I’m reflecting on how much value has been extracted from me. If I had been able to keep the yearly insurance payments, I could have bought the car all over again.

Over the past 7 years I’ve paid my car’s initial worth in insurance payments, it’s great.

Capitalists, reactionaries, liberals, and fascists will cry crocodile tears for Princess Anastasia while voting to bomb brown children without a single second thought.

The propaganda aspect is especially obvious since OP’s friend invoked the nonsense emotional appeal of “would you shoot the Tsar if he were me?”

From OP’s friend’s perspective, it’s likely a sensical appeal coming from a place of valuing life, which is an excellent opportunity to force him to confront the contradiction.

I was dissapointed that the one communist didn’t brutally blow Anastasia’s brains out, but I definitely think the play … inspires violence in me.

I don’t think this is a good thing. It is true that violence becomes regrettably necessary in resistance and revolution, but it should not be something we take pleasure in, for a myriad of reasons. It leads to adventurism, it hinders our ability to grow our movement, and it puts our culture in a bad spot post-revolution towards successfully building towards communism.

And on a personal level, no, you should never, ever tell your friend that you would kill them under some hypothetical scenario. You should never let the conversation get to the point where that’s even a question being asked.

My disillusionment in Mormonism and subsequent embrace of atheism is what set me on the path that led me here.

Maybe it’s just me but I like to look and feel like my own perception of what is attractive.

I don’t think that anyone’s preferences or identity is any less genuinely theirs just because they were influenced by culture. Moreover, what we find attractive can vary greatly from person to person, even within the binary norm.

Yeah, I read the comment. The thesis of the title isn’t supported by the article, which makes for a confusing read.

That’s not based on the article is it? The article seems to attribute growth primarily to the war economy.

Not only is it not Linux, but the operating system is closed source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS. According to the article it’s built on top of “OpenHarmony,” but that does little to assuage my disappointment.

Yes, in that it uses the Linux Kernel. It’s not typically considered a Linux distribution because most everything else in the OS is custom and Google-suffused. In particular Android lacks GNU libraries and tools.

Which is doubly worse because those higher-level libraries are black boxes, and you can’t always fix things that arise inside of them easily.

If by “higher level” you mean something like Java libraries, I’d say the opposite is true - at least if you don’t have the source for a Java class it is trivial to decompile and have something immediately readable. Can’t say the same for something like a dll originally written in C++.

https://archive.is/vJlze

https://archive.ph/Iwvfl

• old webpages (like from the 2000s) are fast and snappy
• new webpages take much longer to load

Modern webpages are less like a page and more like a full blown application. If you’re not careful you’ll get an unoptimized mess, which is exacerbated when you put a bunch of ads on top.

That being said I don’t have memories of everything being snappy 20 years ago - there were messy scripts and gigantic images that made Geocities and Angelfire sites near unusable back then as well.

The PSP and 3DS titles also had pause. Pause is more likely to be a key feature on “handheld” games since you’re more likely to play in “bursts,” and the Switch is a handheld" system.

Moreover, as I understand it there are two Monster Hunter dev teams - a primary team that works on the the “mainline” (previously numbered) games that tended to target console, and a secondary “handheld” team that would handle the handheld spinoffs and ports. Rise was developed by the secondary “handheld” team, World and Wilds are being developed by the primary “console” team.

That being said, I’m with you - I like to be able to pause while on a long hunt to go get a drink or take a quick break.

Getting them to do anything other than spit up probabilistically correct information and sentences would require them to have comprehension, not just associations between strings of words.

I would argue that associations between pieces of information is the cornerstone of how you form comprehension. While I agree that the technology is somewhat overhyped, the fact that you can instruct models to perform arbitrary tasks that the model was not specifically trained to do is evidence of some level of “comprehension.”

Probably has more to do with the primary target platform being the Switch. I don’t think Monster Hunter World allows for pausing, for example.

While I appreciate his thoughts on MMT, I am generally wary of his analysis; 1Dime has previously defined “Petite Bourgeoisie” as “high income earners,” which is a red flag for me.

I’ve had to limit my interactions on both here and especially Hexbear because of this toxicity. Idealistic based bickering and hatred of individuals. Constantly wishing death on groups of people instead of understanding the material reasons they act the way they do.

I found memes like “To the wall with them!” amusing enough at first; but then I realized that more often than not the meme is being used seriously.

Playing devil’s advocate - it looks like the main advancement made by SpaceX is the reusable rockets. Do you think this has a material benefit to space travel going forward?

In terms of the real economy, I would think this is beneficial.

Devil advocacy aside, I’m skeptical that reusable rockets should take priority over other possible areas of advancement; and of course, the inefficiencies and waste of the private sector should go without saying.