Makes sense, given the ending of automata. Need to get a whole new dev team now

yet you participate in society

I’ve always viewed this as a politics problem in disguise.

The cook wants to oust the king. He has no allies and no claim, but swears profusely that once he is king, every person who failed to back him is going to pay. Do you back the coup? What if you say yes and the cook’s assistant, who overheard you, proclaims that whatever punishment the cook had in store for your lack of cooperation, he’s going to do even worse? Do you switch your allegiance to the assistant then?

What if this is a hypothetical cook, who the assistants are speculating they could bring over from abroad and are also speculating would mete out the punishment to end all punishments to his non-backers, because he is petty like that? They haven’t even met him, but they figure surely a petty enough cook to fit this description has to exist out there somewhere, and inevitably someone will find him, and bring him over, and he will surely attain power once everyone understands that this is inevitable? Do you throw yourself behind their coup and challenge the king? What if the jesters overhear you and proclaim “oh wait until you hear about our hypothetical jester, he is even worse than that hypothetical cook” – do you switch your allegiance to the jesters then?

If implicit, empty “once I have power!” threats were horses, beggars would ride

unauthorized bread

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I’m doing a nothing playthrough, focused around progressing the plot by doing as little as possible. I finished act 1 by heading to the mountain pass and sneaking past all the gith and undead (this required a potion of invisibility). Went to Last Light, spoke to no one then went immediately back out, skipping Moonrise Towers and the entire shadow curse theme park, and going straight to the temple. Sneaked past everyone there and very disappointed to find B waiting for me at the end anyway, how did he know I was there? Well I’m like level 3 or something so I cheese him with a silence spell before he has the chance to get going then shove him off a cliff. Up next, sneaking into Moonrise Towers without anyone noticing and then guilt tripping the guy in charge because Selune Shar Myrkul knows it’s not a fight I’m going to win. AFAIK this is where the fun and games end though, because the final phase of the act II boss requires that you actually be capable of doing something, which my MC for this run canonically isn’t.

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I haven’t seen that “all opinions are equally valid” take since, what, 2012? Wow

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Two govt spooks are hunting a dangerous fugitive who is also a humanities graduate. He escapes into a sprawling maze of tunnels. “It’s hopeless,” one of the spooks says. But the other simply says, “Watch.” then proclaims loudly, “studying linear algebra is important because of its use in stochastic processes and image manipulation.” Before he finishes the sentence, the fugitive emerges back out the tunnel and shouts, “but what’s even more important --” and is immediately knocked unconscious and taken for questioning

With this whole “you pay for a screen package, love is sharing a password” business they just dug a PR hole for themselves. If they’d had offered price X per screen from the start, then introduced a “same household discount” or whatever, we wouldn’t have all this outrage. But execs can only see as far as next quarter and here we are.

Does this mean I’m supposed to be team MTG in the feud? Help I’m confused

My “Sniffing Cocaine is Not My Thing” T-Shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my T-Shirt

Well, it would be a start to let artists sue AI for copyright infringement in some way. If a human can’t hide behind “oh but I draw inspiration from a lot of places, this was an accident” then neither should an AI company. And on the flip side the same way you can’t just accuse someone of infringement because “they must have drawn inspiration from somewhere, everything is a remix”, it shouldn’t make sense to accuse an AI this way. So far we’ve somehow been able to deal with the supposedly intractable question of whether something is plagiarism or not, I reckon we should hold AI to the same standard.

To me vim’s main strengths are

• It delivers the same OK-ish experience no matter what file type or language I’m dealing with. Yeah it’ll never be as good as a dedicated Python IDE for writing Python, but I’d rather know vim than 5 different IDEs for Python, YAML, Dockerfiles, Rust, Latex, whatever I need to deal with today.
• It just edits files and doesn’t hide internal state, intermediate files, etc to make my life ‘simpler’ (notepad is the same, so I guess this is more of a strength vs IDEs). When an IDE fails to align all of its internal moving parts just right to compile a project I know I’m in for an hour of figuring out which checkbox needs to be unticked in what sub-sub-sub-sub-submenu, I like it much better to have a “flat” experience of invoking a command line and getting an error message directly from the tool I am invoking.
• 20dd to delete 20 lines, that’s very neat.

This is going to be uncomfortable to say but I feel that it is crucial that it be said.

In case you were not aware of the situation in Israel right now, the state is on the brink of civil war. This is not hyperbole. The situation that ultimately boiled over to cause this is in a narrow certain sense a mirror image of what’s happening in the US. The conservatives have gotten hold of the executive branch whereas the supreme court, while officially neutral, acts as a bulwark of liberalism. As a result, conservatives have raised many of the same frustrated points that US liberals are raising now: “How dare the judiciary put itself above the executive branch? Vox populi vox dei”. Under this banner they justify a ‘judicial reform’ which will do just that and, bluntly, put the government above the law.

I implore you not to reach the conclusion that there is something wrong with the judiciary having oversight over the executive branch – that because the government is democratically elected, it therefore must be the case that putting the government above the law will result in maximum democracy. This “maximum democracy” is precisely what they have right now in Hungary and Poland, and its ultimate end result is what they currently have in Russia and China. A strong, independent judiciary is necessary to keep the executive branch in check and make sure it doesn’t abuse its power to take control of the media, the electoral process, the state’s functioning institutions, to secure more power and act with destructive impunity. An oft-mocked hypothetical question in the Israeli public discourse today, which is also a completely valid argument, goes: “If the government forces through a law that all gingers be executed tomorrow, what then? Who will put a stop to it?”. A strong, independent judiciary is the only possible answer. “The people” cannot and will not keep a rogue populist government in check. Again, look to Hungary and Russia.

Now, this does not mean that you have to be content with the current state of the US supreme court, and meekly accept what it does and the values it stands for. I certainly don’t. Indeed, in Israel too, there have been many voices over the years which have called to temper the supreme court’s perceived political activism, and the previous (much less extremist) government contained several non-populist elements which successfully advocated for “their candidates” to reach the supreme court. Maybe the required reform in the US supreme court should be different and could be achieved by different means than this, but please, don’t follow Israel off this cliff, don’t fall in love with the notion that a strong judiciary is a burden on democracy. The opposite is true.

I have never in my life seen a more concise demonstration of the adage, “without a threat model there can be no security, only paranoia”