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Posts
15
Comments
570
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • IMO, the U.S. will become similar to Russia. It's not some sudden societal collapse scenario; just an oligarchy with high levels of corruption and incompetence. Most people will conform or keep their heads down to avoid the consequences of stepping out of line. If you're in a possibly targeted group, you may want a valid passport though. And it's always been a good idea to keep at least a months worth of non-perishable food on hand in case of supply chain disruptions. Possibly stuff like emergency propane heaters and a propane tank could be useful too (they've been useful for me in the past already without an authoritarian government or social unrest). Knowing your neighbors and helping eachother out in little ways is probably the most powerful thing though.

  • He's probably talking about the media capitalulating to the Trump campaign by agreeing not to fact check during the Vance/Walz debate. And most recently, the WSJ blocking the Harris endorsement. I.e. a lot of the very rich and powerful people seem to be acting like an authoritarian Trump administration is inevitable, and they're trying to avoid his wrath or position themselves to be favored oligarchs.

  • Well, yeah, the spectrum certainly exists, but almost all of us fall hard to one side or the other.

    I've heard it described as a bimodal distribution. Bisexuality seems pretty common though. Statistics say it's more common for women to identify as bisexual than lesbian. The majority of women I've dated have been bisexual, but with a preference for men. Most non-straight men I've known have been fully homosexual. Personally, I'm straight. I've always had a hard time trying to figure out what a conventionally attractive man was (mostly to make myself more attractive), and still sometimes get surprised when someone describes a particular man as attractive. I find most women physically attractive, at least in certain ways (though I have certain preferences, of course). Personality seems to be what makes or breaks the attraction for me.

  • I use LLMs for multiple things, and it's useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you're trying to find or learn about something, but don't know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don't exist). It works OK for things like "translation" tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don't use it anymore. I've had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.

  • Ideally, the Democrats would be unabashedly pro-immigration and advocate for solving the "problem" by making it much easier to immigrate legally and getting those currently undocumented, documented. This would make immigrants harder to exploit, address fears of immigrants under-cutting wages, and paying more taxes and social security. That addresses all the somewhat legitimate worries I can think of; the rest of the "problems" I can think of are just rooted in racism and lies. Immigration has been and is a net-positive for the U.S., and a pro-immigration stance should be an easy argument to sell to voters that's also backed up by many studies and data; including conservative think-tanks like Cato. Pro-immigration sentiments were very popular in the U.S. until this recent bout of anti-immigration propaganda. Even now, Americans hold contradictory opinions, like being pro-mass-deportation while being in favor of expanding pathways to citizenship: https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/polling-around-mass-deportation-far-more-complicated-right-wing-media-let

  • Also from the article (which I agree with):

    To be sure, Democrats are wary of getting stuck talking about an issue where Trump always polls better than Harris. Backlash to a Democratic president and a surge of migrants at the Mexican border have helped make Americans suspicious of immigration at levels not seen since 2001. As Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma explained to Mary Harris on Wednesday’s What Next, the share of Americans who think immigration should decrease has risen from 28 percent in 2020 to 55 percent today. And some polls have found that a majority of Americans support mass deportations.

    But results like that are an indictment, not a vindication, of Democrats’ reluctance to talk about immigration. Mass deportation would separate 4.4 million U.S. citizen children from their parents. It would require the largest police action in American history, wipe out millions of jobs, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and destabilize the economy. Industries from milk to housing construction would be damaged for years. Los Angeles and Houston would see their populations fall by 10 percent; Florida would lose 1 in 20 residents. A million mortgages could be at risk.

    I.e. Democrat's position is unpopular because they offer little-to-no pushback to anti-immigration arguments. In fact, Harris, Biden, and many Democrat politicians, seem to be embracing the anti-immigration narrative. In a sense, they are complicit in aiding fascism, IMO.

  • GPL'd clients. Everything is encrypted/decrypted on the client before sending/receiving to/from the server. I may later switch to a self-hosted solution, but don't want to set one up right now (was using BitWarden's cloud before).

  • Yeah, I used to occasionally use tianeptine to self-medicate on days when I was really depressed (hard to get out of bed depressed). Worked well for that, because regular anti-depressants take about a month to start really working, and tianeptine took about 30 minutes, IIRC. I never found tianeptive very "enjoyable" or intoxicating though. I used to use MXE for a similar purpose; and also recreationally sometimes.

  • For some of the ultra-wealthy (Theil, Altman, Andreessen, Eric Schmidt, OpenAI board, etc), a type of accelerationism seems to be in-vogue (e/acc publicly, and probably accelerationist thoughts like The Dark Enlightenment privately). I think some ultra-wealthy are just trying to hedge their bets (Zuckerberg, and news corporations come to mind), because if Trump does win he'll definitely try to use his power to harm companies he doesn't like. I think others, such as Musk, want to be Russian-style oligarchs. I guess all this is kinda related; accelerate into some sort of collapse or chaos, use their positions to maneuver into greater power and become oligarchs or create corporate-city-states, or whatever stupid shit they believe in.

    I think finance workers are about as split between the parties as the rest of the population; probably more socially liberal. Small bussiness owners are some of the most ignorant and authoritarian people I've encountered.