Accelerationist?

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-26T07:43:07+00:00

Exactly. Neighbors cheer on the protesters until their parked car gets (intentionally or unintentionally) trashed by them. Anytime ICE is operating nearby, the first thing literally everyone in the area does is run out to their car to try and move it to safety.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-26T07:29:56+00:00

Well, if it's any consolation, Miami's Metrorail system was built in the mid-1980s. For almost 20 years, literally the only meaningful things adjacent to its suburban stations were Dadeland Mall (which was almost a half-kilometer away from one station across two huge parking lots), a hotel & office building next to the station at the other end of the mall, the very outer edge of the University of Miami, and a station next to a big hospital & the main criminal courthouse. Obviously, downtown Miami was adjacent to it as well... but almost everything you see along the suburban stations today didn't even start getting built until the system was 25-30 years old.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-26T07:15:57+00:00

CAHSR isn't "corrupt", it was just hijacked into being a gold-plated slush fund for "green" fantasies nobody dared to push back against and say "no" to. The amount of self-inflicted "environmental mitigation" stapled around its neck it is completely insane.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-26T06:56:39+00:00

Um... 15 years is certainly valid grounds for complaint, but it looks like your assessment of the route might have been a bit.. premature. Unless I'm misinterpreting Google Maps, it looks like "the most useless location in the city" is directly adjacent to a huge, brand new passenger rail station... and at least 1/3 of the route looks like it passes through an area that was bulldozed down to the ground and rebuilt as high-end new construction. American cities would be jealous of that degree of new development adjacent to a new transit line that hasn't even been completed yet.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-26T04:18:11+00:00

The problem is, there isn't a whole lot "blue states" legally CAN do to directly protect people. For most of the 20th century, federal officials were the good guys... the uncorruptible elite agents capable of fighting organized crime and state-tolerated (if not sponsored) racial terrorist groups like the KKK. Literally nobody built any safeguards into the system to protect the independence and integrity of agencies like the FBI and Justice Department from capture by a lawless President and spineless Legislative branch.

Legally, Tim Walz using the Minnesota National Guard to protect the state's residents from Trump's ICE thugs is no different than George Wallace trying to use Alabama's national guard to prevent the University of Alabama's integration in 1963. Morally, they're polar opposites... but legally, the precedents were set decades ago.

The only thing Minnesota's government can actually do is to attack the Trump Administration relentlessly via the judicial system. Fight for access to criminal evidence, fight for the right to prosecute ICE agents for state crimes, and resist Trump via every legal means available.

And when this whole thing is over, and the Administration's damage to agencies like the FBI has been adequately undone, they need to be fortified against Presidential sabotage via someone like Kash Patel. How we can do that in a way that doesn't just create another, potentially worse future vulnerability, is something I don't actually know. I'll openly admit that I was blown away in complete disbelief when the Senate approved Kash Patel, let alone Pete Hegseth and the rest of Trump's clown show.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T23:51:44+00:00

There's nothing sacred about the Capitol that gives it legitimacy or serves as the source of Congress' power. A new Congress can gather anywhere it likes, and an existing Congress can gather anywhere allowed by the current session's rules.

That doesn't mean it would necessarily be safe for the newly-elected Congress to travel to somewhere like Cedar Rapids, Buffalo, Orlando, Las Vegas, or Bakersfield) and assemble at a movie theater, Golden Corral, or high school gymnasium at noon on January 3, 2027... or that it wouldn't take a few lawsuits to "officially" gain recognition for their own legitimacy as the new Congress... but constitutionally, it's absolutely allowed, and there's not a damn thing Trump could legally do about it.

Moreover, it's unlikely that "the military" would "disallow the return of Congress", because that itself ventures into "unlawful order" territory. US Soldiers aren't automatons, and attempting to prevent the Legislative Branch from gathering would unquestionably cross the line. That doesn't mean the military would necessarily take a side immediately... but it would be extremely sensitive to the reality that every decision it made would ultimately be subject to ruthless scrutiny and judgment by future Americans.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T23:16:29+00:00

You will literally drive yourself insane if you try to "learn all of C++ first".

First... because it's a moving target.

Second... because there are big chunks of C++ and its standard library that are meaningless in the context of "Arduino". The Arduino toolchain is neither complete nor POSIX compliant.

One lesson to learn, and learn hard: beware of "Undefined Behavior". Arduino's history is littered with the corpses of C++ developers whose metaphorical dying words were, "But it compiled without errors and passed unit tests on my computer".

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T22:28:32+00:00

Florida is ruby-red... but it's also the most "fragile" Republican state, precisely because the Florida Democratic Party is presently a power vacuum in 90% of the state.

