Had a college friend. Fun guy, but what started as “a little unreliable” when we lived on campus together turned into “massive flakey ghost” when we didn’t. Drove me a little crazy. Eventually another friend said this guy doesn’t respect me and I should stop wasting my time. I don’t remember if there was a clean break but we haven’t talked in years. I doubt he thinks about me at all, but he’s a sort of archetype of one kind of asshole for me.

But I’m kind of insufferable myself, so there are probably a handful of people out there with stories about me. Welp. Nothing to do but try to do better.

I saw batboy in Brooklyn and it was a great show.

I don’t see a reason not to teach more about personal finance. How interest works. Consequences for missing payments. I knew a guy that when he was 18 just maxed out several credit cards to buy fun stuff. He got out of that hole eventually, but it was a rough couple years.

I think there’s an underlying problem that I don’t know if you can just teach people, but I think people need to be better at delayed gratification and thinking about consequences. Like that old friend of mine, even if he knew that the credit card debt was going to be more expensive long term, he wanted the tv and stereo now. I don’t know if you can teach that.

And, even if you could, it’s fucked up that people who are poor through little fault of their own are told to just live with less, while people born into wealth can squander it.

So, at the end of this tangent, we should have mechanisms so the floor is high enough people can still have a decent life, and the ceiling is low enough that no one has four mansions.

The legislation seeks to amend existing immigration law to bar entry and naturalization, as well as create new grounds for deportation for anyone linked to what it describes as “totalitarian” parties, both foreign and domestic.

Trumpism is pretty “totalitarian”. I wouldn’t be that upset if all the magas got removed from power, and the irony of their own law being used to do it would be delicious.

That humor aside, this is a terrible idea that should be grounds for Roy’s immediate removal from office.

My leading theory is there are many, many, people who are semi literate and don’t realize. They think reading is just kind of uncomfortable and slow, and don’t understand why anyone else would. Maybe they’re reading each word out loud in their head, sounding some of them out. You wouldn’t find a lot of people like that on a text based platform like this.

But for someone like that, an AI summary or video is probably a relief.

I took some dubious online reading speed tests the other day and it said like 350wpm, but the average is like half that.

Personally, I think the solution would be to invest in education, but there’s no quarterly money in public good.

With a 9 prefix for organic!

Given the amount of people saying they don’t want a stranger engaging with them in this thread, and the op describing it as liberating, you may be in the minority.

And it’s not apathy really. It’s more like… respect. If someone asks for help, that’s different than just barging into their space.

The stagnating wages and fraying social bonds are problems, though.

I got home this morning and found my cat mid-sceam. He was startled when I walked in and then started chattering at me. I guess sometimes he screams when he’s home alone.

Now he’s lounging on my lap

Conservatives don’t care about being correct or consistent. They say things for effect. They follow their feelings. Something inside them is broken and ruined. They project constantly onto others, because introspection would shatter their flimsy ego.

Also doing my part. Fuck Microsoft. It would have been a harder choice if Windows was, like, fast, stable, and efficient. But it’s not. It’s jank and AI slop. Fuck them.

It’s hubris and/or abuse, and should be illegal barring exceptional circumstances.

Public schools should be well funded.

Private schools should also be illegal.

I don’t find “lol 5% of the time something WACKY happens!” very fun very long, no. That is too high a frequency for freak events. Actually, it’s 10% because people do wackiness on natural 1s and natural 20s. That’s too much! That’s so much it’s distracting.

I outlined the dice system I liked from nWoD in another comment. You can get some wild outcomes there, but it’s not the absurd flat “10% of every roll is insanely good or bad”. You get the occasional “I can’t believe I rolled three tens convinced the vampire I was a wizard!”, still.

I am a huge fan of dice pools and absolutely done with “roll one die vs target”. The flat probability you get from one die doesn’t give results that feel good.

I was a big fan of the nWoD’s S10 system. Add up your stat, skill, and relevant bonuses, roll this many d10s. Every one that comes up as {8, 9, 10} adds to degree of success. Roll another die for every one that came up {10}, possibly repeating if you keep rolling 10s.

You get pretty consistent results. Someone who’s a professional will throw ~6 dice on average, so they’re very likely to succeed on basic tasks. Much less of that “lol the wizard rolled a 1 and forgot how to read” or “barbarian rolled a 20, I guess he can speak infernal?” weirdness. You still get freak outliers every once in a while, where someone rolls like six 10s in a row and everyone’s cheering. But not 5% of the time, and not so binary.

Plus there’s other “dice tricks” you can apply for different circumstances. “Reroll all failed dice once”, “reroll 9s like 10s”, etc.

1d20+stuff is just so basic and threadbare. It’s not even easier. nWod’s dice pool you don’t even have to add. You just count. We all know players that can’t add 16+7, but they can probably count to 4.

Not a fan of the “lol natural 20 zaniness happens” trope. That’s 5% of the time.

Also Shadowrun doesn’t even use d20s

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

Mixed. I find new artists I like somewhat frequently, but genre-wise I don’t often go that far.

I don’t really relate to “I listen to all kinds of music! A hundred new songs a day!”. I find an album I like and spend a couple weeks with it, then find something new. I go into my backlog a lot.

I buy music (mostly on Bandcamp) so that works for me. Cheaper than a subscription,.and now I have a library.

There was someone a while ago who was trying to get a web ring going for like nerd stuff. They said so many of their friends and people they talked to loved the idea, but no one made a site of their own.

I posted it in a local community group, and everyone said the same thing.

Google also making search worse so people will use their slop machine instead

This is infuriating and I don’t know what to do about it.

I use them as reactions on platforms that support it. Someone sends a PR and I react with eye emoji for looking at it, checkmark for done, or speech bubble for comments. It takes less space than a full text response. Especially in damned Teams that doesn’t have threads in chats, so you can’t even group your responses.

That’s pretty much it. I don’t use them as punctuation and rarely use them in an actual message