Exactly, so why two different character codes? :-P

Easy solution, use only a single space for each level of indentation.

/s, probably. Though one could make an editor expand the single spaces at the start of a line to an arbitrary width, for readability.

I’m undecided on if Canada having nukes would be good or bad.

You’re right that the more people that have them, the more likely someone will use them, which would be extremely bad.

But if the choices were: 1) USA invades Canada, 50,000-2,000,000 Canadians die (plus some number of Americans). 2) Canada has nukes, USA does not invade, no one dies.

How can you balance the existential danger of another country having nukes against so many deaths?

(All potential deaths, yes. But we’re already solidly in theoretical territory. I sure can’t accurately estimate the chances of the US invading Canada in all potential scenarios, nor can I estimate how much more likely Nuclear Armageddon is if one more country has nukes)

Yeah, I couldn’t avoid the meme response.

Careful tariffs can help shield a local industry against an exploitative economy in another country, which could result in benefits to a larger workforce / population.

But “tariffs so American automakers get higher profits so they can do more stock buybacks” ain’t it. (Example; I don’t really know who other than Trump is benefiting from current tariffs)

strategic benefit for US industry … just funnel money to the rich

They’re the same picture

Nah, sadly (?) that’s not how it works. People’s desires come first, and then they find a way within their belief system to justify their actions.

The people I’m hurting aren’t human.

They’re bad people.

They would do the same to me.

I’m only doing it because I’m a bad person.

I was hurt, so now is my chance.

That’s just how the world works.

Et cetera. Sometimes if the conflict between their beliefs and their actions gets too great they change their beliefs.

But for the most part, people don’t want to kill, steal, rape, etc. So they make up a reason to not do it, like “God will punish me if I do that” or “It’s morally wrong” or whatever, and then they don’t do it and move on with their lives.

(And those who do that stuff come from literally all belief systems; the only real differences being social environment - acceptability, expectations, protection from consequences, etc)

Yup, LLMs are wonderful.

They provide anyone with access to knowledge that only about half the time is misleading in some way, but is just as persuasive as an expert explanation of the truth.

By automating writing, coding, and data analysis, LLMs remove any need for humans to understand how to express nuanced thought, how to clearly and safely execute a technical process, or how to extract insights from large amounts of information.

By automating customer‑service tasks, LLMs remove the last vestige of a human who can understand why a corporate process is failing a customer and find a way for the system to meet their needs. And as a bonus the LLM can confidently declare ‘facts’ that aren’t true.

LLM‑driven tools can assist clinicians with literature summarization (reinforcing training-data bias, eliminating the actual point of scientific papers, and making lots of errors), patient communication (eliminating any human contact and care towards vulnerable patients), and preliminary triage (with extra training data bias and distracting the doctor from reading the not-written-down actual human presenting symptoms in front of them)

Artists, writers, musicians, and game designers use LLMs as co‑creators, generating drafts, ideas, or entire works that rehash old works and remove any pesky ‘artistic expression’, as the LLM is much faster at making a polished-looking end product, and it’s not like people ever come up with new insights during the revision process.

Advanced multilingual models translate and transcribe minority languages, ensuring that no one ever need learn the language of their cultural heritage, as they have an English approximation that’s totally good enough.

And the best part is this can scale to billions of people, meaning that no one will ever need to be knowledgeable, or know how to write, code, analyze data, do customer service, read a scientific paper, talk to a patient, observe someone to understand their current state, or have to learn anything about other languages or cultures. Just trust in the often wrong but-who-cares-stop-complaining LLM!

Or skip the search engine:

“Tell me about the ecology of Namibia. Use only sources from before 2022 because I do not trust LLM generated output. Make no mistakes.”

The roof is on fire

Yes, this. @ 👆

It almost always will be a false start, unless you’ve been in contact with some other sourdough starter recently.

Just be patient, it takes time for the starters environment to get to the place where it’s hostile to non-sourdough microorganisms, and friendly and full of happy sourdough critters.

The “undesirable” bacteria are actually fine at the start, their lifecycle just pushes the starter in the direction you want it to go (more acidic, probably other complex environmental changes)

I don’t usually buy into “both sides same”, but this is actually how ‘both sides’ win or lose elections - if you put up a candidate that people are excited to vote for, people vote. If they’re disappointed, they don’t.

This is the majority of voters, not the vanishingly small minority that post online or pay attention to politics.

https://pixelfed.social/p/NickEastPhoto/988350626603935285

Looks like the photo series didn’t survive federation to lemmy, but that link should work

assert(titles == DIFFICULT);

Thank you for the post

It’s impossible for me to back Platner - he’s out of the race. If I had a choice, I’d pick him over Collins, but I’d prefer a candidate with a more marginalized identity and substantially more experience in successful “leftist” political work.

The Democrats spent roughly a third as much promoting Platner as the GOP spent trying to take him down (I don’t have exact numbers), so I agree that propaganda is everywhere. Perhaps the GOP is more desperate, while (as you say) the Democrats have other avenues to power, so they’re allowing this one to slip by.

Regarding the rape allegations, I sincerely hope the victims receive justice and healing, even though I don’t expect much from the system - that’s a whole different conversation.

My only point here is that the massive amount of propaganda aimed at demonizing political candidates gives us a very distorted view of who they really are, mostly on the side of “wow they’re so eeeevil”, so we all need to be wary of that. (Unless they’re a billionaire of course; at a certain level of power evil seems to be compulsory)

All I know is that Republican-aligned groups spent a ridiculous amount of money to get him out of the race.

If he was a bad candidate, they would have had to do that.

It’s all but the worst phrase and we need to all but stop using it! All but most of the time the actual all but intended meaning can all but be found by just all but removing “all but”. Switzerland is all but all all but but surrounded == Switzerland is all but surrounded

Yesssss I love Her Story - that “curiosity as game mechanic” was really well done, and I wish there were more games in the ‘genre’.

I did play the later game “Immortality” which is a bit similar in gameplay - you can click on something in one scene to find other scenes with the same character / object in them. I enjoyed that, though it didn’t have the same exploration-narrative magic of Her Story. I definitely found it harder to get engaged with at first.

It must be really difficult to craft a story that reveals itself well in that clip/connection format. It’s not a simple linear narrative, and avoiding sequence breaks (where you get a clip that reveals things you shouldn’t yet know) is so important. Though I think Her Story handles that well by keeping clips short enough that you don’t have the context with just a single clip.

Oof, haven’t thought about them in years and now I want more.

I should take another look at Telling Lies. When it came out there were a lot of complaints about what you said, it drops you into the middle of a scene and I think you had to slowly rewind to the start of the clip? I read later that (?) they added a feature to skip back to the start with a single button press (or maybe that was a steam mod?). Anyways, I never ended up playing it.

I was watching the other game: “#wargames” for a while but it stopped being sold and vanished from the internet.