Yeah I feel the same way. The last No Kings event in my area seemed like people were treating it almost like a street festival or parade. There was no confrontation, but had there been, I think everyone would have immediately complied and gone home. “Hey guys, the police said we have to turn the music down” type energy.

“You’re seeing people out there with thousands of signs that all match, pre-bought, pre-put together. They are organized, and someone is funding it.”

As always they make accusations to mask the truth of the accusation on their own side. The No Kings people aren’t the ones with giant professionally printed custom flags and actual corporations creating the merch they wear to their events. Crazy

Journeyman Troll perhaps

Young Adult Dystopian literature, imo, is really under-respected. It captures realities of politics and power in a way that is understandable and relatable to even people with only partially developed minds, and simultaneously it depicts those realities in a way that is often more accurate to reality than the more subtle “adult” approaches. Reality ain’t always subtle or complicated. In fact, it’s often such a repetitive tune that anyone who really cares to listen to the music is driven nuts by it and wishes it would play a different melody for once. Novelty is a lot more necessary to make entertaining media, but reality has no obligation to be entertaining. Ultimately, I think YA fiction is often great “by accident”. In being a product for developing minds who are only hearing the endless hymn of humanity now for the first time in their life, it is able to be entertaining without requiring creativity on behalf of the producers - in the same way that gimmicky toys that sold well 50 (or even 500) years ago can still sell well today: there’s a child born every minute who hasn’t seen the gimmick yet and isn’t old enough to be tired of it. But in the case of YA fiction, the exploitation of this dynamic actually frees authors from the constraint of catering to so-called refined tastes that demand things like subtlety, nuance, creativity, unwillingness to rehash the same old ideas, and so so on. These tastes are really just demands for more stimulating entertainment. As a result, YA lit may not be very entertaining to the perceptive adult reader, but by shedding this need for “lowly” entertainment it can ironically begin to function more like “true art”, or at least one flavor of true art: holding up an undistorted mirror to the world regardless of whether you find the reflection entertaining to look at.

Not sure. Google patched it by just limiting the amount of blurs an app could request: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/native/+/20465375a1d0cb71cdb891235a9f8a3fba31dbf6

Yeah, far be it from me to rush to the defense of religion, but this is not quite as scary as it sounds. You could very well have a religious person answering this survey who absolutely hates Trump and thinks he is a force for evil. Like you said, most Christians believe literally every event is part of God’s plan (which is quite reasonable given their axioms tbh).

In fact the article clarifies this:

"That survey, of a nationally representative sample of 8,937 Americans from across the U.S., found that overall, 4 percent believed God chose Trump because He believes in his policies, while another 32 percent think Trump’s election is part of God’s plan, although God may not necessarily agree with his program. Nearly half, 49 percent, said God doesn’t get involved in elections, while 14 percent said they don’t believe in God.

When it comes to white evangelicals, those numbers are much higher, with 8 percent believing God ordained Trump because He agrees with his policies, and 63 percent thinking his election is part of God’s plan, whether the deity agrees with his policies or not. Their beliefs held firm with regards to Joe Biden’s election in 2020 with 67 percent of white evangelicals believing his victory was part of God’s plan – but with the stark difference that a negligible percentage believed that God agreed with his policies."

Did the “resistance” in question take the form of saying “nooo don’t”? If the governor of the state doesn’t want them there, they have their own national guard to facilitate that.

“This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”

Yeah! Speak up so that…so that…hmm. Maybe so that people with more power and authority than themselves individually deploy their power and authority on behalf of the people? Like some sort of… representative… Intriguing concept

Is it really being a pedant, or is it just being precise?

"Our end-to-end attacks simply measure the rendering time per frame of the graphical operations… to determine whether the pixel was white or non-white.”

This is a prime example of something that is so simple, yet elegant, and brilliant. Fantastically cool and scary.

