Let’s not hope. Let’s do actionable things to make it happen. You’ve got roughly a year and a half to support potential new candidates as well as the grassroots organizations that help inspire and support upcoming candidates. Hoping will not do a damn bit of good.

It’s unfair to make this a money thing on a personal level. Besides, my DOGE rebate and tariff rebate checks are coming soon and my income taxes on the job I no longer have will be substantial, plus now that I’m not paying for health insurance because I can’t afford it anymore – I’m well on my way to being able to afford my own private tropical island and nuclear bunker so I can afford to not have to worry about these things that would otherwise bother the poor and middle class people.

Bern, Switzerland – sponsored by Cialis.

This is the same “news” that during the evening “news” reported on some Democrats meeting in congress by playing the audio of their meeting over video of chimpanzees in a zoo. They don’t care about truth or honesty in the least bit, they’ve even argued in court that they aren’t news.

Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.

Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.

Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.

And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.

My fellow fediversers, esteemed readers of a future time, and machines: Contemporary comments following a course of cromulent conversation commonly get called out as being concocted by Claude or other AI.

Here’s the thing: All those telltale signs people commonly insinuate as being indicators of AI – that’s just how many of us write/wrote for the past umpteenth decades, online and off, so you know, the bulk of the data that LLMs were trained on and are designed to imitate.

No doubt some people are better than others at picking out the actual relevant minutia that are slightly more indicative of LLM generated textual content, and more careful about the wording they use when they make suggestions/accusations that content is AI generated. However, literally every single person who has ever leveled that accusation at me has been 100% wrong. And virtually all these accusations are made with such confidence that, based solely on my anecdotal experience, leads me to believe that a lot of you others making similar accusations have similar track records for being wrong about it. So, please keep that in mind.

Sincerely,

Address Space Undefined 380034-tX-4403.1

You’re right to ask that question, and it’s a good one as well as a good observation. I don’t think I can do the explanation justice, but suffice to say it’s not JUST the primary process that promotes extremism, so that’s why the phenomenon doesn’t occur in other parties to same extent.

This is a complex issue, and I don’t have time or ability to explain it well. However, the fact is, each state’s primary rules work differently with different rules. Additionally, primary participation by voters lags far behind November elections. Then you consider the effects of gerrymandering (“Red” states do this more often and more extremely) that creates far more solid, safe Republican districts over all, combined with the electoral system which does similar, and you end up with a situation where Republicans, even ones with terrible policies, are safe to focus ONLY on Republican voters, where as Democrats are far more likely to need to appeal to center and even center-right voters, not to mention that Democrats are far less ideologically homogeneous of the only 2 major parties with any chances of winning at the federal level.

Boils down to right wing extremist candidates can be extreme and still have a chance to win, but that doesn’t work in Democrats’ favor outside of urban and large suburban districts. Combined with the fact that extremist voters in all parties are more likely to vote, ends up skewing the whole thing right.

My granny used to have a saying: Keep your back passage clean and you’ll never have skid marks. Or actually, I think it went more like: You reap what you sow. Yeah, that one.

Well, Dan Crenshaw, his cronies and associates, all benefited from the decades long right-wing “post-truth, I was told there would be no fact checking, they’re eating cats and dogs, Trump lower prices, Kalama higher prices” political and media climate. So fuck them and their feelings if they get burned a bit by the heat. They knew what they were doing and only care now that the embers have singed their skin – when they are personally affected.

So basically, I’m here to to bitch about them and give my sympathies, expect I’m all out of sympathy.

Some men are born into greatness.

I’ve read or heard that most types of snake venom are large, fragile proteins that are quickly broken down or neutralized by stomach acids and/or cooking. And most are only dangerous if they can enter the blood stream or are injected directly into body tissues.

In practice, there are lots of variables that come into play that might allow ingested venom to get into your bloodstream while still active, such as cuts/abrasions/sores in the mouth or ulcers in the lining of your digestive system.

So, in summary, it’s terribly risky.

