Your mistake here was saying “puppies” too early. You have to lead with a couple paragraphs of how you’re a flexitarian who has a farm and humanely raised animals like pets and then slaughters and feed them to your family.

Then list off the animals you exploit, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens, cats and ducks. Then their brain gets hit with the dissonance of “wait why did I support this and then stop the second they said ‘dog’?” That jarring experience can work for the intellectually honest type.

Saying it too early means they can categorize your post as satire easily and not engage with it at all mentally.

They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.

Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.

I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.

The end goal is near-total eradication of the natives. Similar to native americans in the U.S. Israel is a settler state, much like the U.S was, and actively drove the natives out of their homes. They’re almost done though, we’re seeing some of the final acts of the ethnic cleansing/genocide.

Once there are barely any left, they’ll feign sympathy to garner support, and that’ll be that. Another win for imperialist settler states. Nothing unique or special about it.

Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

I don’t think the person you’re responding to is a Trump supporter. I think they’re critiquing the vast amounts of political energy people put into supporting and justifying a genocidal state and its leaders.

Your entire comment exemplifies this perfectly. There’s obviously a lot of time and effort you’ve put into forming your electoral views, and you obviously spend a good deal of time going around, at the very least online, trying to inform people how to make better decisions inside the electoral sphere.

This is exactly what electoralism tries to drive in people. The expenditure of political capital within acceptable bounds. Before electoralism/liberal democracies, political capital accumulated and was then spent on strikes, riots, or revolutions. Things that are much more effective at driving change per political capital spent.

There are literally millions of people like you in America that could all immediately stop all your expenditure of political capital and it would make actually no material difference. That’s a beautiful thing about electoralism (for those in power), the thing that matters is the differential, not the total expenditure. This is why “swing states” exist.

I’ll put it into concrete terms, imagine the amount of electorally active individuals in America was immediately cut in half. The population remains the same, but exactly half of the current voting population stops voting. Assume all ratios remain the same. There’d be fundamentally no difference in material outcomes.

Now imagine if all current political capital was spent towards strikes, unions, revolution, or really any form of politics outside electoralism. Doubling or halfing this engagement would be massive. Real material outcomes would be different if there were thousands more strikes. What doesn’t matter is if the voting population is 150 million, 90 million, or 10 million. Only the differential matters, and only for determining a fixed binary outcome.

Until the tankies seize power and start killing the anarchists for being anti-state xd

Not all tankies would do this, but it’s happened before and it’s good to be cautious around those who want supreme authority, even if they claim it’s just “temporary”. If we see the Chinese state wither away and give rise to a truly communist society, I’ll be genuinely surprised.

Sadly defunding of the space program has rarely meant funding proper welfare. It’s not really an either or situation, or at least it hasn’t been yet.

Presidents are above the law while they’re in office. This case is unique because it happened before he was in office. The message that will really be sent is “wait until you’re actually president to do would-be illegal shit”.

Still worth handing him a harsh sentence, just to put the orange fascist fuck behind bars, but there shouldn’t be any misconceptions about some true notion of justice here. Trump is just a moron, and didn’t know how to play the game correctly.

Not all gamers are triple A gamers. I’d call myself an avid gamer (I used to put in easily 80 hour weeks gaming, now it’s almost always lower, but I’ll still go on gaming binges during long vacations or holidays).

The vast, vast majority of my time has been WoW and LoL. I have played other games throughout the years, but usually in the same genres (mmo/moba).

A lot of these games have entry fees of below $70. Right now most of my gaming time is cata classic, and that requires $15 a month. Over time that will obviously add up, but everything adds up overtime, and $15 a month is not prohibitively expensive for most people. Also it’s really only $15 for the first month, just by leveling in cata classic to max you make enough to buy a wow token, and can easily pay $0 a month every month by just using in game currency.

