifically around the lifetime of a company / ticket in terms of things like inclusion in indexes and retirement accounts, right?

How does allowing this not simply encourage a world of, basically, stock market karma farming: making bullshit barely company companies, just to sell the ticket so they can be used to engage in a pump and dump scheme with the little wealth the working class has left?

This domain isn't exactly my forte...

> Picking up a flower and smoking it on the spot is interstate commerce

I don't quite follow - would you be able to explain the argument behind this for me?

We officially threatened to invade Greenland (and therefore the EU) and Canada. The former we threatened again, what, two days ago?

Not to mention the tariffs against our allies we levied. Or the fact we personally insult them from our highest office WRT things like calling their dead service members cowards.

They're not going to just forget how the US population and half it's legislative body just... Doesn't care at all. Will just let all of this happen.

We have become an apathetic, unserious people.

Oh, please. Don't insult everyone here by pretending you actually believe HTML is a human readable format like markdown. It was never designed for that and has never claimed that.

What a rediculous thing to even say.

No clue what you're on about:

> Pedophilia is defined as a sexual interest in prepubescent children.

When they touch them they're not a pedophile, they're a pedophile molester or a pedophile rapist. It has adds an additional word.

He likes looking at children in states of undress. He's a pedophile.

And, if dozens of people are to be believed across multiple lawsuits and 30,000 files at the FBI, he's a pedophile rapist too.

No? That has always been a uniquely unreadable language with weird, arbitrary choices.

And on no planet is it human readable without parsing.

Proton cannot destructively hash the email address for recovery because they need to use it. And if they can use it, they are legally mandated to give it to LEO in warrants that include that data as scope.

You can argue they should have a password the user holds to encrypt the recovery address, but that's going into the territory of hurting normal users. You use a recovery address when you don't have your password or recovery phrase. Requiring a password for the recovery email would just mean more customers locked out requiring human intervention (if it's even possible for that account) to get access back for the customer. And remember, many users also use the same account for their password manager.

And no, Proton is 100% welcome to publicly support free speech and protest while not destroying their company and going out of business with all their executives jailed for not complying with non-optional, legally required, minimally exposing warrants from law enforcement.

Especially after the double-tap on civilians and first responders the US just did on that bridge. Or the threat for no quarters from the secretary of defense. Or the threats to destroy critical civilian infrastructure for water or power.

Trump openly stated one of the perks of running an underage beauty pageant was being able to walk in on them in the dressing room.

He has himself admitted to being a pedophile...

This seems unreasonable. The entire point of Proton is that they themselves cannot access your data, that's how I've seen it advertised. The Swiss thing is more just that they can't be compelled to enable logging. (To be fair, though, maybe that's changed. it's been a while since I saw their home page and I don't exactly make a habit of disabling my adblock).

But I don't see how any reasonable person would not know that the email addresses and payment information that Proton must have access to would therefore be subject to disclosure to law enforcement. And for the vast majority of people, they aren't exactly on a tight watchlist where intelligence agencies are making thread boards to catch them committing for international crimes to make this matter.

Anyway, I especially don't understand the flack they get on this forum with people who do understand and should understand how hard it is to advertise technical features to normies.

Normal people aren't cyber criminals who needs to hide every spec of their trail from all governments. They just want to feel like no one is reading their messages or Internet history or passwords. Proton offers that, full stop.

Proton has never said they will refuse a warrant for what your email address or recovery account are. They say that the contents of your emails, calendars, notes, passwords, etc are not accessible to them and therefore cannot be spied on even if a warrant is fulfilled.

From every instance I've seen, Proton has only ever done what is legally required of them by a warrant. They do not get to say no when asked to turn over what they do have; which is going to be things they can't avoid storing - like email addresses or recurring payment information an account has.

But they don't store logs and all actual data is E2E / at-rest encrypted, so that data does not exist for them to give away. There's no master key or back doors.

Why? It's very likely we will never get a "proper" KSP 2. And that was pretty clear from KSP 1 through the acquisition to the multiple studio transfers

We quite literally have a whole report from multiple independent intelligence firms and agencies with corroboration from the FBI that he is...

Not to mention the planet. Launching satellites takes an incredible amount of fuel.

It wasn't a direct quote, to be clear. If anything, it would be "/s" at the end for sarcasm.

The head of the DoJ, being questioned about the president of the United States' involvement in (one of) the highest profile child sex trafficking ring in US history and it's subsequent cover up using the FBI itself, yelling about the economy and that nobody cares about child sex trafficking... Is not exactly a normal "political gaffe".

I would, in fact, say it's a huge deal that anyone remotely aware of what's happening in politics should know about. It was headlined and broadcast on most major networks.

Nor do I see anybody upset that it was misinterpreted or that someone didn't know. Just people who didn't know about it name-calling anyone who did. So not sure how their little joke "provoked" a flamewar, vs people being sensitive and lashing out that they aren't in on the joke immediately.

Never heard that one, but my off the cuff thought was "sounds like something a so-far-lucky gambling addict would say".

It looks like 70% of all satellites deployed in 2025 were starlink. Seems they make up over half (~65%) of all satellites currently in orbit.