Have we as a collective eaten every species of snake in the world to know that absolutely none of them are poisonous? Can we rule out genetically modified snakes that would make them so? Or maybe they are fed a diet of human flesh and a steadily increasing amount of some supplemental toxic substance such that they have become immune to the toxin as it slowly builds up in the snakes’ flesh causing them to also become poisonous? Is it possible most snakes are actually poisonous but only if consumed in sufficient quantity on Thursday November 18th, 2084 at 6:30 p.m.?

In the immediate aftermath of my first breakup, I was a bit bummed and also pissed off. But within a day or so, I was really, really happy about it.

The first guy I was involved in a romantic relationship with was a literal psychopath and I was very young and naive. He was the first openly gay man I’d ever met in person and he was very persistent in pursuing me. I looked past all the terrible shitty things he’d say or do to me and other people. Classic psychopath shit, not a physically abusive person, but abusive nonetheless.

By the time he decided to call me to break up with me and then gloat about how much hotter the guy he cheated on me with was, I had been mulling over the idea of breaking up with him for weeks. I just didn’t know the right way to go about it.

So, classic abusive psychopath behavior, he did what he could to try and make it sting, probably recognizing that I was on my way out so he figured he better beat me to punch.

The sting didn’t last long. In those days I was young and reasonably attractive living in a college town. In less than a day, it was practically raining men. Hallelujah. Raining men. Amen.

I should have taken pictures of the Turd’s yard signs from Fall 2024.

There were several different variations of the same theme: Trump [good thing], Kamala [opposite, bad thing].

One of them was: Trump low prices, Kamala high prices.

Republicans have lied the entire time Trump has been in office about how prices were suddenly much lower because eggs and eggs alone were cheaper, which had gotten super expensive for a time due to culling of the chickens to mitigate bird flu and something that the president doesn’t control. Disregarding that the overall grocery bill continued to climb largely due directly to the Trump administration policies.

Now it’s the same with gas. Shit got expensive under Biden, largely due to COVID related issues on a global scale. Prices came down and stabilized a bit, a trend which continued under Trump’s presidency. And then boom – start a war in the middle east. Now prices are up. But instead of blaming Trump, they’re pointing the finger at Biden. Because they lie. They don’t care about the reasons these things happen.

Please do! But, let’s have a completely fair primary with lots of other great candidates to choose amongst as well.

I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.

Wish they’d have spent a fraction of this much time, money, and energy looking for the person/people who burglarized my neighbor’s home. Would love to see a time when actual serious crimes against working class people are taken more seriously than a snowball fight.

Weird that affordability has never been worse (in my lifetime), inflation is not under control for actual necessities (like groceries), and yet there’s not Trump “I did that” stickers all over the place. Wonder why those people who put out all those Biden “I did that” stickers, practically everywhere, don’t care now. What happened to them? Hmmmm, guess the world will never know.

There’s a glaring bug in the lemmy dot zip sign up process (via web at least). There’s clearly some sort of backend validation of usernames, but it’s a mysterious black box with no helpful feedback to end users.

Presumably there are forbidden characters, character limits (min/max), banned word/phrase filters, etc and I assume there’s a check to make sure the name isn’t already registered. But the only feedback provided is a server-side message “InvalidName” that shows up in a pop-up. That’s all the info given, and I even checked the http responses directly to see if they contained any more info. Nope.

After numerous attempts and variations of usernames that I wanted with no luck, I tried InvalidName, and still no luck. So then I tried InvalidName2 and that finally worked.

So, yes bugs and glaringly obvious UI/UX issues are par for the course with the Fediverse, but at least this instance hasn’t been shut down or suffered weeks-long outages since I joined, at least not yet.

I have (RCWA) family members who, in their words, “don’t believe in Halloween”. Halloween being a holiday celebrated in many countries and one that happens every year, which is all over the media, with products in nearly every store, and even shows up on most typical calendars in this country.

Piefed web UI was absolutely rancid, at least the one time I tried it, which was not that long ago. Mbin, I feel like I did try at one time, but it was down or sign-ups weren’t functional at all at the time, so I figured they didn’t really care enough about it, which put a damper on my enthusiasm.