Ben Cates

Unless and until I start seeing ads for GPU-native databases and web servers I'm not gonna worry about hardware misallocation.

My brain volunteered the phrase "spot weld" and I am dutifully passing it along.

I can top this; one of my college guilty pleasures was hot cocoa mix, coffee, and vodka. It is a shockingly good irresponsible comfort beverage.

Kat Abu for what? Secretary of the Interior?

It's not even just the thoroughly unsurprising transference of this specific slur (although it is that too). It's that teaching your brain to enjoy being hateful is categorically bad. It's the opposite of virtuous. I really don't understand how this could be controversial.

A just and valid note to bring up during the empathy circle.

The exact maximum amount of smart at which it is still possible to make a substantial investment in the existence of Trump's stated principles.

They're not? Wow! That must mean indulging your unhealthiest impulses in their general direction is a good decision then.

The original point, as I understand it, is that a widely known asshole should be banned on general principle despite not having actually done anything ban-worthy on this specific platform.

I'm sure it's a both/and thing, but the main thing I saw was indie artists with a very justifiable initial complaints getting pulled into one-upmanship feedback loops.

Really astonishing once you notice the pattern how many strains of discourse boil down to trying to find a morally laudable target for cruelty.

I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference. It's more that currently one coalition is powered almost purely by substantive commitments and one almost purely by resentment and both incorrectly assume the situation is symmetrical.

Not even close to the main problem, but I'm pretty sure my extremely white and organically American culture wouldn't survive the process either.

This feels like cheating. I don't know why but it does.

A very confused and frightened hotel bellhop.

I'm not generally a second amendment fan, but it is worth noting that if they decide to play a game where bigger numbers usually beat better armed, team badges can't make the better armed assumption too casually either.

There's also a lot of IMHO unwarranted pessimism about whether the fallout from such an incident would make protesters more or less restrained and officers more or less comfortable with their orders moving forward.

It's extremely American.

Just because Jefferson was too chickenshit to take himself seriously doesn't mean I have to be.

The video making the rounds today of some clown awkwardly unslinging his rifle to get it out of the way so that he can manhandle a protester is ridiculous. Constitutionally terrifying, sure, but mostly just ridiculous.

Yeah, it was fine I guess.

The problem is that you really can use a glorified d20 and lookup table to nudge yourself out of a rut so long as you're honest with yourself that that's what you're doing.

It also takes him, like, six episodes plus a recommendation to stop halfway through and go watch the linear algebra miniseries. It's kind of like electromagnetism where it's not hard, exactly, but it's just too foreign to everyday intuition to give someone a usable mental model inside an hour.

It's not terrible but it's hard to think of a use case where several other brassicas wouldn't have been a better choice.

Luckily for us there's plenty of extremely toxic behavior on all sides. We don't have to choose.

I mean, I think randos have a duty not to anthropomorphize machines for the sole purpose of enjoying hurting their fake feelings for the same basic reasons I think they have a duty not to derive joy from hurting real feelings. We are what we pretend to be and whatnot.

The future Wikipedia page for "crimes against sentience (formerly crimes against humanity)" is going to be *bleak*.

The use of the parenthetical on "probably venomous" instead of "exhibiting aggressive displays" implies the spider would be willing to help clarify matters.

It's an open question whether turning what could've been perfectly good tequila into health food is an angelic or demonic perversion.

Your brain is a (huge but) finite collection of electrochemical reactions that is empirically capable of entering an internal state that we describe as suffering. Why would we expect a sufficiently accurate simulation of those same electrochemical reactions not to have the same internal states?