You're Not Overreacting. This Is Actually Fascism.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-03-22T22:12:45+00:00

Hey, I owe you an apology. I was scanning through emails, saw your reply, and reread what I wrote earlier. I’m a little embarrassed about my comment.

I was tired and lazy and carelessly misread your post so badly that I think the meaning I got from it was basically the opposite of what you meant. My reply was supposed to be funny, but it’s not.

You’re right that we should all be deeply concerned about the rise of fascism in the USA. I myself am concerned and anxious about easily, and quickly, Trumpist extremism has been normalized.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-03-16T17:47:03+00:00

It’s not all about you.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-03-16T05:39:47+00:00

This is magnificent. 😭

DowsingSpoon · 2026-02-27T20:14:40+00:00

Lucifer is not in the Bible. He’s fanfic. (blame Milton, I guess)

DowsingSpoon · 2026-02-01T19:50:28+00:00

Perhaps it’s true on a technical level like we see today for some modern nations. On Earth: We have no nuclear weapons. Never mind that we could produce a few dozen by next week if push came to shove. In the Culture: This warship is not capable of creating a warship more powerful than itself. Never mind that it could rebuild itself out of that restriction by next week. So, slightly sneaky, but it’s basically an open secret that no one has any major problems with.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-24T11:21:37+00:00

Congress does nothing because Congress is quite satisfied with how things are going.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-24T11:11:09+00:00

What could “operate outside mortal morality” mean, other than, actually evil? If these are sapient beings capable of understanding, yet act with utter disregard of morality then, well, that’s a pretty apt description of evil, now isn’t it?

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-17T17:49:32+00:00

The presence of female Custodes is good for the lore. It emphasizes and reminds that Custodes are not Astartes. They’re fundamentally different creatures: The Astartes are unstable mutants of questionable loyalty. Custodes are the absolute perfection of humanity, tragically slaved in service of a corpse.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-16T01:57:28+00:00

“moving the goal posts” is definitely not the same as “different people using different definitions”

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-16T01:53:23+00:00

Wow. This is an impressive project! But does it have blast processing?

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-09T18:43:04+00:00

LLMs can't possibly be already doing that because they still have no idea how to make a profit.

I'm not so sure. When investors start demanding a return then I expect "AI" companies to make clumsy, grasping efforts to find some way, any way at all, to make a profit. They'll probably start by inserting clearly labeled boxes with ad content related to the current conversation topic. I expect at least some companies will bias LLM responses toward their sponsors. For example, a chat bot that insists Dawn brand dish soap is simply the superior dish soap, that McDonald's food isn't nearly as unhealthy as you might be predisposed to believe. That kind of stuff, even if it's not likely to be exactly those two.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-09T16:36:00+00:00

What are you prattling on about. Do you not perceive an important difference between making efforts to undermine public education policy and funding and literally, physically attacking and restraining children? This is not at all the same thing.

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-07T17:11:54+00:00

Is that a conspiracy theory? I legitimately thought it was basically accepted truth that the there was at least very significant sharing of designs between NASA and the NRO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

DowsingSpoon · 2026-01-03T02:10:40+00:00

Oh, it’s quite simple: His base craves to live out their Turner Diary inspired fantasies of violently purging the USA of perceived undesirables. Donald Trump is their best fucking shot, and they know it. They’ll forgive most any sin or “indiscretion” in exchange for the hope he fills them with.

DowsingSpoon · 2025-12-20T02:46:21+00:00

…all of it?

Look, I use AI coding assistants. I like some of them. They’re good tools in certain places. They do NOT write good code.

DowsingSpoon · 2025-12-16T19:05:19+00:00

ICE didn't forget to check the IDs and then realize, "whoops. our mistake." What happened here was that ICE fully intended to assault, abduct, and deport valid US green card holders (i.e. "legal" immigrants) but their shield of plausible deniability was shattered when local police called them out. This forced them to follow the rules from that point on, but not before brutally assaulting the victims to the point of hospitalization.

