I think it’s interesting is that so many autocracies keep up the pretense of democratic and rules-based governance; even North Korea has elections. Same with political trials like you see in so many authoritarian regimes, from modern Russia or China to Nazi Germany – it’s like autocrats need to be able to pretend to themselves that the system they run is fair and just, and that they’re not just tyrants who govern with impunity and enforce rules arbitrarily.

What I don’t get is why? Why bother when it’s immediately obvious to everyone that it’s all a sham? Why not drop the pretense, which everybody knows is just a pretense?

And it’s usually the people with room temperature IQs (and I’m talking Celsius) calling everything AI. You know, the type who can’t recognize actual AI pictures and probably also thinks the Moon landings were faked

Oh yeah they definitely have uses, but there’s a real tendency for people to go a bit crazy with them. Complex regexen aren’t exactly readable, there’s all kinds of fun performance gotchas, there’s sometimes other tools/algorithms that are more suitable for the task, and sometimes people try to use them to eg. parse HTML because they don’t know that it is literally impossible to use regular expressions to parse languages that aren’t regular

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

Well, since it’s Temu Pinhead, he’ll have absolutely no sights to show us and will probably randomly just drop dead(er)

I’m AuDHD (not self-diagnosed), and I’ve felt like neurotypicals do need a longer time to get over fights than I do, whether in relationships or otherwise.

Thank fuck this is no longer the case – the “non-smoking” sections were usually just 2nd hand smoke sections

Uh, define “working”?

Nice phrase but that doesn’t seem to be how things have worked for a while now

I’ve had a conservative say essentially that to me but with a straight face. He was also convinced that white, cishet meat eater men are the most oppressed minority (literally what he said).

Parodying conservative opinions is completely impossible nowadays; any quip anybody can come up with will be an actual conservative opinion, pretty much no matter how ridiculously stupid it is.

Yes because it’s literally impossible to not use some services or products because you don’t want to support their makers, because for some reason that means you can’t use anything else either.

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion you just don’t like people disagreeing with views that you share

Ah the two genders, male and political

So everything now hinges on centrists and “moderate” conservatives not supporting fascists?

Terrific! It’s not like that has ever happened before

Every time somebody says something like “I could have done that” (especially if they’re being dismissive of somebody’s achievement), it brings me great pleasure to say “but you didn’t.”

I’m in my 40’s and trans, and ever since I was a child I knew I didn’t fit my assigned gender and it just felt… wrong. Took me a long time to understand this was me being trans and not me being “broken” somehow, thanks to a conservative upbringing, but basically I’ve known all my life.

You better not be gearing up to go all Deliverance on us with that story

Ah, good idea putting the fire in the tent, that way the fire will stay warm

The first time I saw a headline about this, just saying that the Supreme Court overturned “the Chevron doctrine” my initial thought was that I have no idea wtf they did but if the votes went 6-3 I know it can’t be anything good.

Much to my consternation I appear to have been right.