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Cake day: 2023年6月20日

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  • azertyfuntoFunnyGetting in touch with your roots
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    24 分钟前

    I’m as basic-white-belgian as they come and even I have a little bit of Italian and Eastern European (IIRC) somewhere in there. “Pure” (ew) lineages are actually quite rare in Europe, only the most remote places were spared the millennia of warfare (and the grim reality that soldiers, uh, move genes around) and the urban flights of the industrial revolutions. The average European’s background isn’t as diverse as the average American’s, but a lot more than one might naively assume.

    What is striking about North America though is the anglo-saxon cultural homogeneity, especially considering the diverse backgrounds. Besides Quebec there’s virtually no language barrier anywhere, and an almost entirely homogenous culture. You could probably raise a kid in 6 states and 3 provinces without any major issue. All North Americans eat Mac and Cheese and they all watch the Superbowl and all American children stand up for the Pledge. Meanwhile the only cultural references I am likely to have in common with the average Pole is American TV/movies/music and depending on their English skill having a conversation at all may be a major challenge.



  • MAGA against who exactly? There don’t seem to be many high ranking Democrats willing to call out Trump on his bullshit, and none willing or capable of leading an actual separatist movement or insurrection. They’re actually even more subdued and helpless than they were in 2017.

    I’d love to be wrong but I’m calling it now; when (blue) “states’ rights” get de facto dissolved and/or their midterm elections are obviously rigged, they will buckle silently and proceed with a Peaceful Transition Of Power™. Maybe their attorneys will send a Strongly Worded Letter to the Trump-appointed federal judges in charge of their case, but that’s about all the political violence the American Left has an appetite for.

    States being stripped of their independence is exactly what happened to Germany in the '30s and I don’t see why the U.S. would suddenly deviate from the script. Your country is way too morally bankrupt to even entertain the idea of a popular uprising.


  • I’ve always despised teen drama in media. Back when I was a teen, and now. Can’t stand it. For that reason, I have zero interest in playing the sequels. Furthermore, some of Life is Strange’s writing is downright amateurish.

    But somehow, the game threads the needle of the formula in a way I can’t explain (and from what I read the developers weren’t ever able to fully replicate it either). The gameplay, the themes, the great acting/directing, the amazing soundtrack, the perfectly paced escalation of the stakes… It all works together to attach the player very deeply to the characters. I played it a decade ago and the ending absolutely shook me to my emotional core. To this day one of my favorite works of fiction.



  • All Russia did was give a nudge to the literal trillions of dollars in capital held by elites who wanted nothing more than full-blown fascism. All the Kremlin had to do was finance whoever could sow the most distrust in democratic institutions and wedge themselves in existing divides within the US. It’s the most boring coup in history, people voting for Hitler not because of Bolshevism of whatever but because they’re triggered by fucking vaccines and pronouns.

    Conversely even if the EU went full hybrid warfare (which we aren’t because we can’t even do anything about the open fascists in our own Union), the counterplay is rebuilding trust which is harder by orders of magnitude than just buying up a social media, deleting moderation, and promoting the Nazi stuff.

    Best we could hypothetically do is sanction y’all into autarchy and hope the subsequent recession/depression acts as an electroshock to the population, but you’re already doing it to yourselves and besides I see no reason why the two thirds of y’all who either don’t care or actively support fascism would change their minds. It will be just like Putin Orban or Erdogan, 15 years from now shit will be worse than ever for the 99 % but Republicans will still win elections without even needing to cheat much thanks to their complete control over state propaganda. Your democracy is dead, you should be moving through the stages of grief and planning your next move.

    I’d love to be proven wrong but there’s too much historical precedent, and zero precedent to Americans being even remotely close to politically conscious enough to engage in “forceful” political change (unless the force is being exerted on Black people, then the “well regulated militia” comes out the woodwork). Hell, the videos from “protests” I’ve been seeing this week in your major cities look so pathetic it makes Denver look like a large village.


  • The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).

    Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.

    Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.


  • Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).

    OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
    So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.


  • Ces airbags Takata ça fait des années qu’ils font perdre des milliards à de nombreux constructeurs. On parle de plus de 100 millions d’airbags partout dans le monde, c’était un constructeur réputé avant 2013.

    Je ne connais pas les détails du dossier, donc c’est possible que Citroën ait trainé des pieds sur un rappel préventif. Si ils ont été mis au problème dans le mois passé cependant la réaction me paraît plutôt décente. Mieux vaut éviter de prendre des risques pendant quelques jours le temps de trouver un garagiste qui peut faire l’intervention.

    La bonne nouvelle c’est que quand ils disent qu’ils ont les pièces j’ai tendance à les croire… Les garagistes ils remplacent des millions de takata depuis une dizaine d’années, c’est de la routine à ce stade-ci.



  • This can be - and has been - generalized to all industrualization.

    Tolkien wrote Isengard the way he did for a reason.

    The history of Brutalist architecture is closely associated with fascism as it promotes societal ideals of a neatly segmented and ordered life.

    Henry Ford. Just, Henry Ford.

    Elon’s technocratic nazi grandfather.