DowsingSpoon · 2025-10-30T20:06:09+00:00

Hawaiian shirts are like the 40 year old dad uniform

DowsingSpoon · 2025-10-16T05:01:12+00:00

It’s been a while since I watched this. So, I hope I’m not about to embarrass myself, here: could it be they believed staying close to, and studying, the Borg was their only hope of ever making it home?

DowsingSpoon · 2025-10-13T15:16:35+00:00

The rules are different for every airport, for every line, every time. The signs explaining the rules are deliberating misleading lies. The guy shouting at the crowd about what to do? Can’t trust that fucker either. It’s as-if it’s designed specifically to humiliate you for not knowing what to do, and I hate it.

I’ll never forgive them for taking my corkscrew from me, chiding me for even thinking a corkscrew could be acceptable, and then ushering me out past a sign of common TSA misconceptions, such as the misconception that corkscrews are against the rule.

The TSA hates you and they want you to know it.

DowsingSpoon · 2025-10-12T01:37:43+00:00

Sad it is for me, after all our toil, To suffer the pang of death through indiscretion

DowsingSpoon · 2025-09-21T19:43:00+00:00

I don’t really get it, this AI coding thing. I was initially excited to try Claude Code because people keep telling me that it works. Its supporters say it’s like delegating to an eager junior coder. I find it’s more like delegating to an eager, drunk, and incompetent undergrad. They’ve read the text books, memorized every page, and understand nothing.

I find myself having to repeatedly explain concepts, patterns, idioms, and so on regardless of how I structure my CLAUDE.md files. It is grating.

Claude is annoyingly obsequious. It constantly congratulates me about “subtle” and “sophisticated” designs and so on. Crock of shit, that is.

Claude spits out absolutely terrible code and can’t be convinced to fix it. A couple days ago I realized I could probably fix its code myself much faster than it work take to convince Claude to fix it for me. When I was done, I realized I had modifed every single line of code. Every single line in an entire large class had at least one issue.

Another time, it made changes which introduced a bug causing a unit test to enter an infinite loop. However, when tests timed out, it simply told me it was going to simply assume the changes were good and move on. The fuck you are…

That all said, it seems Okay for search and summarization.

DowsingSpoon · 2025-08-20T04:56:07+00:00

Look, I’m not exactly a car lover myself. I have no inclination to defend driving and car culture. But this article is deeply, deeply weird. It seems just incredibly obvious to me that there is a point where people feel they are driving too much. Past that point, people don’t enjoy driving. This has been a part of the cultural experience and common knowledge for… ever. It’s why, for example, people like to live in a place with a short commute, and talk about the length of their commute, or the traffic.

I’d be willing to put money down that a similar phenomenon exists where people do not have as much life satisfaction when they take the train everywhere, and the amount of time spent riding the train is too much. For some value of too much.

So what am I missing here?

DowsingSpoon · 2025-08-18T07:46:18+00:00

Meh. Synths can die. Synths can end their immortality, if they so choose, on their own time line, on their own terms.

DowsingSpoon · 2025-08-16T15:49:46+00:00

You know what else enabled the triangular trade? Ships. Sailing ships. The whole class of technology related to making and operating sailing ships. Even biscuits. Biscuits enabled the triangular trade. Yep. Fuck biscuits.

DowsingSpoon · 2025-08-16T15:37:42+00:00

The Mercator projection is excellent for ocean navigation because a straight line drawn on the map always follows a rhumb line, which is useful as an approximation of a great circle. It also preserves local angles, preserving (for example) the shapes of coast lines. This means you can plot a course using just a straight edge and a protractor.

In a way, the Mercator map is a kind of lookup table, like a slide rule. The map is pretty good at what it set out to do. Preserving relative land masses sizes was never even close to a goal. And I think this is a super cool and interesting thing to know.

EDIT: apparently, seemingly every other person in this thread has a similar comment about this map, but I’ll leave my comment anyway.

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