“Yeah, takes us a while to get any traction, I’ll give you that one.”

“Read” and “readed.”

Man, I don’t recognize this at all. At work I’m currently in the middle of a two-month project that I think will end up producing about ten lines of code. It’s all about tracking a bunch of stuff down in a gigantic code base and then trial-and-erroring all of it until it works.

So, my mother-in-law’s phone keyboard switches to French-Canadian? Yeah, I can definitely fix that! My dad wants a mesh network in his house so he can listen to music in the garage? Can do! My kid’s audio player breaks and I need to transplant in a new part? Give it to me! My wife’s computer won’t print suddenly? These little wins (and sometimes medium sized wins!) are euphoric. They keep me from feeling like I’ve wasted an entire day switching one variable, running a build, and then switching it back.

Sure, it gets annoying when they don’t try anything before they ask, or they keep having the same problem over and over again. But that’s by far the minority.

Yes. If it is built using public money, it belongs to the public.

Just stop with this. It’s a form of obeying in advance: buying into the despair of nothing being possible, and everything being broken.

Their plan is to make it seem like there’s no point in fighting so nobody does, but if we give up the fight three years out we’re just conceding that ground to them.

Yes, they’re going to cheat. So we have to make it impossible for them to manipulate. Yes, they might try to make it look like a landslide anyway. So we have to be ready to take every single possible thing all the way through the courts.

Yes, the Supreme Court is a captured entity as well. So we have to overwhelm and clog up the apparatus they’re using to make it do horrible things and force everyone from the poll worker all the way up to the SCOTUS justice to publicly go on record and say “voter fraud is ok.” Then, when fascism falls (and it always does, don’t kid yourself) we know who to throw in jail first.

Don’t give up in advance. They want you to love Big Orange Brother or fear Big Orange Brother with every fiber of your being; either way, you’ll never stand up to him.

We assume there’s an election until there isn’t. We assume it’s fair (or fair-ish) until we have proof it isn’t. Anything less is saying “eh, you can have this one.”

Ok, last 20 years. So that’s Obama v. McCain, Obama v. Romney, Clinton v. Trump, Biden v. Trump, and Harris v. Trump. Five elections: two featured probably the most attractive (or at least youngest) president in recent history winning, and the other three featured maybe the ugliest S. O. B. on God’s green earth, who won twice. I feel like it’s generally a tossup.

The links I have are on my computer and that’s at work, sorry. The one thing I can tell you for certain is that Musk’s media manipulation on Twitter constituted voter fraud. There are a ton of rumors about more direct manipulation, a lot of which I find unconvincing, but some of which I think merit further investigation.

I don’t mean voter fraud is the theory. Yes, obviously it definitely happened and will happen again. I mean the commonly-repeated theory that there “won’t be an election” next year. That is a great way to just capitulate the election in advance.

Honestly I might have replied to the wrong comment. I’m sorry.

I don’t think there’s any data to prove that. There have only been two women ever nominated by a major party, and they both had substantial electoral problems absent their gender.

Remember, a “big chunk of the voting population” would never vote for a reality TV show host. Or for a Black man. Or for the son of a previous president. Or for a movie star. Or for a Catholic. Or for someone who had never served in the armed forces. Or for someone who wasn’t supported by the Southern states. Or for someone who wasn’t from one of the 13 original colonies. Or for someone from the Whig party. Or for someone who wasn’t alive during the Revolution. —in each case, until it happened.

47 (really 45, Cleveland and Trump being one person but having two administrations each) just isn’t a big enough number to draw any statistical significance from. And we’ve elected women to every other elected office for decades. And other countries that are no more progressive than we are have elected women.

I’m not saying that women wouldn’t have to excel to beat a merely-adequate man in a presidential race; but for a good candidate, their gender isn’t as much of a drag on the vote as a ton of other factors.

Except when you realize that the last five Republican presidents have looked like: Annoying Orange with a cobweb toupee and a perfectly cylindrical body; the guy who bullied literally everyone in high school; an unholy combination of Jeff Daniels, age 70 on the right side and Jeff Daniels, age 40 on the left side; a washed up movie star with too many hours under the warming lamp; and the villain in a teen movie about having a bake sale to save the local dance hall.

The guy currently stinking up the place.

Cool theory. Not helpful.

We have to assume there’ll be an election until there isn’t.

I don’t know, Valve is financially motivated to make every game they sell a hit. This isn’t like YouTube, where they want people to keep churning out content without remuneration; Valve only gets paid when video game companies sell their game.

And as a software engineer myself, I can totally see how this bug could’ve happened. There are so many ways, in fact; they released on 2024-12-12, maybe the bug was that they also released at 12:12, and some ancient code in the emailer got set up to treat any repeating string of four 12’s as a signal that this is only a test and shouldn’t actually be sent (probably in an attempt to diagnose and fix another bug), but that if statement was never removed from the codebase before it shipped.

Or maybe there’s a weird overflow error that happens when an email is supposed to go to exactly a certain number of customers. It’s kind of close to a number divisible by 64 (138,688); maybe it’s just sloppy binary unit choce?

Or maybe it was at the end of the email fanout for the day and the server crashed without warning, and lost some games without notifying anyone. That would only have to happen once a year over that decade and it would add up to all 100 games.

The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity. Or at least a SWE going too quickly and not checking their work.

Trump insiders claim

Suuuuuuure. I’ll believe it when I…actually probably never.

Oh, this is great news. I have Nova tweaked to work almost exactly like this. Excellent, thank you.