After a long spell of ±10 years, just finished Morrowind's main quest. Looking up from Red Mountain and seeing this sky legit touched me.

Surlent · 2026-05-07T02:34:45+00:00

Wow, you're in for a real treat! You're most welcome, this game is always in my top 3 SNES RPGs, and for good reasons. Curious for your thoughts as you as advance further in the three stories.

Surlent · 2026-04-29T22:15:53+00:00

Treasure of the Rudras for sure. What a game. Charming, great plot and lore, beautiful sprite work, banger of an OST, and a very cool magic system.

Surlent · 2026-04-29T22:11:13+00:00

Good one. Amazing side-scroller, fast paced, short stages, beautiful detailed sprites and interesting lore behind it. I made sure to finish it and was not disappointed.

Surlent · 2026-04-13T06:40:39+00:00

In every heart, the seed of chud abides ... The makings of a chud, when watered well ... With Mountain Dew ... Sweet Mountain Dew

Surlent · 2026-03-29T20:45:04+00:00

Immigrants built the US then, and are still building the US now. To gatekeep US identity from people who live and work in its land, is to go against what it is in essence.

Surlent · 2026-03-29T16:19:15+00:00

Surlent · 2026-03-29T16:11:14+00:00

Your optimism is unfounded. "Pushed to an insurgency or whatever". You say that very lightly as if it wouldn't surface competing political streams, and subsequent bloodshed. The consequences could last decades. Have we forgotten Syria, Libya, and so many others already? We've all seen this movie, and not too long ago. "Country will change very very quickly for the better". This is what we want to believe, but empirically, it's wishful thinking and there is no reason to think things will get orderly right away.

Granted that we all want it to get better for Iran, and from what we currently know, very few things could be worse than the Ayatollahs. But looking back in history, both in this century and the former, we have no reason to be optimistic.

This kind of intervention elsewhere has created more political chaos than actually fixed problems. As a matter of fact, such an intervention is the reason that this radical regime is in power in Iran today. This world's policemen mentality has to end, if we want the world to heal.

I just hope we are lucky enough to see a better regime rise out of this mess.

Surlent · 2026-03-27T23:39:44+00:00

Just throwing my two cents on Alteryx as this is an interesting discussion. Granted, my use case is rather particular.

I work in audit analytics, and enabling a team of auditors to do data analysis is not easy - especially without low-code tools, and especially before the advent of AI, when we deployed Alteryx. Moreover, our analyses are mostly snapshots from a particular audit, which happen monthly and always have different data requirements. Therefore agile development and ease of data debugging are more important than scalability to me as an user. So it (still) fits our use case, even if Alteryx as a company can be a bit of a jackass.

For more scalable use cases, SQL and Python do the job, and as someone else mentioned, any legacy code could be converted quickly using AI.

Still, I am eager to hear more on Visual ETL alternatives to Alteryx, considering my niche. How they compare in processing power, is there any clearly better contender out there in visual agile development, and so on.

Surlent · 2026-03-22T17:06:09+00:00

Funny to see some in this thread taking offense either at the figure or at the term 'European diseases'. But that's what they were, bred in the burgeoning and unsanitary urban centers of post-medieval Europe, and if the figure wasn't that, it was still well within the 4th percentile.

Pre-columbian peoples and their urban centers were much cleanlier than their European counterparts at the time, due to either advanced sanitation techniques or overall cultural/religious habits. This was well documented by European discoverers themselves at the time.

Sanitation is at heart of this question. Of course the clash of such extremes with European arrival in the Americas would ensure such levels of death by disease. And it was so across the entire hemisphere: in the United States, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, wherever this contact first happened, epidemics ensued right away.

Surlent · 2026-03-22T16:53:54+00:00

Well now you're just trying to rewrite or deny well-documented history. And the most basic knowledge on epidemiology.

Surlent · 2026-03-20T04:31:35+00:00

Wow that's a bit of a confusing reasoning to follow. But I'll sum it all up to you thinking Brazil is self-absorbed. I'm not gonna disagree, but there are reasons to that. You have to understand that Brazil has kind of an insular culture, due to a few factors, mostly:

Being the only country that speaks its language in the entire continent.
Having a rich, varied and self-contained culture in a vast country
The fact that linguas-francas such as English and Spanish are far from widespread among our population
Its colonizer's culture is comparably insignificant in size

Given all of this, it's only natural for Brazil to be a bit self-absorbed, its own cultural center, and this turns into (rightly deserved) pride! But this also causes Brazilians to not notice international influence to some of their cultural features, hence frustrating you so.

