The US may affect the whole world less next year if everyone else works hard to find alternate markets, but it’s going to take longer than that for the rest of the world to totally detangle themselves from our mess.

What if they’re more important than ever before in American history?

Don’t use bar keepers friend to clean them. That fucked up ours.

The easiest offsite backup would be any cloud platform. Downside is that you aren’t gonna own your own data like if you deployed your own system.

Next option is an external SSD that you leave at your work desk and take home once a week or so to update.

The most robust solution would be to find a friend or relative willing to let you set up a server in their house. Might need to cover part of their electric bill if your machine is hungry.

“Banned” and “burned” books go hard as hell

Every library I’ve been to in the last 5 years has had a poster of “banned books” specifically to advertise them because people (especially teenagers) love that shit.

A coworker was telling me all about how “once you own a truck, you realize all the things you can do with a truck that you couldn’t before”

And like, he’s not wrong but all the things he listed were my non-urgent to-do list that I keep written down and when it has 3-4 items I rent a truck from Uhaul for the day. I spend about $20 while they’re spending thousands on their monthly payment, not to mention gas.

It’s fine. For legal reasons (particularly in the EU and California) they had to add a Terms of Use fit the browser, and the had to translate a bunch of broad, idealist, simple phrases into legalese so they wouldn’t get killed by those governments.

Ask an LLM to write code for you. Paste it into your IDE, try to run it. Describe the problems to your IDE and ask how to fix them. Lather rinse repeat.

Then you better believe it’s trying to fuck you.

I don’t think “mods per user” is that important of a metric. “Mods per daily/weekly/monthly post/comment” is a more useful gauge of a community’s activity.

They get non-voting representatives in congress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-voting_members_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives

It’s a context thing.

Ohio = a bad place to be. Honestly, as a non-Ohio Midwesterner, I say this should be allowed.

Chat = like addressing the twitch chat. “Chat, are we doomed?” It’s actually pretty interesting from a linguistics perspective because it’s arguably a fourth person pronoun. But in-class I can see it getting out of hand.

Per that last bit, I’m guessing they never had a lawyer present. Would make any of those fabricated statements null and void, if the constitution meant anything.

A relative of mine just had a baby, and her mom came from out-of country to meet her grandchild and help mom and dad in those first crazy weeks with a newborn.

But when she told CBP that she was “coming to help her daughter with the new baby” she got detailed and questioned for 2 hours. Eventually they let her through but they were really trying to pin her coming to work illegally on a tourism visa.

If you or a loved one are in a similar situation, just say you’re “visiting family”. Apparently it’s a legal gray area in this shithole to help your child take care of a newborn.

“Before won the primary” is a different reality from the one we live in. Even if you remove the superdelegates and only look at the ones decided by popular vote, Hillary won that primary.

I wanted president Bernie Sanders and voted as such. But I actually live in THIS reality and don’t waste my energy whatabouting if an election had gone differently.

I think that quote was from later in his life.

It’s a little too dramatized to call it a documentary, but it’s a fairly accurate retelling of an important American story. Better than half of the movies I ever watched in history class as a kid.

This is a movie that US citizens should watch. Not because it’s a good film (it is, though), but because it’s an important story in our (very recent) history.

AoE2 is one of a small number of video games I can entertain an argument about building an immense skill gulf between average and top tier players, like chess. But the size of that gulf is just incomparable.

There are approximately as many titled chess masters* as there are total monthly AoE2 players. And truly, the difference between a Candidate Master and a Grand Master is probably as big as the difference between a candidate master and an average player. Grand Masters are just so insanely skilled, they can pull some crazy flexes by forcing their opponents’ moves due to traps they set tens of moves ago.

I watched a GM streamer playing against his subs, with the rule “no matter how bad you’re losing, you can’t forfeit” so that he could show of these stunts. He was doing stuff like promoting every single pawn to a queen (which gets tricky because when you have 8 queens you have to try to not accidentally checkmate your opponent until you get the 9th). Taking only the pawns from his opponent, and then forcing all of the pieces back to their starting square before checkmate. Forcing an “underpromotion mate” (where you win by turning a pawn into a knight rather than a queen, pretty rare circumstance). Drawing basic pixel art with the pieces on the board at checkmate. And these weren’t all against noob players, some of them were quite skilled or even semi-pro, but to someone at the top tier of chess there is almost no difference between semi pro and beginner.

GMs are crazy good.

*All master titles combined, not just GM.

I wanna see Elon play a grandmaster and get absolutely memed on. The gulf between the average person and a top tier chess player is probably 10x greater than the gulf between the average person and a top tier gamer, in any video game. Chess just has such a large player base and literally centuries of tactical/strategic development, few games can even claim to have fostered the level of expertise required to be a top player.

Side note: chess skull is often correlated with intelligence. There might be something there, but at the top levels it’s really just about having played thousands and thousands of games and recognizing patterns between is how often you’ve played. Perhaps some genetal intelligence translates well to chess, but little chess skill translates to general intelligence.

To quote Paul Morphy, who was a worldwide chess champion at 21 years old but retired at 22: “The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”

Joke’s on me, I still have to use windows at work!