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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The police have gotten very effective at quashing effective movements, and we’ve had decades of concerted effort to make it more difficult to organize and to get people to actually oppose the concept of effective resistance in their own favor.
    People with power don’t want people threatening to destabilize that power. People who set media narratives need access to people with power, and so they don’t want to convey those destabilizing factors positively.
    This makes people view them negatively, if they even see them at all.

    America has never had a culling of the rich and powerful. The closest we got was when we decided to exchange a rich and powerful person far away for a few closer to home.
    As such, there’s no weight given to the morale of anyone who isn’t rich and powerful.
    Reporters, politicians and businesses people have never had to put their heads in the scale when making choices.


  • This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

    There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

    It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

    A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

    Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

    From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

    If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.



  • Multiple people is significantly more force than even a knife.

    Proportional force means the force must be proportional to the threat, not to the force the other person is using. If someone threatens death with their hands, you can use deadly force to defend against a deadly threat.

    One would be reasonable in concluding that masked people trying to force you or someone else into a van is an imminent threat of death, great bodily harm or sexual assault.

    You can’t use deadly force to defend against harassment, or theft because that’s disproportionate.


  • unlike Democrat and Republican voters have morals and will not tolerate genocide no matter how hard they fearmonger.

    And yet their principled opposition not only did nothing, it’s very clearly made things worse for basically everyone. The genocide didn’t stop, but now there’s not even token opposition. Iran is being bombed. Civil rights are being rolled back across the country, food aid is being taken from millions, and it’s just starting.

    The Democrats were never “doing genocide”, just like the Republicans aren’t now. The Democrats weren’t saying they would do enough to stop someone else from doing it, and the Republicans were saying they would encourage them to do it harder.

    Red MAGA … Blue MAGA…Democratic party is a bigger cult than Republicans

    Congratulations on being an unwitting mouthpiece for the RNC. "Maga is just a rude word to call someone! It’s not literally what we have on our hats!” "staunch opposition to fascism is closed minded and just as prejudicial as wanting to eliminate trans people!”

    I hope your movement does stop Trump and cause effective change and reform. I’m not holding my breath, because I don’t think they were counting on your votes in the first place and the next time they think about you will be when they want you to be mad at the Democrats again to keep you from voting for them.




  • So, I wasn’t referring to enjoyment. I spoke of engagement or interest. It’s why programming is more appealing than data entry.

    You’re just doubling down on the false dichotomy I spoke of. It’s not at all uncommon to find someone with plenty of experience who can easily and honestly tell you why they think what the company they work for does is interesting.

    Asking someone why they think working at the job they’re applying for is appealing isn’t “hiring for enthusiasm”, and it’s honestly odd that you keep casting it that way.
    I get where you’re coming from, and I partly disagree. It doesn’t seem like you’re parsing what I’m saying because of this “either one or the other” attitude though.
    No offense intended, but it makes you come across as burnt out and sad. I don’t work for small companies, with inexperienced people, and I’m not constantly shipping broken code that needs rewriting. I’ve been doing this for roughly 15 years and I can honestly say “working in security in general is interesting because it forces you to think about your solution from a different perspective, the attacker, and working at $AuthenticationVendorYouQuitePossiblyUse in specific is appealing because you get to work on problems that are actually new at a scale where you can see it have an impact”.
    That’s not gushing with enthusiasm: it’s why I’m not bored everyday. If you’re actually just showing up to work everyday and indifferently waiting to be told what to do because it’s all just the same old slog… That’s sad, and I’m sorry.


  • I’m lucky that after all these years still get those moments of great enjoyment when at the end of doing something insanelly complex it all works

    I just think it’s worth pointing out that that is an example of the work being engaging.

    No one is so naive as to think that you work a job for anything other than money. The original post doesn’t even seem to convey that it’s bad to ask about the pay and benefits. It’s saying that if, when directly asked, the candidate has no answer to what seems interesting about the job they might not be a good fit.

    You seem to be an experienced software developer. You’re easily qualified to do basic manual data entry. Same working environment, same basic activity. Would you be interested in changing roles to do data entry for $1 more salary?
    I’m also a software developer, and I can entirely honestly say I would not, even though it would be less responsibility and significantly easier work.
    Even the boring parts of my work are vaguely interesting and require some mental engagement.

    It seems there’s this false dichotomy that either you’re a cold mercenary working 9 to 5 and refusing to acknowledge your coworkers during your entitled lunch break, or you’re a starry eyed child working for candy and corporate swag. You can ask for fair money, do only the work you’re paid for, have a cordial relationship with coworkers, and also find your work some manner of engaging.

    It’s not unreasonable for an employer to ask how you feel about the work, just like it’s not unreasonable for a candidate to ask about the details of the work.


  • Sure. I wouldn’t disqualify someone for being ambivalent towards what we’re working on, but the person who seems interested is gonna be better to work with.

    Likewise when looking for a place to work, if the tangibles are equivalent I’ll prefer the place with better intangibles.

    I’m not in HR or management, so I don’t care about cost effectiveness or productivity beyond “not screwing me over”. From that perspective, it’s generally nicer to work with someone who finds it interesting than with someone who doesn’t.

    There’s no point asking “why do you want to work here”, because the answer is obviously a combination of money and benefits, and how food and healthcare keeps you from being dead.
    I can’t fault an interviewer who’s clearly trying not to ask the obvious question and instead actually ask how the candidate feels about the work instead of disqualifying them for not volunteering the right answer.

    It’s not unreasonable for an employer to ask a candidate how they feel about the work anymore than it’s unreasonable for the candidate to ask about the working environment.


  • I actually kinda agree with both here.

    It sucks working with someone who is utterly disinterested in the work, if it’s anything above rote work.
    Asking the candidate what they found interesting about it is at least a basically fine idea. If they can’t answer when you ask, that actually is kinda concerning.
    Big difference between asking and expecting them to volunteer the information.

    At the same time, if the people interviewing you can’t even pretend to show basic conversational courtesy by asking some basic “what do you do for fun” style questions or anything that shows they’re gonna be interested in the person they’re looking to work with, that’s a major concern.


  • Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

    There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
    An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
    So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

    I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.


  • For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

    It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

    Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
    You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
    This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
    Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.



  • exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1

    I specified countable to keep them in the same class of infinity. :) not about to make that mistake when bringing pedantry to a silly fight. .

    Since it’s implied that they have names, I’m going to use that as my argument for there being a countably infinite number. If you want to argue that only certain special angels have names, like Michael or π, then I’d say they’re uncountable.
    If you wanted to argue that omnipotence means a deity could defy logical restrictions and allow contradictory truths to coexist, then I’d say I’m far too sleepy for that discussion but I love where you’re heads at. :P