nameless912

This is the thing that keeps making me so angry when I hear so called "budget hawks" get mad about the number of federal employees. Payroll is _not the problem_!! All of the federal payroll is something like 10-15% of the government's expenditure. Firing _everyone_ would only cut costs by 10-15%. There are plenty of programs (read: bloated defense contracts and corporate subsidies) that we could cut to save costs instead, and we wouldn't crater the federal workforce like we are now.

You can be mad about the government spending money on things you believe are unnecessary, and you can even want to fire the people related to that program! But across the board personnel cuts don't fix the appropriations issues and will waste money in inefficiency, waste and loss as the folks that are left have to pick up the pieces.

Does the federal government employ too many people? I dunno, maybe. Do we fund too many programs? Yeah, probably. But these cuts are _fucking insane_.

There's a strong part of me that thinks that a model not unlike BBSes with Fidonet might be the way to go. Everyone gets to have their own little bastion of the 'net that they control, filled with their own content (games, warez, text files, the good ol' shit) and global email/forums/chat provided in a decentralized way. When people are arseholes, you cut them off by blocking them from your server, and we all move on.

I keep toying with building a modern version of that using some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially because my attention span was fried by Instagram.

> this is what causes most peoples chronic fatigue

[Citation needed] I've never heard of this, and I feel like it would be much bigger news if there was a conclusive link

This seems like a "turtles all the way down" kinda solution... What's to say you won't fool the supervisor LLM?

I don't know how to write this comment in a way that won't land me in a CIA black site so I'll just start with a disclaimer that this post in no way celebrates or condones any violence, but I wouldn't be surprised if political assassination attempts go up 10-fold in the next 10 years. We already saw two different assassination attempts against Trump during the lead up to the election. You can read my older comments to know my political leanings, I don't like Trump. But wow, I'm genuinely more worried about the stability of our society because of increases in violent acts like this and the inevitable retaliation by the government against all people in the name of "security", than anything Trump could enact.

I wouldn't be surprised if New York passes new gun control laws because of this shooting; I wouldn't be surprised if there's a congresscritter or White House Staffer or judge who's assassinated in the next several years causing some kind of martial law situation. It's scary times we live in right now.

I would be fascinated to see to who was donating to Sarah Palin's campaigns at the time.

In the US, all political speech is bought and sold on the open market. Especially statements made by (most) politicians.

Nowadays spending 500-1000 USD on a machine gets you something that can print almost anything (within size limitations) out of the box with no calibration. The BambuLab printers are nothing short of extraordinary for quite reasonable prices (the A1 mini is only like 300 bucks, but it's small). And their software stack is good enough that 3D printing is roughly as easy as 2D printing (with the same caveats that occasionally your machine will jam and you'll want to chuck it out a window).

Respectfully, both of our diets are totally fine, and I don't need your opinion to let me know that. Any biomarker you might like to use tells us that we're fine; our weight is the only number that is "outside the norm", and while sure it's a measure of overall health it's not the only one or even the best one.

Hey, that's great! I'm really happy to hear that there are patients and doctors out there working together to use this medication correctly.

> it makes me unhealthy

...then it's not cosmetic weight loss? I don't think we disagree. If we prescribed these medications the same way we prescribe, say, blood pressure medication, I think I would be less worried. When you have high blood pressure, they of course put you on a medication immediately to get your blood pressure down, but the goal is to reduce the medication over time by helping you work on the underlying cause of the high blood pressure. Some people just have naturally high blood pressure and will need the medication support forever, and that's OK, but many people can engage in lifestyle changes that will give them most of the improvement they need. If we were approaching GLP-1's with the same mindset I think I would be much less worried about the future of our society with these medications.

And for what it's worth, the above isn't a "coping strategy". It's body acceptance, which has made me a hell of a lot healthier than all the attempts I made at losing weight I didn't really need to lose in order to be healthy and happy.

Okay, here's the thing.

I Totally get that GLP-1's are absolute medical breakthroughs. But they are a _serious_ societal problem, IMO. My partner and I are both larger-bodied people; both our BMI's (it's a terrible measurement, I'm aware) hover just over 30. We've done a lot of work to destigmatize our own bodies and accept who we are so that we can teach our kids to have healthy self-images and not suffer the dysmorphia that we both went through for decades. We're active, we eat well, and we have great lives; we just aren't _thin_.