Coding happens in languages. This works much the same way as natural language, sometimes you’ll speak in a way that is very clear to you and people who speak that language, but not to others.

sumSquares = sum . map (^ 2)

vs

def sumSquares(numbers):
    result = 0
    for number in numbers:
        result += number ** 2
    return result

Function composition is clear to people who speak Haskell, and eliminating mutation/untracked side effects helps to keep behavior local and gives equational reasoning. You can ask your IDE what the type of sumSquares is, and immediately know without looking at the implementation that there are no side effects, and what the types are.

On the flip side, most programmers can read basic Python, the C family of languages has seen more adoption, and Python simplifies a lot of the syntax/concepts down to their most basic forms. Python tries to be the most like English, and this is both its greatest strength and weakness (English can be an abysmal language for structured data processing).

You can of course write the Haskell to look more like the Python, or the Python to look more like Haskell. But I’d say the two snippets above represent idiomatic code for those languages, and as someone who actually loves FP, I wish Python never introduced list comprehensions/generator expressions (what a lot of people would use to implement the above in Python). If you’re trying to write typesafe functional code, you should just not be using Python.

Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.

If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.

“they can’t learn anything” is too reductive. Try feeding GPT4 a language specification for a language that didn’t exist at the time of its training, and then tell it to program in that language given a library that you give it.

It won’t do well, but neither would a junior developer in raw vim/nano without compiler/linter feedback. It will roughly construct something that looks like that new language you fed it that it wasn’t trained on. This is something that in theory LLMs can do well, so GPT5/6/etc. will do better, perhaps as well as any professional human programmer.

Their context windows have increased many times over. We’re no longer operating in the 4/8k range, but instead 128k->1024k range. That’s enough context to, from the perspective of an observer, learn an entirely new language, framework, and then write something almost usable in it. And 2024 isn’t the end for context window size.

With the right tools (e.g input compiler errors and have the LLM reflect on how to fix said compiler errors), you’d get even more reliability, with just modern day LLMs. Get something more reliable, and effectively it’ll do what we can do by learning.

So much work in programming isn’t novel. You’re not making something really new, but instead piecing together work other people did. Even when you make an entirely new library, it’s using a language someone else wrote, libraries other people wrote, in an editor someone else wrote, on an O.S someone else wrote. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants.

18 months ago, chatgpt didn’t exist. GPT3.5 wasn’t publicly available.

At that same point 18 months ago, iPhone 14 was available. Now we have the iPhone 15.

People are used to LLMs/AI developing much faster, but you really have to keep in perspective how different this tech was 18 months ago. Comparing LLM and smartphone plateaus is just silly at the moment.

Yes they’ve been refining the GPT4 model for about a year now, but we’ve also got major competitors in the space that didn’t exist 12 months ago. We got multimodality that didn’t exist 12 months ago. Sora is mind bogglingly realistic; didn’t exist 12 months ago.

GPT5 is just a few months away. If 4->5 is anything like 3->4, my career as a programmer will be over in the next 5 years. GPT4 already consistently outperforms college students that I help, and can often match junior developers in terms of reliability (though with far more confidence, which is problematic obviously). I don’t think people realize how big of a deal that is.

I like your comment, but there’s an important note that needs to be made, I’m not the one who invented the conflation of organizational and electoral politics. Putting all that under the sphere of “politics; not to be discussed at work” was a convenient tactic by capitalists to delegitimize important political discussions under the guise of the important considerations you bring up.

Conflation is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Capitalists do it with other things too (legitimizing private property by putting personal property under that umbrella, somehow making you owning your own home the same “kind” of ownership as Elon Musk/Tesla owning a factory on the other side of the planet that he’s never stepped foot into).

The dual to conflation here is intersectionalism, which is important to consider too. It’s not always relevant (e.g foreign trade policy often won’t intersect with organizational politics), but it sometimes is. “right to work” ideals in electoral politics directly impacts organizational politics, so if we legitimize and normalize the latter, it’d be hard to unilaterally ban the former as well. The line gets muddy, and it’s better to stray too far on the side of allowing too much discussion so organizing can actually take place, than too much restriction.