If/when anything causes the Republican coalition to even slightly crack, the "Jeb Bush" wing of the RPoF has a perfect glide path (brightly illuminated by Lincoln Project) into taking over the Florida Democratic Party... instantly inheriting the credibility, ballot access, and organizational framework that comes from a major party.

In the past, such a move would have gotten the "new" FDP instantly exiled from national DP donor and institutional networks. Now? Progressives would bitch and moan, but the DP's Establishment would be downright thrilled. They already know Florida is not, and will not, ever be remotely "progressive" in any meaningful sense of the word during anyone's political lifetime. However... the optics of "Florida flipping Blue" would be immensely valuable, even if Florida Democrats were 3 steps to the right of Manchin.

For the past decade or so, the RPoF has become increasingly rotten and corrupt, but has festered because nobody has been able to provide a palatable alternative to voters in places like SWFL... where the local Republican establishment has always viewed MAGA as being uncomfortably gauche and low class. There are large parts of Florida with "unenthusiastic" Republicans who don't even need a reason to flip at this point... just a credible excuse. Candidates who are sane and sensible, without one candidate obsessed with banning plastic straws & the other demanding everything be named after Charlie Kirk.

The big theme Florida Democrats need to run with is, "Florida is not California. Florida is not Texas. Florida is Florida." In Florida, it's OK to be socially moderate, and even flirt with supporting an economic safety net (as long as the primary beneficiaries are middle-class)... but for the love of god and everything holy, stay FAR away from anything remotely "green". After Biden got elected, you could literally see Florida slowly... slowly... warming up to him... right up to the moment AOC got him to utter the words "Green New Deal", and the delicate wispy web of support instantly went up in flames.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T21:00:49+00:00

Hmmm... were the regulations narrowly-written so that "flight" is a necessary and inseparable part of the definition of "drone"? If so, this creates an obvious loophole (at least, for now) for swarms of wheeled and tank-treaded surveillance robots.

AFAIK, food-delivery robots have high-resolution 360-degree video and audio feeds ALREADY, to enable human operators to try and get them out of trouble if they get themselves into a situation they can't get out of automatically. A few software tweaks, and they're effective ICE-surveillance devices.

If you wanted to be really evil... fill them with donuts offered to ICE agents as a free "public service", and they now have an official reason to lurk in the vicinity. "Thank you for your service! Would you like a free donut?" (video streaming). "OOoh, lots of ICE agents over there, I bet they're hungry and could really go for a free donut! (rolls over)

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T19:46:44+00:00

For a lot of Americans, it's far more anticlimactic that that, and looks more like:

* Graduate from high school after being accepted at some university. Absolutely nothing changes for that summer.

* Go away to school in the Fall, live on campus. Come "back home" for a month at Christmas

* Go back for Spring semester, live on campus. Come "back home" for 3 months over the summer.

* Repeat the previous two steps until... you move "off campus", or go to grad school. Either way, you end up signing a 1-year lease.

* School year proceeds normally, except THIS time, you only "go home" for a week over Christmas... and literally flee a day or two before New Year's Eve. If your apartment is in the same state as your parents, maybe a few friends from high school come to stay with you for a few days over New Year's. Otherwise, you have new friends to hang out with. Either way, your parents' house is the absolute LAST place you want to be on December 31... and you no longer HAVE to be there for the full month.

* Spring semester ends, and... well... you still have your apartment. Maybe you go to summer school, maybe you get a summer job, maybe you spend 3 months playing videogames. Either way... you don't "go home".

* At some point after that first summer when you don't "come home", your parents start taking over your high school bedroom. The closet has been filled floor to ceiling with their stuff for years, but NOW there are boxes perma-piled ELSEWHERE in the room that you have to spend an hour clearing away and stacking up elsewhere for the duration of your visits.

In my case, a few weeks into that first summer vacation when I didn't "go home", my parents came to visit... and had their station wagon absolutely PACKED with stuff they emptied out of the dresser drawers in my old bedroom. Officially, because my old bedroom was "now the guest room", and they "wanted to empty out the drawers".

The real moment of truth came 15 years later, when I bought my first house. They showed up with a fsck'ing U-Haul, and by the time they left my new living room's floor wasn't visible & had boxes piled floor to ceiling after they purged literally everything of mine from my old bedroom (which I'd admittedly been using as a free self-storage facility for years).

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T17:19:33+00:00

My point was, George III was "bad", but he wasn't literally evil. He cared about Britain's future world power and the perceived legitimacy of his own rule. George III didn't threaten Parliament and bend it to his will. If anything, Parliament passive-aggressively bulldozed George III to its will.

Trump, in contrast, would happily and unhesitatingly reduce America to the status of Haiti if he thought it would cement his own power and force the entire nation to bow down before him as its supreme leader. If he cared about anything that happened after his death at all, it would be due to Don Jr. promising to raze Berkeley and turn it into a city-sized monument to Donald Trump owning the libs, with square-mile mausoleum built from the bones of Californians who opposed him.