My partner has a new coworker who just started on Wegovy and has been poisoning my partner's brain with her terrible self talk. She calls herself a "fat bitch" at work, and raves about how excited she is to "lose all the fucking weight" before her wedding next fall, and it's bad enough that my partner has had to talk to her manager and HR about it. It's bad enough that my partner broke down the other day and told me she's struggling to see herself as anything other than overweight and unhealthy because the negative sentiment her coworker has of _her_ body is leaking onto everyone else.

These medications are absolutely essential for _some_ people who need to lose weight for medical reasons or need the other benefits they provide. But, they've also unlocked a cheat code for losing weight, and people like my partner's new coworker are focusing on only that aspect. The potential societal effects of making weight loss easier than ever before are kinda terrifying to me. I don't know what I'll say to my kids if they end up with our body type and come to me one day asking to go on Ozempic or Wegovy because "all the kids at school are doing it" and "being thin is what's normal now". I'm so scared that we've opened up a Pandora's box of making thin even more of an expectation because it's "easy" now.

I guess my point is, I _really_ wish the FDA would step in and make it clear that these medications are not to be prescribed for cosmetic weight loss, and they should bring the hammer down on online pharmacies like Hers (which is where my partner's coworker got her Wegovy).

EDIT: there are a bunch of folks in the replies telling me I'm lying to myself and misserving my kids by accepting myself. That's...odd, to say the least. Every metric I have that isn't my weight is perfectly fine. My blood pressure is normal, my cholesterol is normal, my A1C is normal, my blood sugar is normal, my doctor and I are very happy with my health. The number on the scale is _a_ representation of your health, but it's not the only or even best one. And the impact on my mental health has been astounding. I'm not going to change my mind about my weight because a bunch of folks using an extremely outdated metric of overall health tell me my number is bad.

Anecdotally, the answer is a resounding yes. The two major academic communities I follow, mathematics and geology, have wholesale abandoned Twitter in the last several months for (mostly) Bluesky.

A friend of mine who has a PhD in Geology (not exactly a related field, but eh) and is interested in the Voyager program was telling me about this the other day. Basically, it's not that these measurements give us any new understanding of the universe _by themselves_; but, they may (and probably are) confirming theoretical models we have about interstellar space, providing more color and texture to other observations, and improving our understanding through increased richness of understanding. In other words, extremely useful but not in obvious "here's the smoking gun" ways.

Short answer: because chat is a shortcut to anthropomorphization in folks' brains. It's much easier to assign personality and intent to a chat than a floating head that needs to be 99.999% lifelike in order to not feel completely fake.

Y'know what? fair point. No handwashing? right to jail.

Were I not also raising a toddler, learning how to throw pottery, and writing a novel on top of my day job I would consider it :) the last two years have taught me though that touching grass is way more important than maintaining a tech blog.

Just the general vibe of insanity from Immortan Joe's army :) quoting parent comment

The silver spray paint in universe is basically preparing yourself to enter heaven (Valhalla) "all shiny and chrome", implying that being shiny and chrome is a higher state of being than being rusty and covered in dirt, which makes a hell of a lot of sense in universe. This particularly shows up in the difference between the leaders' cars (e.g. Immortan Joe) and the War Boys' cars. The War Boys are essentially on a death clock due to illness, so they act as suicide fighters. The Psychotic flash bang was really effective in communicating the cult of personality that Immortan Joe has cultivated. I really liked it because the world building was incredible IMO.

No pivot tables would have been a non starter on this project, and it _had_ to be python because of an edict from on high :)

I tried to do this in a previous job, it's _hard_. Our requirements were to use the math in a spreadsheet to calculate some results (basically actuaries created a set of formulae in the spreadsheet, we paste in the data and pull out the result). The best solution we found was to actually utilize LibreOffice and manipulate the spreadsheet using LibreOffice's Python API. There's no other solution that provides relatively complete implementations of Excel's functionality, and also updates cell values correctly taking into account complex formulae. And it was _painful_ and involved a very fiddly docker container image, a custom shell script with some LD_LIBRARY_PRELOAD magic, and some other hacks I don't even remember anymore.