    I would also like to remind everyone that fascism is simultaneously extremely dangerous but doomed to fail. That obsession for finding rigid rules where there aren’t any, of constraining the real world to simplified models, makes fascists eventually lose touch with reality because they can’t account for the messiness and human factor. At first they destroy everything they touch, kill anyone that doesn’t fit the model. They then make fatal, obviously irrational mistakes like opening an Eastern front in Europe before tidying up the Western one because the Ideology says Bolsheviks are weak. Attacking the US in Hawaii. Not installing Lidar in supposedly self-driving cars. Invading Ukraine with an incompetent army and cardboard supplies against a dug-in western-supplied army.

    It’s not particularly helpful to the tens of millions killed by fascism yet, but at least we can rest assured that the fascist technosolutionists will lose and that plants will grow out of their corpse.


  • Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.

    Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.

    Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.

    Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
    What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.

    The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).


  • Using the suffix -er for a two syllable word isn’t any correcter than verbing a noun and would probably make quite a few English teachers red in the face.

    Both have a linguistic use; the verb “vaguing” is a shortened form of the cumbersome “vague-posting”, while “stupider” is a more emphatic and/of colloquial form of “more stupid”. Neither can be replaced by their more formal form without changing the meaning of the sentence slightly.

    Objectively they are very similar linguistic quirks, the only reason you’d use one but dislike the other is familiarity. Why dismiss it out of hand when you can excitedly marvel at a novel way people can remotely transfer thoughts?




  • Don’t force me to deal with your shiny language of the day,

    WE HavE LegItImaTe COnCeRNs

    Exact same shit as last time, some cranky old dude with the territorial instinct of a bulldog sabotages anything to do with rust under a very thin layer of so-called technical concerns, yet refuses to partake in constructive discussion. Like, literally, the changeset is just bindings in rust/kernel? What even is there to complain about regarding maintainability of kernel/dma, given that as far as I can tell the rust devs will deal with any future incompatibilities?

    Very shameful for the kernel community that this kind of aggressive sabotage is regular and seemingly accepted. The incessant toxicity is not a good look and very discouraging to anyone thinking of contributing.


  • I despise crypto, crypto-bros, and do not own a single unit of cryptocurrency. Crypto is not only impractical due to its fluidity but almost every crypto is deflationary by design which disincentivizes people from spending it.

    With that out of the way, the blockchain is certainly more resilient to a “fuck you” class solar flare than the regular economy. There are for sure a bunch of people with EMP-resistant copies of the blockchain (since every node has a copy). As soon as internet goes back up, so will the crypto-bros.

    Meanwhile cash makes up only a few percent of fiat currency and the rest is digital money in databases around the world’s banks and financial institutions. Almost all cash flow is completely virtual and literally cancels out in accounting at the end of the day.
    If those databases get wiped, the global economy simply collapses and your paper money won’t be worth shit-fuck. Admittedly neither will crypto since no-one actually uses it for anything other than exchanging it for fiat.

    One of crypto’s major problems is that it actually behaves too much like cash. Every bitcoin is a non-fungible token, it’s not tied to gold but might as well be; exchanging a bitcoin costs exorbitant amounts of crypto and real-world resources. Meanwhile if my bank wants to give me a big loan they merely change a number in their database. On a technical level they could give me a one trillion euro loan today if they wanted, although that would run afoul of many laws and immediately bankrupt them once I tried to actually spend that money in what would quickly turn out to be a one-man bank run.


  • Yeah that’s the gender-radical answer. I’m all for it but we’re certainly not there yet despite being on the very progressive side of gender rights.

    There are also the positive discrimination laws to take into account (in Belgium it’s illegal for companies to have a pay gap between men and wonen in equivalent positions) but IMO those should not rely on a central government database to be enforced.

    Then there’s the fact that people usually change their names if they change their legal gender… When Robert becomes Julia there’s no need for a gender marker to guess what happened.


  • Side-note but this is exactly the reason why my country never asked for my ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation (and AFAIK is not legally allowed to do so). We learned from WWII that this is too great of a liability to entrust to future, potentially hostile governments. The Nazis poured over every written registry of Jewish population census to make a handy murder list, maybe we shouldn’t facilitate their job next time?

    (Side-side note: because of what I just said it is very surprising that Germany keeps a registry of everyone’s religion for tax purposes, like maybe just find any other way to allocate subsidies?)

    (Side³ note: I’m going to guess unfortunately my government does have “legally trans” people in a database due to the logistics of changing legal gender)


  • Hitler died before he could be tried. Does that mean he is presumed innocent?

    Trick question, you’re falling for semantics. “Innocent until proven guilty” really is “legally-innocent until court-proven legally-guilty”, which is the only avenue the state has to imprison someone.

    What it doesn’t mean is “you’re not allowed to have an opinion and/or act on it until the accused has gone to court”. The court of public opinion works independently from the court of stuffy judges in wigs. Sometimes it’s wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s always wrong nor that it shouldn’t exist. OTOH the legal courts very often fall short of delivering a verdict for a bunch of reasons, many quite bad (victims don’t want to relive their traumas for months, cops are uncooperative, court system is backed up, legal definition of rape is unprovable, etc.).