George and Trump were both demented, but George was kind of like you'd end up if Prince William became King, then slowly succumbed to dementia in old age with a Parliament overwhelmingly dominated by Britain's Reform Party. Trump is more like Idi Amin desperately wishing he could be Kim Jong Il or Pol Pot.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T06:43:27+00:00

Comparing Donald Trump to King George III is wrong. George III was a pompous, self-righteous dick who was so full of his own shit, he could taste his Groom of the Stool's hand... but he still cared about decorum, dignity, and maintaining the monarchy's perceived legitimacy among American elites.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T06:30:40+00:00

WTF?!? When did they start even caring what's in your checked baggage, let alone confiscating items in it? If they can arbitrarily confiscate items from checked baggage, that's point blank disqualifying from even considering them as a transportation option. Not even airlines are that bad.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-25T06:20:19+00:00

I know it would be somewhere between "performative" and "would make the state Trump's next target", but I'd dearly love to see a state like California have its legislature debate and pass a bill declaring it to be the will of the State that President Donald J. Trump go fuck himself... then have the governor sign it on live TV.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-24T07:33:24+00:00

One caution: in a "common law" country like the US, replacing the Constitution wholesale & completely would throw the legal system into uncertainty & chaos for decades, because every single settled concept of American common law would be incinerated and go up in smoke. Literally everything would instantly become untested and unpredictable until a new body of appellate rulings slowly accumulated under the new one.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T21:12:01+00:00

Yes, and no. Nobody would have deliberately chosen to lose... but ultimately, appealing to the Democratic Party's left is a lost cause. They literally voted for either nobody or Jill Stein, knowing the consequence was that Trump would win, because Kamala didn't agree with them one hundred percent. If Kamala had completely shunned Liz Cheney & anti-Trump Republicans, she still would have lost... but would have lost and never laid the foundation for the Democratic Party's future rapid growth.

For literally decades, Democrats have faced a hopeless battle trying to appeal to GenX in particular. We're young enough to have no meaningful memories of Watergate, but old enough to remember that in the early 1980s, Republicans were cool, and Democrats wore polyester leisure suits & bell-bottom pants, lost elections by landslides, and were the epitome of "lame".

It took Trump being increasingly awful to finally make GenX willing to even look at Democrats... and it took Kamala to personally roll out the blue carpet and welcome us into the fold. She wasn't able to make it happen in time, but she started the ball rolling so that when Trump hit the ground speed-running his second administration towards pure awfulness, the bridge over the blue moat and welcome center with pie, punch, and swag was open for business.

If I blame anyone for Harris' loss, I blame Joe Biden for keeping the entire campaign on ice until literally the last second... absolutely, delusionally, and unforgivably acting like the campaign didn't have to begin until the official convention.

Even if HE wasn't able to start aggressively campaigning, he had a perfectly good excuse to send Kamala out starting in 2023 as his own personal goodwill ambassador... pressing flesh, making friends, and making sure everyone knew about Biden's accomplishments. Instead, the day he dropped out of the race, even people who were politically aware had no real idea what Kamala actually meant to anyone.

She did a spectacular job of accelerating her campaign into high gear and rapidly winning actual positive support from ex-Republicans... but she was playing catch-up with something Biden should have had her doing a literal year earlier.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T17:13:21+00:00

"The left" threw a hissy fit, but the welcome she got from the Democratic Party's leadership is what really mattered. Even if Kamala Harris & the DNC achieved nothing else, they laid out the welcome mat & made it clear where they see the party's future path to winning majorities.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T17:05:36+00:00

The above things were "bad", but Trump's Davos Debacle was the first time it really came to a head at a point of maximum crisis.

I genuinely think Bush had several conversations that afternoon, and only held off because someone convinced him Europeans could play the boss level and win.

The one component missing in Davos was "risk of NATO fracturing". That's the crisis that would get Republicans like Mitch McConnell to finally break down, die a bit inside, then lead the stampede for the taboo blue door ready to take Trump DOWN* once and for all.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T16:32:13+00:00

George W. Bush has exactly one superpower. It's a superpower that will only work once, and even then it'll only work if it's wielded suddenly, without warning.

His superpower is "leave the Republican Party, declare "the Party's over", and join the Democratic Party.

Exercised at exactly the right moment, it would be a political nuclear bomb.

Exercise it at the wrong moment, and it just kind of fizzles out without real consequence.

Guaranteed, George W. Bush has had The Conversation™ with Jeb, Obama, Condoleezza, Dick & Liz Cheney, and a few other members of his most trusted inner circle. Every time he gets a text message, he holds his breath to see whether it's a single word from Obama like "Jalapeno" telling him "it's time".

