mozz

Low level programming C

Could be pretty much any computer

rust

Need a lot of memory (8-16 GB) if you are planning on dissecting any existing projects

Machine Learning programming with Python

Start with colab / huggingface and get a feel for what level of hardware you need for the stuff you’re doing before you start buying stuff

If you want just a general high quality system with upgradability etc, frame.work or System76 are supposed to be good high end providers.

I sorta agree with a lot of what you're saying; not completely but I think you might have misconstrued some of what I was getting at here.

The US State Dept does a lot of good work

Agreed

There has been no "imperial" ambitions under the Biden administration; quite the opposite, really in countering imperial ambitions of Putin, while also coming down harder on Israel than quite literally any past Presidential administration in history

Agreed

Because the election is 62 days away. Withdrawing aid from Israel will immediately by framed by right-wing media, Republican opposition, AIPAC, Russian and Israeli troll farms as being "Antisemitic."

Agreed

I'm not going to subscribe to this notion that they're some inherently evil entity

I didn't say they were evil. I said they're not your friend; I think it's weird for them to be showing up with a guitar like we're gonna hang out.

Put it this way: If one of my neighbors regularly made phone calls ordering people to be killed, I wouldn't hang out with them. Like if they showed up to a party with a guitar, I wouldn't be able to get it out of my head that they might wake up the next morning and decide that a bunch of Houthis need to die, and then make it happen in the course of their working day. That's weird.

I mean it is fine. You're not wrong. And I have the luxury of sitting here in my safe little bubble protected by these wide luxury oceans with dudes staying up all night watching the satellites, making sure nothing geopolitically bad happens to anything American anywhere in the world. I definitely think that the US empire is by far the most benevolent of the big empires available in the world today. That's a pretty fuckin low bar, but sure, I accept it. I mean I'm sitting safe and happy inside it and not trying to put a stop to it or anything so I might as well.

But at the same time, there's people waking up in hell on earth right now. Like coming awake not eating for two days, hungry with their kids crying, some of their kids just gone killed by the shelling, no food, no toilets, just a big dusty hellscape with more death and misery and emptiness all around them. I get it that at this point we gotta just let that happen, I guess? It just doesn't seem like too much of a fuckin priority to make it stop. We're sort of trying, but not on the same level as if it was happening in Philly or Austin or something (or in Tel Aviv.)

I definitely won't disagree with you about what Trump will do or the electoral calculus of supporting Israel. I'm just saying, you can't be helping make that happen (or whatever other "lesser evil" atrocity, including the intermittency of our support for Ukraine and our weird little pussyfooting rules about how they're allowed to fight back) and then be friends and show up with a guitar like it's all cool. Yeah, I'm glad we have professionals keeping things under control. It is fine. But it would take a lot more humanity from the State Dept before I would really like something like this.

Look, I love this country. Part of why I love it is that streak of anti-authoritarianism that keeps the empire stuff in check, which leads to a lot of the good behavior you're talking about, and also a lot of the rock and roll we make. I'm just saying... play some other fuckin' song. "Rockin' in the Free World" is a song of desperation inside the inhuman system that is America. It's the homeless guy who knows it's getting colder with winter coming on and still doesn't have a place to go. It's trying to keep hope alive even when you've given up on anything you can see or interact with to ever be deserving of hopefulness. You can't be part of the system and play it unless you are actively fuckin fixing things (I'm not saying Blinken is not, you have a point about that part, but... Gaza.)

If you're in Ukraine, and you want to play a kind of dark Neil Young song you can still rock out to, play "Powderfinger" about the kid who's too young to be using a rifle but has to pick one up, all scared, because someone's coming for his family. Or just play RHCP and blow off some steam. You can bring some America stuff and everyone can have a good time. I just feel like maybe he's playing it thinking like "fuck yeah rock and roll" and I don't know whether it's occurred to him that a lot of the dark horrors that the song talks about are still going on, and for some people in the world he's the central symbol of the system that's exporting them to other countries so they can experience them too.

at least he's got the balls to go to Kyiv in the first place unlike his predecessors

Yeah. This part, I like. We need more of this.

Edit: I got curious and I watched this. JESUS CHRIST MAKE IT STOP. As with many things, George Carlin said it far more succinctly than I could.

I gotta say

Fuck imperialism; the US State Dept is not your friend and they’re not supposed to be
The idea of the US Secretary of State playing guitar in a nightclub in Kyiv while supporting them in a war against imperialism is actually kind of incongruously good, gives me some kind of hope WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SENDING WEAPONS TO ISRAEL STILL
From the short clip, that sounds like one of the least hip performances of an inherently pretty good song I have ever heard 😢
For the uninitiated

Stop calling it “the fediverse”

It's a well trodden path at this point

GOP: I'm gonna do WHATEVER I want whenever I want up to and including KILL YOU AND FUCKIN CIVIL WAR if you try to stop me

Also GOP: Whoa whoa whoa, where's my entitlement thing you were supposed to give me, this isn't fair! More pls. Give more. I need it and you're supposed to give it to me.

