Socialism is when things get bad and Communism is when they are at their worst.

Four Legs Good, Two Legs… uh… wait a minute, they’re changing it.

The Algorithm used to match people isn’t designed to encourage healthy and normal conversations. It’s designed to encourage people to spend more time on the apps (and, eventually, more money).

Had a couple of lady friends who went on vacation to Europe - Spain and France, specifically - and had totally different experiences on the dating apps. Men were open and friendly, knew how to hold up a conversation (in non-native languages!), showed politeness, responded quickly, made first contact easy and low-anxiety, looked good, smelled nice, knew how to dance, charmed the panties right off them both, and then kept in contact afterwards. Like, even after they flew back home, these guys were still saying “Hey, what’s up, here’s something cool happening in my neighborhood can’t wait to see you again”.

Just a radically different experience than the American dating scene. One friend straight up swore off American men entirely. She’s booking a flight back to France for a three month go - working remote, learning the language, the whole thing - because of how blown away by the healthier and happier social conditions over there.

Getting maybe 20% of the features of Notepad++ standard was nice out of the box. For a fleeting moment, I almost kept it as my default.

Gmail has started injecting a fat “Suggestions for responding to emails” feature into my composition space. Really fucking annoying when you’re trying to type something out on a phone. No idea how to begin disabling it, I couldn’t find configurations anywhere in the settings.

I’ve had this email address for over 20 years. Not looking forward to changing it. But enshitification won’t stop.

Two is bigger than one. You got’em.

:-/

You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.

Come down to Texas! We’ve got:

• Drought

• Cow Farts

• 83°F Christmas

• Flammable drinking water

• Breakfast Tacos

• Cowboy Police

• Confederate Flags

• Pokey Plants

For C-subs, the bra is the show

For D+, it’s the curtain to the main event.

Can’t not read that in his voice

I mean, graded take home essays are a waste. It’s like assigning weight training. Good for exercising, and we can talk about your form when you’re done.

But as soon as you start stack ranking the results, the incentive to cheat outpaces the goal of practicing ingesting and outputing ideas.

Guaranteed a bunch of ex-girlfriends are getting extra double stalked.

DM: “You enter a room. There are three dead bodies lined up along the wall, each with a mysterious sigal etched into their foreheads. Also, you see a clown.”

Player 1: “I sense motive on the clown.”

Player 2: “I talk to the clown.”

Player 3: “Omg, my parents were killed by clowns. I wrote the DM 300 pages of fiction about it. I draw my sword and prepare to fight!”

DM: “Damn, why aren’t these players interested in my clues?”

Teachers are using AI to grade essays. But some experts are raising ethical concerns

We pretend to study and they pretend to grade us.

I would sooner download a tire fire.

The history of the protest-turned-riot-turned-massacre is genuinely incredible. I wish more Americans learned enough about Chinese history to understand the significance of the event. It wasn’t just one guy in front of a line of tanks. And the movement didn’t end in Tienamen, either.

Dengism into the 21st century was defined by that movement and the backlash and it’s reverberations. Modern Chinese domestic policy exists as a combination carrot and stick to discourage this kind of insurrection from happening again.

Would that the US people had the kind of courage and social cohesion necessary for a Tienamen in the modern day.

Now Is The Time of Monsters

I guess I’m curious what “enlightenment” you felt you got out of it.

I met people from a variety of backgrounds, including people who’d grown up overseas. I had roommates for the first time, which gave me a taste of living with others who didn’t share my same habits or hygiene. I started dating seriously for the first time. Experimented with alcohol and a few other substances. A bunch of friends came out of the closet. I spent every summer doing a different low wage job - grocery store, teacher, assembly line worker, entry level paid worker on a political campaign. Put more miles behind the wheel in my freshman year than my entire life previously. Got to watch a particle accelerator fire and buy a homeless guy a drink at a local bar.

Idk how to really nail it down in simple terms, but I had such a broader exposure to the rest of the world in those university years.

Agreed but I get annoyed at people who have this idea of if we just educate everyone -> utopia and that conservatism is a function of undereducation

Oh, I agree. Some of the worst reactionaries are college educated. I don’t think college makes you liberal.

What’s the old saying? “A Conservative is just a Liberal that’s been mugged by reality”?

I had more than a few diehard Republicans in my friend group in college. Like, I got to meet the kind of people you just see shit talking on CrossFire IRL. People who unironically thought we should do genocide in Iraq because these were subhumans who had forfeited their right to life. People who were in Engineering because they wanted to build the bombs we were dropping in Afghanistan. People who used the hard-r at the end of the n-word just to prove they could.

Also incredibly enlightening.