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So Angry!
  • "It was the left that ruined Truss's budget!" Was the genuine reaction of someone I talked to about this a while ago. Could not believe it nor understand it. Still can't.

  • It'll end up as "Vote stupid parties, win stupid prices"
  • I said in another comment but basically the left have a tougher message to sell than the right. The right says that the system works but it's the foreigners/benefit thieves/refugees stealing your money/house/jobs. That is inherently quite easy to understand without much thought or critical thinking. The left on the other hand have to tell you all about Thatcher, Reagan and neoliberalism before we even get to the point of solutions which are usually incredibly radical like changing the fundamental economic model we've all been operating under since the 80s. Inherent in that is a fear that the left's solutions will take assets and wealth away from people. While the right promises that your assets, wealth and property rights are sacred and that it's the "other" that will have their assets, wealth and rights taken away. Again, very easy-to-understand messaging for the right versus the left.

  • It'll end up as "Vote stupid parties, win stupid prices"
  • I totally agree that neoliberal economics are essentially what we understand to be economics now. To be clear, I'm not blaming the left, I think it's a case of they have a more difficult message to convey. To explain the problems that neoliberal economics has and to propose a solution to them is a really hard task compared with "it's the foreigners at fault". It's a much clearer, more concise and seemingly solvable problem compared with "we need to overhaul the global economy".

  • It'll end up as "Vote stupid parties, win stupid prices"
  • Far right parties gaining significant popularity especially in France and Germany. It's not great for the neo-liberal centre who created and perpetuated the economic downturn we're all in and indicates a failure of the left to present a coherent alternative. There's a lot to unpack about it. France has already dissolved their parliament and triggered an election because of these results.

  • What is the best model of used ThinkPad to purchase?
  • Literally just bought what I believe to be last generation's X13 on ebay for half the price of the new one. It's been great so far, especially with the power efficiency of Ryzen CPUs. My one complaint is the soldered RAM, which judging by the new lineup is getting phased out, thankfully.

  • SGE, ChatGPT and the likes are the stupidest thing to come from AI
  • I've had this argument with friends a lot recently.

    Them: it's so cool that I can just ask chatgpt to summarise something and I can get a concise answer rather than googling a lot for the same thing.

    Me: But it gets things wrong all the time.

    Them: Oh I know so I Google it anyway.

    Doesn't make sense to me.

  • JK Rowling in ‘arrest me’ challenge over Scottish hate crime law
  • Yeah then you start debating the merits of hate crime as a concept and I am not even slightly equipped to deal with that!

    I had similar queries around "biological sex" vs gender a while ago and my understanding now is that biological sex is surprisingly hard to define. You can't go by genitalia because sometimes a person creates the "wrong" ones. You can't go by chromosomes because again, sometimes they're different. And you can't go by other physical traits (Adams apple for example) because again sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not, completely unrelated to sex. You can sort of go by hormones but not really (just look at professional sport) so it's all a bit of a mess. It's way easier for me to just accept there's a spectrum and move on, because to me it's way harder to actually define where the line is than to just dismiss the line entirely.

  • JK Rowling in ‘arrest me’ challenge over Scottish hate crime law
  • Without the context of your understanding of the debate as you've outlined here we can only guess what you meant by "the debate" in your previous comment so thanks for taking the time to describe it. I absolutely agree that there needs be great care around the legitimacy of when someone declaring their gender should be taken seriously or not in some limited and extreme circumstances (prisons spring to mind). I think your characterisation of the terf argument if you speak to normal people is about accurate from my limited experience. The media and some outspoken terfs like JK are on the more extreme side of that where they say that it is already "too easy" to legitimately change their gender. Which is where I fundamentally disagree with them since I know the hoops some of my friends have had to jump through to even get the smallest amount of help from health providers.

    (I'm using "legitimate" above as a sort of catch all for legal or what the person genuinely feels. I don't think legal and legitimate are the same thing in this context, hence the distinction.)

  • JK Rowling in ‘arrest me’ challenge over Scottish hate crime law
  • In the nicest possible way, what do you mean by "both sides" in this context? One side says that trans people either don't or shouldn't exist and the other side says they should exist. I know that may sound extreme or combative but that's fundamentally "the debate" so I genuinely want to understand how you reached this "both sides have merit" stance that some people close to me also take but I've never understood.

  • Git Battle: YOLO Mode vs. Clean History
  • You do you. People generally discourage rebase because it rewrites history but that's what you're doing anyway. You can achieve the same result with revase --interactive and following the instructions to squash all your in progress commits into a single commit. That way you don't have to figure out how many commits between your in progress and dev(for your reset command) as the rebase will handle it for you.

  • GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack
  • Again, this existed before AI. Typo squatting, supply chain attacks, automated package uploads, CI pipeline infection, they're all known attack vectors. That's not to say this isn't a concern, just that it's a known risk and the addition of "AI" doesn't, to my eyes, increase that risk. If your SSH keys don't require a password, you have taken the decision to make those keys less secure but more convenient to use. That's pretty much always the tradeoff in security.

  • Tripod recommendations for an amateur

    Hi all, my trusty (but honestly always pretty terrible) Amazon basics tripod finally died, does anyone have a tripod they'd recommend or brands they'd avoid?

    Typical usage for me would be travelling/hiking and landscape photography so ideally small and light without breaking the bank (which I know is pretty tough). Budget is variable but call it £100-£200 for now.

    6
    FP4 Android 13 Update is live
    forum.fairphone.com Software update: FP4.TP1V.C.073.20230905 | Upgrade to Android 13

    Hi everyone, Fairphone 4 is catching up to the rest of the pack and getting Android 13! The update will start rolling out on Monday. Software Version: FP4.TP1V.C.073.20230905 Security Patch Level: 5th of August, 2023 Update size (from previous version): 851 MB List of changes: Introducing Andr...

    Software update: FP4.TP1V.C.073.20230905 | Upgrade to Android 13

    It's being rolled out in stages so you, like me, may not have it yet.

    1
    I'm bad at the role playing part, suggest a character or trait to separate the P from the C

    Title. Friend group and I play regularly but most of us are bad at the role playing part of it to the point where it's hard to tell when the player or the character are speaking in some scenes. Conversations are stiff. We can't use too heavily modified voices because we're playing remotely. My character is about to die (probably!) so help me pick a character or trait of my new character that someone not comfortable roleplaying can stick to without feeling weird about it!

    30
    DIY vs pre-build NAS for home use

    What do you have, what do you recommend, and why?

    Asking as I've got a lot of spare components lying around that I'm planning on turning into a NAS. If it doesn't work out I'll buy a pre-built enclosure and reuse the drives.

    15
    Ruby Weekly Issue 657: June 8, 2023

    Not affiliated I just find this useful and it exposed me to a few of the new features of Ruby 3.2 like not having to specify the value in kwargs if the variable is defined in scope, eg:

    foo = 'bar'; call(foo:) is equivalent to foo = 'bar'; call(foo: foo)

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PI
    Piatro @programming.dev
    Posts 5
    Comments 48