I’m in multiple ways part of minorities, but luckily invisibly so, so I perfectly understand what you are saying with being “white” helping.

This year I started to learn some self defense, together with my wife. My gut feeling says we need to toughen up for whatever times are coming up, because in any case they won’t be good, that is for sure. I must say, no idea how much it would help in practice, and I hope to never find out, but it at least does help psychologically.

Having to watch all this insanity unfold on one hand slow motion (compared to movies) and also on ultra high speed (objectively / historically) and seeing where this is going without any ability to stop it leaves one feeling pretty helpless. Enact change… But how? Ultimately even hundreds of thousands protesters do not change a thing. We saw the same thing with climate change. Everybody knows what’s going on, nobody is really doing anything. Sadly, not only for such abstract threats but also very concrete and personified evils.

I think all we can do is try staying calm (but prepared) and remain decent human beings. I hope when the time comes I will have the courage and trust to help people who need and deserve it. Decent people helping each other could at some point be the only thing that remains, when all institutions have crumbed or gone rogue, and it’s crucial. Little actions by regular people can mean life or death. We cannot stop the storm, but we gotta try what we can in whatever sphere of personal influence we have. That’s all we can do and the best we can hope for. Everybody with a mind and heart keeping going and trying to do the right thing.

I wish you the best of luck to get through all this. Stay safe, stay sane.

Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it’s really … Just not very healthy behavior.

Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much a means in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.

If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?

So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.

Good one. I am the frame of reference myself… And we rewind time around me, kind of.

Okay, that at least does not sound so wrong like the “teleportation-style” approach!

What you say is like the extreme form of how time travel worked in Primer (the movie), which in fact is an interesting variation.

My condolences from Europe. Most likely we will follow into the abyss like lemmings as usual, with a few years delay. US was always setting the trends for Europe, and I already worry about what happens in the old world pretty soonish as well.

German chancellor announced his crew. Blackrock and the gang. They will already start to strip social systems down, and the openly fascist party will use the growing discontent to seize power next time. Then fascists and oligarchs will finally kiss and unite, like in the US.

The whole “Western world” has this Virus right now, there is literally no escape. Because rest of the world has it even worse.

What a disappointing timeline to live in.

That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.

Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I’ve had my nihilistic phase in my 20’s. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the “arbitrariness” of ethics.

Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.

I’m thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.

I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.

Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.

Gotta find the gems in the dirt.

I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.

It’s the saddest part. He always said exactly what he was going to do. And Thiels plans were also known for years, in the open in obscure edgelord blogs. They all never made a secret out of their plans.

I wonder what else from the “crazy stuff he says” he will actually do at some point, like the famous “shooting some random person on the street” without consequences or something. Maybe in 2028.

I like https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

Is ReVanced having any features I’m missing out on with NewPipe? (Serious question, never bothered trying ReVanced)

This is the way.

In some areas of theory, all the cool stuff happens on https://arxiv.org/ months before they end up being officially published and “paywalled”.

And in my area (theoretical computer science) we mostly publish short versions in conferences and put the full versions with proofs on arxiv. Of course everyone is downloading and using the latter. The rest is just for the “metrics”.

Absolutely. In these times it is probably the only way to survive and stay sane. Being terminally online and informed is just leading to overdose of the shittiness of like everything. Create a soft bubble of bliss and steer away from noise and trouble. Before, I always thought that escapism is despicable but it feels increasingly like I’m not strong enough mentally to look in the face of reality for prolonged times these days. It’s like staring into the sun, it burns you.

This. Once you understand enough about the universe how all coordinates are relative and everything is moving relative to everything else… Like, how the fuck is time travel supposed to work it it was anywhere like this naive movie idea of it? Time travel Hollywood style is literally not a continuous operation and as such absolutely unphysical.

“Turning culture into an expensive amusement park” - made me think of Mark Fishers Capitalist Realism essay. He articulated well how capitalism absorbs everything and sells it back to us as a monetizable commodity, only that its version is a replica, it has no soul, only a form. What remains is an aesthetics, looking close enough to the real thing for a person who has actually no idea. Even “counter-culture” is absorbed and emptied of all content to become just another flavor of the “mainstream”.

AI is the perfect tool for capitalism, because it works in a similar way. A kind philosophical zombie, a parrot that can replicate the buzzwords and mannerisms, one that wants to convince the customers they get a certain value or quality, without truly having it. It’s just as real, meaningful and authentic as green- and rainbow- washed marketing campaigns of huge corporations.

In the previous phase, capitalism absorbed our cultures and values and made a corrupted version into a part of itself, and now it tries to absorb the human soul and thought, to sell it back to us as a service.

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite. The problem are those who currently control this power, and what they do with it.

Haha nice bait, which I took to get some actually interesting statistics, well executed !

Here is your comment, you deserve it. Now your post made it to “average”! You’re welcome.

(Was there any correlation between upvote count and the comment-based metrics? That could also be pretty interesting)

A beautiful answer, our trajectory was pretty similar, only that we were together and building it for over 10 years before we finally got married last year :)

My wife is my home, my constant, my safe harbor, the anchor of my sanity and peace of mind.

Two planets orbiting each other - I could not have said it better. We’re a unit that is greater than its sum and we grew and continue to grow together as individuals and into each other.

Tochter aus Elyyyysium

Yeah it’s an artificial dichotomy based on a popular misconception of what std::endl is and how \n is interpreted.

Ultimately it does not ask about line endings, but about flushing, which is a completely orthogonal question.

Haha absolutely, I’m also one of the people who always said all this rainbow and green washing is bullshit. As if they ever cared for anything.

Capitalism has no values, except for one: shareholder value. Yesterday they help sending people to concentration camps, today they help saving the world and increasing diversity, yeah, totally convincing.

There is one thing to rely on with capitalism - if you convince people you can make good money with it or it is good for the brand, they will jump onto it and squeeze the shit out of it. An abstract, amoral force, made from a large number of concrete shitty people.

Software developer here.

I only recently switched from vim to VSCode and I refuse to use any editor without vim emulation.

Regular expressions for quick and efficient and precise search and replace, modal editing which allows me to type di" to ‘delete inside current double quotes’ (needs vim-surround plugin), typing 123gg to go to line 123, press % to switch between any pair of marching braces, brackets or parentheses, and all sorts of such efficient goodies.

It’s not only efficient, vi has a whole concept, a philosophy how you can build quick editing commands. It’s not like remembering random shortcuts like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V. Once you understand the language, it becomes second nature and you can translate something you want to do into 5 key strokes which would need 100 otherwise or would involve the mouse and clicking and selecting etc.

I’m not even that good at vim, I’m just using the surface features.

It has very good reasons why every notable editor provides some form of vi editing emulation.

Yes, exactly. To make America great again, Americans first have to take their country back from the oligarchs that are destroying it and sucking it dry. Noone else can or will do it for them.

Nice! I’d love to use Rust at work, I was a Haskell guy for hobby things, rather recently switched to Rust for that, and I enjoy it a lot. Taking 80% of the good lessons from functional programming while staying performant and practical and just have nice tooling - whoever designed Rust are wise people who know what is important for happy developers.

My job is mainly C++, and if you have seen the bright side of life, it is difficult not to be frustrated by the language and tooling. I think C++ without clang-tidy is almost as horrible as Python without types and linters. Undefined behavior and foot guns everywhere!