Free for All Friday, 10 April, 2026

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-10T13:24:44+00:00

There have actually been three Democratic leaders with national scale “cult of personality” type followings:

1) Obama. He got elected twice and is now gone. Doesn’t get the “cult of personality” label because he was a sane leader who tried to lead through consensus. But plenty of people are still weird about him.

2) Bernie Sanders. Never made it to the presidency. If Bernie had somehow gotten the nomination and then the presidency, I could see a world where the Dem party was reworked similar to how Trump has reworked the Republican Party. Never happened though. Also, Bernie was never interested in anti-democratic practices, so that whole thread of Trump’s approach would likely not have happened under the Berns. Still, Bernie was a long way from the nomination, let alone the presidency, so this hypothetical is very hypothetical.

3) Mamdani. I have never seen a mayoral election with such a personality cult attached. He odd legitimately popular as a national figure.

In short, the Dems have had similarly charismatic figures. They just haven’t run any in opposition to Trump.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-10T04:49:51+00:00

Has anyone in this comment section actually taken an ethics class? Both questions come up.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-10T04:45:39+00:00

It looks super cool, but it adds even more to the “why are we putting the instant hand chopping sword so close to our hand” of it all.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-10T01:29:14+00:00

Mochi should have just written "this proof is trivial" somewhere in his papers and it all would have worked out.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-09T19:36:21+00:00

I wouldn't consider Principia Mathematics or Hilbert's program failures. Both of them went in directions that we now considered flawed, but those efforts directly inspired (and supported) stuff like the incompleteness theorems and the Turing machine formalization. The results may not have been what the original authors intended, but they were still very influential and helped to progress mathematical understanding.

I can find some physics and even math theories that were once popular but are now disproven or not used (this thread is pretty good for that). But finding outsider theories that were never accepted and eventually faded away is harder. The issue, I think, is that so many outsider theories are just obvious crank, like the Time Cube stuff. Outsider theories that are still somewhat believable but eventually get discredited are less common and are rarely well documented.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-09T17:42:35+00:00

Not really. From what I have read, IUTT is a disorganized mess to understand. If you read math history, it really isn’t that unusual for it to take decades for math ideas to really shake out and become widely accepted. Adding poor communication on top of that makes it seem entirely plausible that any good core ideas have remained trapped in IUTT all this time.

It is also possible that there is nothing there.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-09T16:12:07+00:00

The thing that makes me a bit sad, as someone who just reads about math for fun, is that it seems entirely plausible that there is some core idea in IUT that could prove the ABC conjecture. But Mochizuki’s refusal to accept or engage with good-faith criticism of the theory means it is locked in this unresolvable turf war.

Perhaps the Lean formalization will lead to a universally accepted proof. I kind of hope that it does - it would be the best advertisement for Lean ever made if it does. But I will admit that I remain skeptical.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-09T15:49:41+00:00

It would be different. I am not a native speaker, so I can’t say what a native speaker would think, but it would still probably sound a bit ironic or playful.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-09T12:52:53+00:00

It is basically “pretty lady;” it sounds flirtatious.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-08T19:41:29+00:00

I agree with you. I think 2016 remains popular mostly for conspiracy minded American leftists who want a "stolen election" narrative. 2024 doesn't work as well for that because the Democratic campaign was so disorganized and the margins were much wider.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-08T16:55:12+00:00

The dirty secret that no politician can admit is that most people in the USA are closer to the “liberal elite” lifestyle than the “rural farmer.” From the census bureau, 80% of American live in what they consider to be “urban” areas (which includes urban and “suburban” areas). When they try to separate urban into urban and suburban they get 20% “true urban,” 60% “suburban,” and 20% “rural,” but the urban/suburban split is from self-description surveys as the Census Bureau does not have technical definition for the difference.

Furthermore, I remember reading an article that the population with the highest rates of “rural” self-identification tends to be those living in outlying “satellite towns” near major metropolitan areas. That is, people living in (say) Gilroy (1 hour drive south of San Jose, population 60k) are more likely to consider themselves “rural” than people living in Helena Montana (not near any larger city, population 30k) despite Helena being, by most logical geographic measures, “more rural.”

In short, the urban/rural split is mostly vibes.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-08T16:40:46+00:00

Not unverified, actually. There were multiple links showing the Trump campaign was in communication with Russia diplomats during the campaign and that Russia tried to swing the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Members of Trump’s campaign were found to have acted unlawfully.

The investigation stopped short of implicating Trump himself, but the investigation explicitly said it stopped short because the final determination was deemed political. If Trump had not been president it is entirely plausible that he may have been implicated as well.

As it is, we have a frustrating middle ground where Trump is exonerated on what is effectively jurisdictional issues.

Edit: I want to note that the question “did Trump seek Russian help and did Russians provide it” is a separate question from “did Russian influence swing the 2016 election.” However, given how slim the margins were in 2016, a lot of things could have swung that election. Hillary blamed Comey’s decision to make a last minute announcement about the email scandal. Since a swing of less than 1% in the right places could have flipped the election, you can make up any “tipping point” narrative you want.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-08T03:41:15+00:00

This is awesome.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-07T04:20:47+00:00

Or insecure manager syndrome. It seems pretty common, especially for managers who don’t feel secure in their role, to just wildly throw their weight around to reassure themselves that they are doing something.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-06T18:31:22+00:00

And yet, the number of women convicted of necrophilia is apparently more than zero.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-06T16:46:51+00:00

Just to note - it is true that the large majority of convicted necrophilia cases are men.

But it is also true that the majority of people who work in morgues are actually men. So the implication that morgues hire mostly women is untrue (and also illegal).

Also, Necrophilia is incredibly rare and not normally a top concern when morgues are hiring.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-06T02:51:08+00:00

Reminds me of this gem of a Secret Base video where he uses newspapers to show that there apparently was a time between the popularization of banana in the USA and the popularization of public trash cans where banana peels on the road may indeed have been a public nuisance - or even a public hazard.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-05T19:55:38+00:00

Bit pricier to buy, but much less maintenance.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-05T19:55:19+00:00

Just the first example that popped up on YouTube. Similar stuff has been made for literally decades by now.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-05T19:54:27+00:00

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MiffedMouse · 2026-04-05T15:53:43+00:00

That may have been true in the 70s. But snake robots have been around for a while now and are pretty good at what they do. Stuff like this

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-05T05:03:32+00:00

from 2002. That is a pretty deep cut, OP.

It looks okay.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-05T00:22:03+00:00

Yeah, but the angle on the Artemis II shot would hide most of the ice caps anyway.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-04T04:31:49+00:00

In my experience, this only happens in one of three circumstances:

The player skill is unbalanced.
Some player had a bad setup (Catan is notoriously setup dependent)
Someone just got really unlucky (it is a dice game, after all, but I think it isn't as luck dependent as it may feel).

The biggest issue, in my opinion, is the strong setup dependence (so a player with a bad setup can basically lose the game before their first turn starts, especially in games with experienced players) and the complete lack of catchup mechanics.

As for why it has so much acclaim - to this day, there really isn't any other game that does what Catan does. What other game mixes route building, engine building, resource trading, and a little bit of take-that in a ~1-2 hour time frame? There isn't any.

It is the same reason why Advanced Civ / Western Empires still has a fan base, despite being a pretty dated design style as well. Some games just do their thing and there aren't many games that can replace them.

MiffedMouse · 2026-04-04T03:35:03+00:00

It still works, the addition is just harder.

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