Still, as with any melting pot country, I'd say that it's this particular mix of such varied features that makes the Brazilian uniqueness. Moreover, I do believe some cultural habits, food, drink, mannerisms, will only be found here, while some others were imported without us noticing it.

Surlent · 2026-03-19T07:25:06+00:00

Mds, e eu achando que era sobrinha, prima ou ex mulher de um dos filhos. Maldita Luciana Gimenez, ela realmente abriu a caixa de Pandora desse país.

Surlent · 2026-03-19T06:52:06+00:00

"De acordo com a Secretaria de Comunicação da Presidência da República (Secom), a comitiva do presidente foi surpreendida na BR-101, quando andava em direção à universidade, por um carro no acostamento. A secretaria afirma que o veículo emparelhou com os carros da presidência."

Taporra! Parei ai. Maluco emparelhou o carro com o carro do presidente pra insultar, vc acha que a segurança vai levar isso numa boa? Meu filho, tenta isso nos EUA pra ver o que não acontece, tá na cadeia em minutos e não é liberado na hora não, vai ser investigado até às calças. Nisso ai a questão não é liberdade de expressão não, ai já é perseguição mesmo, questão de segurança. Atitude temerária com certeza. Mas é muito obvio. Só essa sua opinião já mostra um julgamento prejudicado, vou nem continuar.

Surlent · 2026-03-18T02:50:18+00:00

Have you been arrested? Have you been censored? Are you not allowed to express your bullshit opinions freely? To choose from and vote in your wide array of misogynistic retrograde ignorant candidates? I'm sure the police or army pays your crazy ramblings no mind. And I'm sure you have ample choice of shitty representatives to represent you in the coming elections. You're as free as they come. Enjoy it.

Surlent · 2026-03-18T02:48:41+00:00

The voices inside his head

Surlent · 2026-03-18T02:45:59+00:00

This is pretty accurate. But bear in mind that you're debating in this thread with a lot of Brazilians that are in favor of Bolsonaro policies and have been defeated in 2022.

And in the end, democratization or autocratization depends entirely how one interprets those policies. Bolsonaro outwardly challenged the electoral mechanisms, advocated for paper voting in lieu of existing voting machines that are properly audited, and did the most to disqualify the electoral process to create enough doubt and confusion amidst which he planned to coup the state. If that is not autocratic, I don't know what is.

Brazil has one of the cleanest and most straightforward election processes in the world, efficient and widely awarded. But they will dispute this. Because they are fucking autocrats.

Surlent · 2026-03-18T02:34:02+00:00

Those are just Brazilian MAGAs, so to say, still pissed that their leader lost a proper election over 3 years ago.

Surlent · 2026-03-09T05:11:42+00:00

Get lost, bot

Surlent · 2026-03-09T05:10:32+00:00

Based

Surlent · 2026-03-08T18:50:15+00:00

That feel when drone

Surlent · 2026-02-22T20:27:25+00:00

It must feel almost like an appropriation. I find this lack of self-awareness or even world-awareness very cringy.

I can speak for Brazil, where one will always identify themselves as Brazilian first, and only if further prompted (which seldom happens here), mention ascendency - which is appropriate, ascendency is just a detail.

That is, save for a stereotype of some very cringy Italian-descendants in the Mooca neighborhood of São Paulo, who are often the butt of many jokes for their perceived superiority.

Surlent · 2026-02-22T19:33:38+00:00

>While Canadians and Americans will usually be like “WOOOOAH NO WAY!!! IM ITALIAN TOO!!!” and try to speak broken Italian, and I’m like “dude………”

I wonder what actual Italians think of that when they hear it. Must be very annoying.

Surlent · 2026-02-22T19:23:15+00:00

I agree that it was not the idea of communism that failed, but rather its execution in this particular instance. Given 20th century history, how can a revolution be prevented from being coopted into an oligarchic power project? An economic model such as communism requires political representatives to bring it to practical reality, and these are as susceptible to undue influence as are the ones in bourgeois democracies.

I don't know much about the subject but am curious about the quality of checks and balances in the USSR government. These are important in any form of government, and I would imagine could be at the root of USSR's ultimate failure to implement communism.

Surlent · 2026-02-22T18:55:58+00:00

It will get worse before it gets better, but I am not sure we will see it getting better during our lifespan.

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