I get some people have immense faith in capitalist rule, that you genuinely believe that the reason it’s normalized to not discuss salaries or politics is for your own good. Some people don’t believe in class antagonisms. This used to be a purely fascist position, but liberals adopted it in the mid 20th century because of how effective it is at driving complacency.

Politics used to be common in the workplace. Not necessarily electoral politics, but organizational politics, which is far more important and impactful, and also much more regulated by capitalists and the petite bourgeoise. I’ve talked to my boss about electoral politics before, and it didn’t cause issues. If I brought up unions with him I’d be fired within a month (based on how other union organizers were let go).

Yup, just like it’s employment 101 to not discuss salaries.

Lack of communication and organization is a fantastic way to keep workers in line. Genuinely all it takes are a handful of socialists in an environment of heavily exploited workers to get a union going. They can all feel the material harm capitalism is causing, but lack the language and means to express and resist that harm.

When socialists provide it (via politics in the workplace), that harms companies. When communication takes place (salary sharing, organization tactics, etc.) you place a strain on the bourgeoise to behave more inline with worker expectations. This isn’t what capitalists want.

I don’t think revolutions are any more likely to be fascist than socialist, historically though genuine socialist revolutions tend to lose, mostly because international capitalism can play very nicely with fascism, but not socialism.

However if the U.S underwent genuine socialist revolutions, it’s an entirely different ballgame. The U.S has been the capitalist hand on the global stage for the better part of a century, constantly involved in overthrowing democratically elected governments in favor of fascist dictatorships.

With that constant capitalistic/fascistic pressure gone, and better-yet replaced with genuine socialism, you’d get a very interesting situation. You’d have genuine socialism in the U.S (probably followed by at least some socialist revolution or socialist-inspired reforms in Europe), and then rhetorical socialism in the east, marred by material capitalism. The contradictions of the global stage would intensify, and I don’t think there’s any Chinese theory for development in an internationally socialist stage.

It’s more counterproductive to be a non-vegan and try to convince nobody. I’ve had a good deal of success convincing people to go vegan. There are definitely vegans that are more successful than me, but you want to know who is always less successful? Non-vegans who rage online about vegans.

They should be the focus of our criticism, both in their own actions, and even as a broader strategy for enacting change.

Also I’d go as far to claim malapropisms don’t exist. There is no “incorrect” use of a word. I’m not a prescriptivist. Language is about communicating ideas, and I know everything I’ve said would make sense to a great deal of people I know.

Maybe something doesn’t make sense to you, maybe because we learned different definitions or usages of some word or phrase. Neither of us are wrong, we’ve just hit a language barrier. This is uncommon in English, but actually happens quite regularly in Europe even with two people speaking “the same language”.

Our best example of this is going from American -> British English, but it can happen within the same “dialect” too.

Now there are obviously times where you try to adopt some language someone else has, and misunderstood it, so your usage aligns with essentially nobody else’s (so the word has lost all function). I know that’s not the case with what I’m saying because I’ve had these types of conversations with enough people who have understood me, but I’m fine humoring you, and still interested where the clash/miscommunication happened.

Feel free to correct me, most (or dare I say all) people aren’t born omniscient, so sometimes we misuse words or phrases. I’m not sorry to admit that I’m sometimes incorrect about things, I used to be a staunch non-vegan for example.

what state is forcing a diet on you

The dog and cat meat trade prohibition act in 2018 in the U.S outlaws the slaughter and trade of dog/cat meat, in effect banning it as a diet.

I’d be more than happy with this exact same legislation being passed, but just for chickens/cows/pigs/etc. too. If you don’t think that this is prohibiting a diet, sure. Let’s just ban the slaughter/trade of cow/pig/chicken meat and say we found a good compromise.