It's like living with a teenager in the house who also for some reason has a handgun.

Honestly this meme is way understating the sinisterness

Election interference for money machine
Whole internet is ads company
Dopamine addiction for all children
Superpowers for law enforcement

This has been 100% my experience with my Brother printer

Don’t fuck with the paws

Hey, neat! It's a couple of talking points.

When people hold up dollar amounts like Biden is doing a lot, that number is inflated by fraudulent interest

"They are lying to you about numbers, don't pay attention to the numbers! Just in general; no numbers. Pay attention to my vague, inflated, ever-shifting claims, instead."

Biden is just paying with our tax money.

"This politician is spending our money!" (mostly this one is emotional impact -- it is true that practically everything the government does is spending people's tax dollars, but suggesting that some specific thing is them spending your money is alarming to people on a survival level and triggers this kind of hatred for the situation overall)

But he's literally doing the bare minimum

"Okay, he is making progress, but it doesn't count!"

drastically overpaying meaning for the same dollar amount, more people should be getting loan forgiveness.

Literally no idea what you are talking about here. I think you messed up by making it too specific, so it's factually untrue -- you gotta keep it within the realm of technically true but wildly misleading things ("paying with our tax money").

Are you suggesting that when Biden forgives $10k of student loan debt, the borrower is receiving less than $10k worth of forgiveness? How would that even work? I think you got too excited at the keyboard and let your typing-froth get too close to factual reality and kind of exposed the fact that it's all made up bad faith bullshit.

It sounds great if you only read headlines tho...

"I'm the well informed one! If you disagree with me you are foolish / naive / victim of propaganda / etc!"

Making excuses for Biden always just ends up arguing against moderate politicians like Biden. It's their fault we're in this shitty situation to begin with

Bringing factual reality = "making excuses for Biden"

General bad faith bitterness and blaming. It's actually pretty remarkable how effective this is at turning "Biden tried to forgive $500B in student loans and has been fighting against efforts to stop him and still has succeeded in forgiving $167B and is still trying to do more" into "it's his fault student loans even exist in the first place! Fuck him for pretending to care with his massive student loan forgiveness program positively impacting millions of people!"

Overall I rate this like a 4/10. You hit a bunch of general points that can produce an emotional impact and could literally be applied to anything, and you hit honestly a pretty good rhythm of nonstop firehosing claims wrapped up in a way that they could produce an impact. You got too factual, though; even one claim that is objective and testable and 100% false (the thing about "drastically overpaying" which doesn't even make sense as applied to student loan forgiveness), can sort of snap people back into the realization that you're just jabbering anything you can come up with to attack Biden with no connection to reality.

Almost all nuclear weapons require quite a bit of expertise to maintain over time. If they got sold off 30 years ago, chances are 99% that they’re mostly good for lighting off as a dirty bomb and not much else at this point.

Dude, you're making yourself more important than you actually are. No one cares about you.

Seriously. The West keeps legit forgetting the whole thing is even going on, and then waking up and sending $50 billion and then getting distracted again.

The bravery of the Ukrainians and the 20:1 outmatchedness of the Russians in total industrial/technological capacity are responsible for the failure of the invasion. Not any kind of urgent priority or strong level of care on the Western side in any location west of Poland.

Everyone wants to belong

Everyone wants allies, close friends, brothers and sisters they can rely on and love and support

In the modern world we have pale imitations and crap. There is no village, there is only a dim landscape through which we shuffle, largely alone.

And so there is craving for some substitute, because the under structure is unfulfilled

I mean, it’s clearly doing something which is impressive and useful. It’s just that the thing that it’s doing is not intelligence, and dressing it up convincingly imitate intelligence may not have been good for anyone involved in the whole operation.

BOB: Well, when you have TIME magazine do a cover story on Palestinian rights you see that the perception of the problem is changing.

Any fuckin day now

Filled with self advocacy, more like

Shelter cats have limited avenues for expressing their disagreements, and it sounds like he's being as measured and puncture-free in voicing his opinion as he feels like he needs to be

It is registered as a bot and shows for me as a bot. I prefer to keep it around and heckle it as opposed to “out of sight out of mind.”

The interfaces are relatively modern too, with VGA and a PS/2 keyboard.

The other politician: Everyone is mean to me and calls me weird. They're STUPID. Not like my really good friend who just gave me money. The best friend. Amazing friend. I'm putting them in a position of power.

Also I want literally the opposite of everything good on literally every single policy available

(Except maybe abortion; I’ve got some experience with that one and let me tell you it’s a life saver. I won’t stop my allies from making it illegal, nothing like that, but personally I can definitely say I’m a fan.)