I would bet that more than 0% of that perception, at least from developers, comes from how _fucking awful_ the Unity editor is. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. The games you can make with Unity are absolutely very impressive, but the tools Unity provides are just awful, and give a lot of newbie developers the perception that Unity is a hacked together pile of garbage (which...it is, but so are all game engines). Godot, Unreal, and GameMaker are, I would say, the main competitors to Unity in the Indie space, and all three of them have much higher quality editors than Unity's.

> I don't want to be asked 20 follow up questions to exactly specify the nature of the Orc

This is the tell that these folks don't know enough about game design to be opining so strongly on "the future of AI driven game development". Game development is almost exclusively about the 20 follow up questions. Any moron can say "I want minecraft but in space with guns", but making that and, more importantly, making it feel good, are where all the juice lies in games. The details are the most important part, which is why I think all these attempts to put AI into the game development flow are ill advised at best. Copilot is okay at helping out with game code, but less so than for normal e.g. REST API or UI code, because game code tends to follow rules that don't exist anywhere else and every game is architected completely differently. Games are just...different.

Document everything and pay with a credit card, particularly an American Express or high end Chase Visa or similar. They will want to know why you want the chargeback, but will nearly always side with you if you have clear evidence.

I intentionally don't do this. I leave a line of code half done, a sentence half finished in a doc, etc. The idea is that when I sit down the next day I can sit down and accomplish one thing the moment I sit down. It's shockingly effective at getting me back into flow the next morning.

> - Why would college tuition decrease?

The only answer I can think of is strong and swift government regulation, and there's no appetite for that, so...I dunno man.

What value would this add to humanity?

Agreed. Internet to the whole world is a noble goal, but the internet provider in chief is, in my estimation, a ghoul. The gushing praise is a strange choice to be sure, considering how informative the rest of the site is.

I think you can replace "can be" with "are".

If Google, Apple or Meta feel like what you're saying is not in their interest for the public to hear it, you just... can't say it. Apple can remotely disable your iPhone. Google can remove you from search results. Meta can nuke your social media presence from orbit.

This is by no means an endorsement of the guy because he's a complete piece of shit, but the one thing Alex Jones got right during his temper tantrum when he got deplatformed is that getting deplatformed is not a thing that only happens to people you don't like; theoretically, and in fact quite regularly, large multinationals can simply decide that someone should cease to exist in the public sphere, and they can legally disappear people more effectively than the CIA. Today it's anti vax loonies and racist conspiracy theorists, tomorrow it's folks reporting on Apple's Foxconn factories in China or Meta's content moderation staff or Google's spying on people's private communications.

We live in a world where we've created the marketplace of ideas, which necessarily means that those who hold the marketplace have to give everyone a stall, almost regardless of how vile their ideas are. Not doing so is a great way for large corporations to silence their critics on a scale never before imagined. I'm not exaggerating when I say these three companies can erase you from existence. Losing your Google account, Apple ID, and Meta accounts all at once would be an excellent way to prevent a corporate dissident from accessing the info they need to keep these companies accountable. It's terrifying, and it's also a mundane kind of terrifying that requires what might seem like overly aggressive government regulation, but I really don't see another way forward.

And before someone comes in and says something to the effect of "well, isn't all of the above still true if you replace Google, Apple and Meta with $COUNTRY?" and of course the answer is yes, but at the very very least, countries are theoretically accountable to their citizens. Corporations are effectively accountable to no one, which is certainly worse.

A not-insignificant part of that deficit though was programs and tax cuts from the previous administration. I agree, our government probably shouldn't be allowed to spend money it doesn't have, but the obvious solution (higher taxes, especially on the wealthy) isn't politically palatable, so every president is locked into the same pattern: start a bunch of spending, but back-load the actual expenses so the next administration has to deal with it. The deficit has gone down over the last few years, which means that we're getting more revenue and saving some money, but because deficit is an easier number to digest than change-in-deficit, we keep whinging about it rather than changing anything. And then the next administration comes in and points fingers at the previous while continuing the cycle of overspending.

FWIW the current administration and Congress have done a historically slightly-above-average job of reducing the deficit, I won't call it good but it's at least not terrible. The current spending isn't the problem, it's stuff from a few years ago coming to bite us in the ass.

Only on your right hand side mirror :)