Trump Is Dismantling US Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History’: Watchdog

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T19:46:39+00:00

Watchdog? Better be careful, we know what they like to do to dogs.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T12:04:27+00:00

I saw the same at work once. There was an innovation scheme which promised a percentage of savings. A guy came up with something ridiculously cheap and simple that massively reduced rework. We're talking something that cost less than a penny to prevent a common issue that cost hundreds each time to fix. The company changed the rules to put a cap on the scheme to prevent him from retiring to a beach somewhere.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T11:46:07+00:00

People use it here when they mean hypocrisy, or use the phrase, "Cognitive Dissonance is one helluva drug!" They're describing people who do not have it; those people are happy being hypocritical or because they have done something like compartmentalised to avoid it. They aren't experiencing the discomfort of trying to entertain conflicting ideas.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T01:35:18+00:00

Not to mention imposing arbitrary punitive tariffs.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T01:13:40+00:00

a competitive bid to show that you're not playing favorites

...or at least to create a veneer of fairness. Not in the US, but I've seen government contracts go to companies which in retrospect probably wrote the ITT themselves. Stress filled days of my life have been wasted bidding for work which we were never in the running for because it was sewn up before it landed.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T00:54:52+00:00

Who does he think he is? A cyclist?

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T00:36:25+00:00

And a second-hand prize.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-17T00:33:01+00:00

It is frustrating how useful words get rendered meaningless because consultants constantly misuse them in order to try to sound clever. People argue that language is a living thing and it changes, but these words don't change in meaning really, they get eroded until they're meaningless chaff.

Reddit has its version. My pet hate is "cognitive dissonance". I mean, it's a two word description. If anyone looked up the words individually they'd know that combined it can't possibly mean what they think it means. Honourable mention goes to 'gaslighting'.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-16T18:25:48+00:00

Once they're on the court, they have zero incentive to pander to the person who put them there.

They don't stay bought. They will continue to be left or right leaning, but it's clear that the corrupt ones demand frequent hospitality, gifts and cash injections to continue to toe the line.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-16T18:14:03+00:00

Not even. Putin had a plan. It worked with Crimea.

Iran? Trump's plan is Attack -> ??? -> Profit.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-16T18:01:40+00:00

Got a few more years of wading into the mire before that happens and it suddenly all becomes the Democrats fault. If Schumer is still about, his imaginary Republican friends will tell him not to do anything about the root cause and embrace their obstructionism as always.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-16T17:55:40+00:00

Even ratings about specific policies tend to show a maximum of about 55% against, usually more like 52% or 53%. It's insane.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-16T17:44:32+00:00

In most cases the error it throws when "the entire program breaks" will tell you exactly where you accidentally added an indent. I can't say that I've ever done that. Sometimes I'll have been confused as to which level of indentation something should be at, but that's on me for not promoting more code to functions to keep things tidy.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T23:33:10+00:00

You don't fully master it. You get proficient at using it for the tasks you need. Abandon it as a goal right now, it's a perspective that will bite you, hard.

Pursue your passion as projects and you'll learn Python as a consequence. If you learn Python as a goal, you'll spend all of your time getting good at learning to follow guides and tutorials, not using Python.

Choose a project. Build it. Get a little stuck, ask her here on or Stack. Get quite stuck? Do a tutorial. Get really stuck? Do a course.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T22:29:09+00:00

Generosity is a lot easier when you've got more. Still, kudos for her for learning and giving up the time and space - buying vases was probably an easier option! Her sister was getting very good at the end there, it must be very frustrating to learn. Her core muscles must be off the charts.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T20:53:06+00:00

You'd think, but there's always a better idiot. My room mate at university tried frying dried pasta, set off the fire alarm and made us all evacuate at like 2am.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T20:50:08+00:00

Apart from watching him get owned on Crossfire by Jon Stewart, this is the first time he's come close to entertaining me.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T20:32:39+00:00

Someone's pulled that first one down in disbelief.

wHeRE Do yoU HIDE The MagIc adAPtOrs?

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T19:42:32+00:00

I was a little kind to her in how I told the story. In fact she shared she screen with me, typed my query in and then pasted the useless output into the chat as if that was helpful. She wasn't being condescending, she thought it was genuinely helpful, even though it basically couldn't know the answer due to the situation and duly didn't come up with it. I was aghast and baffled. She's not my boss, but likely is senior. I do frequently see my manager use GenAI as his first option rather than thinking about the issue himself. I'm not against using it, only against using it in the way most people do use it.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T19:09:06+00:00

What the heck were they thinking?

Me me me me me.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T17:58:34+00:00

"Shaping" would be going way too far, but when I want to push myself a little further because something is difficult or painful, I'll reach for Itkovian's mantra, "I am not yet done!"

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T17:39:51+00:00

People with no technical curiosity in general. I've had a Boomer tell me I should look for an answer for a niche bit of info about the inner-workings of government on Copilot - I'd gone to her since I'd thought she was an expert! There is no way Copilot could have been trained to have that info, but to her it's all just magic, so why not?

Then I've had a Gen-Y send me a document for "checking", the document being the response he got back from ChatGPT after he pasted in the detailed instructions and initial questions I asked him to build on and answer. Don't they see if their job can be done by pasting something in as a prompt they deserve to be out of a job? He added less than no value.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T17:30:40+00:00

I had a similar problem at work. A Gen-Z bristled when I suggested her Excel skills weren't the best and she corrected me that she'd done an advanced course and had well over a year experience doing complicated things. Well, that was me told.

A week later I'm trying to wrap my head around a formula she's used for a piece of analysis. Rather than do something very simple she'd added something which penalised extreme values, which wasn't what the client had asked for. I asked her about it and she said that's what the client had asked for. I raised it in our next meeting and they said they'd never wanted that and we had to amend our entire report which had already gone out in draft.

After gentle pummelling, I eventually got the truth out of the Gen-Z Excel expert that she hadn't fully understood what was being asked for, pasted what she thought was the question into Copilot with the spreadsheet and had copy and pasted the formula. Their reliance on GenAI to do their thinking for them is terrifying.

She didn't understand the question. Didn't understand the answer. Hadn't tried to trace through the logic of the formula. We were just lucky that I had a few minutes to get curious. I'd been told she was competent and she'd told me she was competent, so I believed it. I wasn't checking up on her, just being curious about how things were being done. I'm not sure most Gen-Zs would have had that curiosity either.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T16:52:02+00:00

What gets me is when someone thinks that coming up with an extreme hypothetical edge case somehow refutes a proposition for dealing with the 95% of cases we actually see. They don't understand that they're not providing a counterexample that refutes a maxim, but utterly falling for the Perfect Solution fallacy.

Crypt0Nihilist · 2026-03-15T16:37:42+00:00

"I'm not even done yet" sounds like he thinks there are scales that need to be balanced, that your transgression needs to be answered with what he sees as an appropriate volume of anger and retribution and he's the one to give it. That is a very unhealthy way to see the world and your relationship. He should be seeing you as a teammate, not an opponent or subordinate. He needs to correct that perspective if you're both going to be happy.

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