I feel like naming generations has done some harm. This isn’t like, a “Gen z” thing, it’s a young people thing, it’s a “people who are the future of humanity” problem. The future of humanity is one in which people cannot psychologically handle the life they’re expected to/forced to lead. That is a lot more serious. It’s not like, just some cultural issue with Gen Z like the debate about ankle socks

Depending on the social media in question, I’m not sure there’s much difference! I may be misinformed about the state of Tiktok and Instagram though, as I don’t use them myself. It’s just my observations from seeing others on them

This is definitely not true. Gooning usually means like multiple continuous hours of masturbation, usually with the purpose of entering some kind of zoned-out trance state. I think it is somewhat niche, as I’m pretty sure most people just masturbate for 5-15 minutes, just looking at porn but not by any means “entranced” by it. The term gooning has gotten so popular because the activity itself has gotten more popular. Personally I attribute it to people’s strong need to dissociate from the world in a way that isn’t expensive, and that isn’t so harmful that you can’t do it really frequently. It used to be that drugs would fill that void for the populace, but now people need more drugs to cope than they used to, and they can’t afford it anyways. Plus drugs fuck with your ability to stay employed, etc.

Another major contributor to it, imo, is the deluge of horny-bait content on Tiktok and Instagram. Even things that aren’t trying to market an onlyfans still are gonna feature people doing forced cleavage jiggles and whatnot. Sex sells, there’s nothing new there, but nowadays it’s almost like you NEED sex to sell. Basically anybody who is into vtubers or modern anime is an example of someone that just can’t really engage with something unless there’s constantly some ass or titties on screen, or some kind of horny undertone or subtext at the very least.

Ultimately I think gooning is a better form of “indulgence” and dissociation than the alternatives, but its popularity is a sad sign of the times. All humans like to turn their brain off once in awhile, but if a large subset of the population is basically crying out to have their brain off every day for hours at a time, and for it to be in every form of media and relaxation, I can only see that as a sad situation.

For sure, I’m not saying Trump actually debates anyone. It’s just that his specific way of being obnoxious and combative is so much more effective at goading people into engaging with him.

This is a good example of why I don’t think Vance will be able to supplant Trump. Trump is a master troll, he does a way better job of baiting people to keep engaging with him. You have to be the right kind of frustrating. Vance is just irksome, but not in a way that baits you or makes you wish you could try your hand at debating with him. Trump manages to make it so enticing to keep talking to him. He makes it feel like you might be able to get a good own in on him if you just try. But Vance is such a tryhard and just reads as this annoying little fly that you can just swat away

How does this even matter if phone manufacturers block apps that aren’t approved by them? Forgive my ignorance, never done much mobile dev stuff

I think the most comforting way to take it is that when someone thinks “i could throw this drink and kill that guy” it’s more of their mind being vigilant about dangerous opportunities, and not necessarily an endorsement of those possibilities. Kind of like how if you’ve ever picked up a really sharp kitchen knife you might think “it would be so easy to kill myself with this”, that’s not necessarily a “suicidal thought” but just the mind raising an alarm about a possibility + it’s actually out of concern for not dying that my brain raises the thought. So arguably this thought crossing people’s mind is actually out of an abundance of concern for safety. The morbid joking about it is probably after the fact, non-intuitive, and for almost all humans totally not thought in earnest.

I’ve normally never shied away from dark humor or a fucked up joke but something about the innocence of that man just going about his day really makes me hate even joking about it. I’m not hating on you for posting this, but this just really hits a bad note for me. Downvoted, no hard feelings

It feels like if you just build an elaborate enough Rube Goldberg machine for killing someone it suddenly isn’t considered murder anymore.

I mean, while it’s true that IQ tests aren’t a great measure of intelligence, it’s not like all humans are equally intelligent. We all know some people who are clearly smart and some people who are clearly dumb. And I think it’s completely expected that being smarter gives you some advantage at getting money. I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that being smart is generally advantageous in life. This chart seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me…there is a slight correlation, moreso on the low end (how can severely mentally retarded people do most jobs or even have incomes?), and less so on the high end. It makes a mistake in talking about income rather than net worth, which is really the more pertinent thing in “being rich”. I bet we would see a much lower correlation there, because you can be born into having a high net worth. But the correlation isn’t too high, because, as everyone reasonable already suspected, being rich is almost entirely about being lucky. I don’t think this chart really has any import to the many social discussions about meritocracy or wealth or intelligence, except for maybe to disprove someone who believes that we live in a fair world where “if you’re smart and work hard you can make it”. But even then, that would rely on a misunderstanding of what the chart tells us.

Basically, I’m not sure what you’re getting at with this.

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I’d rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don’t want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I’m not going to take that into consideration, because that’s not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I’d rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let’s be honest, especially developers) won’t want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that’s reasonable or not, it’s hard to deny. It’s certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.