Random Dent

Hypothetical alternate reality: Bernie Sanders has won the presidency but hasn’t taken office yet, George W. Bush has just died and there’s just been a massive fire in Texas.

Sanders refuses to fly the flag at half mast for his inauguration, someone from his not-yet-in-power cabinet has told Texas it can fuck off for aid unless it becomes socialist, there’s a publicly published plan for an ultra-left-wing takeover of the country that he swore he’d never heard of until the day after he won the election when he suddenly went “Oh yeah we are doing that lol” and also Bill Gates is living in his house, has a cabinet position and is openly provoking friendly countries with overthrowing their governments.

How chill do we think the MAGA crowd would be in this scenario?

Him stepping aside after the debate really was the smartest thing he could have done IMO, for him personally I mean.

That way, if Harris had won he could take credit for selflessly stepping aside and putting country first. And now that she lost he can just say “well I might have won, but you all forced me to quit” and there’s no way to prove it definitively either way.

Personally I think Trump won the moment that assassin clipped him and he stood up doing the fist pump in front of the flag. That photo was pure 80s movie cheese and people eat that shit up.

My theory: since all the big tech companies seem to be making “donations” and bending over backwards to do favours for Trump before he’s even in power, I suspect it’s going to eventually come out that he’s been selling exemptions to tariffs for companies who bend the knee.

Those companies will then only raise their prices by 50% instead of the 65% their competitors will have to do, and they’ll try to play it off as altruism.

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I suspect he won’t do another two full terms, but not because of any inherent virtue in the system. I think it’ll just come down to biology. He’s 78, not in good health anyway and about to enter a very high-stress job. If he’s still going at 86 I’ll be surprised.

And that’s assuming the cabal of demented fascists he’s assembled around him don’t tear him apart the second he shows any sign of weakness or of no longer being useful to them, which they definitely will.

Reading between the lines a bit, I get the sense that maybe because Musk is a big name the corporation that owns the paper may not have given them the option to not post it? The article also describes her as the editor of the opinion section, so maybe not the overall editor of the paper.

I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.

I’m a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I’m 98% sure I’m just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.

This is why we should never go full Tory.

Also I’m pretty sure this is just the newspapers being sneaky. It was sold off in 2013 under the Conservatives, and now it’s being resold to someone else and the media is trying to make it look like Labour are the ones who privatised it.

I don’t really think it will go anywhere. It looks like they’re fully throwing the book at Luigi Mangione and all the news is hitting the propaganda hard, so I imagine there’ll be a lot of talk and memes about Doing The Thing, but nobody will really Do The Thing.

I didn’t know any of the specifics of the allegations against Brand, but I remember when he did the crazy Jesus pivot I thought “it has to be something to do with kids.” No scumbag flips that abruptly unless they’ve done something really bad.

Haha that’s like a real “reading a book over someone’s shoulder” kind of setup.

I met Brian O’Halloran (Dante from Clerks) once and he was super nice. We bullshitted for ages and he signed a thing for me.

As an animator, the client simultaneously knows everything about what makes a good animation, colour theory etc. and is utterly incapable of doing it themselves or providing any specific feedback beyond “I don’t like this” or “make it feel more pink but don’t actually make it pink.”

This state persists until you introduce an invoice for all the extra work it’ll take to redo all the stuff they agreed to two weeks ago, and then the waveform collapses and suddenly everything you sent them in the first place is fine.

My setup is:

• Arch (BTW) & KDE on my laptop, that’s the tinkering machine that only I use.
• Dual boot Pop!_OS & Windows on the desktop, that’s the one that other people use too so I’m not allowed to break it.
• I also have a bunch of other OS’s in VMs that I mess around with like little specimen jars lol

I’ve been using Filen, seems to work pretty well, it’s got a Linux version of the desktop sync client (comes as an AppImage IIRC) and I dunno if they’re still doing it but they used to have a good price on lifetime plans that were ~100GB that you could stack, so I got a good amount of storage without having to pay a monthly fee.

Cool under pressure maybe? I expect a lot of people would freak out upon meeting an alien which is probably pretty inefficient. And smart is presumably a benefit. That’s not really representative of most humans though lol