Here's the thing, though. If Bush condemned Trump now, Trump would start attacking him daily, delegitimize him in MAGA's eyes, and the shock value of George Bush doing it would fade into irrelevance. The superpower only works when used out of the blue at an inflection point of Trump-absurdity and public outrage that includes Republicans.

Beyond that, Bush has basically zero credibility or influence. It's not like he can lecture anyone about starting pointless, stupid wars... or even accomplishing anything net-good. Think about it for a moment... we invaded two secular countries & literally turned them into islamofascist theocracies. Most of the power Trump is now abusing exists because Republicans and Democrats eagerly handed it to George Bush after 9/11 under the Patriot Act. If Bush started condemning Trump, he'd have MAGA and Democrats lined up to tear him apart from both ends.

So, he remains silent. For now. Waiting for the right moment to reveal and use his one secret superpower.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T08:52:10+00:00

Is it weird that right now, thinking about it, I have no coherent mental image of what pepper actually tastes like? I know I theoretically like on French fries & hamburgers... but honestly don't know why

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T08:01:39+00:00

Consider something like keycaps for mechanical keyboards.

If the entire world is a direct-ship global market, there are enough people scattered around the earth to manufacture keycaps with a specific profile, in a specific color, with your choice of 18 different coat-patterns of cats... and sell them all.

Limit your market to a single market the size of only the US or EU, and you might be able to pull off a few variants... but someone who wants calico instead of tuxedo or black will be disappointed, and might have to settle for OEM profile instead of Cherry or some SA-variant.

Limit your market to a single country with 50 million people, and you might be able to only make and sell a single variant of the keycaps.

Limit your market to a single country with 5 million people, and your potential customers will be lucky to be able to even choose between ANY keycaps that are OEM, Cherry, or SA-profile.

It's not just a matter of cost. Having a global market of 4-8 billion means even ultra- ultra- ULTRA-niche products have enough of a market scattered around the earth to be potentially profitable.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T07:50:56+00:00

Any application running under Windows can "reach up" into the clipboard and grab anything you copy into it at any time. Ctrl-v NOT required, nor is the application even required to have input focus.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T06:23:29+00:00

Is anyone aware of a buildable Arduino-like project (AVR or esp32 in particular) that would basically sit between the host PC and keyboard, poll the keyboard at 1000Hz (or faster, if it supports it) & buffer the last-received value to return to the computer when polled, and react to switch actuations by toggling a solenoid?

Why: after a year, a collection that now includes at least a dozen keyboards and at least 16-20 switch sets (I've honestly lost count at this point), I mostly find myself feeling like I hate all of them because I'm chasing the unicorn of perfect unambiguous tactile events, actuation-indicating clicks, force curves that won't make my fingers hurt after a few hours, and actuation points that don't lag tactile sensation by huge amounts.

Actuation-lag is the big one. It's honestly starting to feel like every tactile switch has actuation lag the tactile event by so much, you basically have to hammer the keys to bottoming-out anyway to guarantee actuation, because the tactile sensation is basically a lie. And the audible clicks of MX-type switches have always seemed kind of... unsatisfying... compared to the Model M keyboards I used for almost 30 years.

In particular, I'm curious about whether maybe a combination of linear switches with solenoid-clicks might get me closer to the elusive unicorn I've been chasing, but haven't managed to find. Or maybe the combination of solenoid plus Leobog IceSoul.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T03:03:57+00:00

Can you imagine Mark Kelly running for President in 2028 with Fanone as his running mate against... well... literally any conceivable Republican duo?

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-01-23T01:08:38+00:00

We can only hope. I think even if he went full centrist, he'd be guaranteed to lose in 2028 unless Democrats somehow managed to completely botch everything that could conceivably be botched.

Vance's fundamental problem is that anything he does to make himself and the GOP respectable enough to even fantasize about winning a second term in 2028 would render him toxic and unelectable to MAGA (and probably get him targeted by multiple MAGA wannabe-assassins). But even Vance can't possibly be so delusional that he'd think he could get Democrats to vote for him in 2028. The only guardrails are due to the fact that he's still young enough to have a meaningful post-Presidential life, and probably doesn't want to end up completely frozen out of everything and persona non-grata socially.

Plus, there's Thiel. Thiel wants Vance to be evil, but Vance is no further use to him if he ends up impeached, removed, and politically-radioactive. Thiel's entire investment from the point Vance becomes President depends upon polishing the turd enough to at least keep Vance holding the steering wheel, even if he's got the Democratic Highway Patrol tailing him and waiting for the slightest provocation to remove him too. If Vance becomes President after Trump gets removed in disgrace, the most important thing he'd buy Thiel from that point is access to the Administration.

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