Neo Nazi.

Is that better?

I’m with you. It’s so goddamn hard not to be black pilled these days. Everyone is either greedy and looking to take you for all you are worth, a misogynist, a rapist, a fascist, or some combination of all 4 and some other horrible 5th and 6th thing that I can’t think of right now. Lies and disinformation are so prevalent and there are so few consequences that it feels like nothing is what it seems.

If you care about some random issue “A”, there is an entire industry ready to take your money in exchange for the lie that your contribution or patronage is helping “A” when it’s just lining someone’s pockets.

Want to make sure you can buy a thing that isn’t made with child slave labor? I hope you did your research because of the 8 companies “certified” as child-slave-labor free, 3 still use child-slave-labor and just paid for certification, 3 use a supplier that uses it, 1 only uses it part time, and one is legitimately what it claims to be… oh no, wait, they were just bought out by a pro-child-slave-labor corp… I hate everything.

Well, what do you call someone who takes orders from, defends, and enables fascistic white supremacists openly looking to purify the blood of their country by ordering loyal thugs to violently remove immigrants and jail anyone who opposes them?

Ah, sorry, our mistake.

Neo-nazi. Is that better?

Killed my subscription a while ago. The whole Batgirl tax break thing kind of pushed me over the edge. Every major streaming service has shown itself to be… shit. I’ve cancelled them all.

At least until the corrupting force of micro-plastic-capitalism causes your house to get seized and you must begin the adventure of a lifetime to retrieve it!

I’m not a linguist nor am I Icelandic. However, when visiting I did notice that the language has this “Eth” (Ð ð) letter and [the “Thorn” Þ þ letter.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)).

My simple, English-based understanding is that they represent two variations of the English “th” sound. Eth is voiced, softer, and similar to the “th” in “the” or “father” and Thorn is unvoiced, harsher, and similar to the “th” sound in its name “thorn” or “thank”. It’s subtle and I never remember learning about the differences in my schooling.

I’ve also noticed there is a small “movement”, here and a few other sites online, to try and bring one or both of these back, replacing “th” with one or both these characters in English posts and comments.

Edit: Pronouncing the actual name of the waterfall, the Wikipedia page has a playable pronunciation that sounds to me like “go the foss” which matches an English pronunciation of just replacing Eth with TH, but that’s just an approximation.

The only annoying insects I’ve seen in Iceland, when visiting Goðafoss I think, seemed a good bit larger than mosquitoes. Not sure if those are midges or some other insect.

In retrospect, Biden did the correct thing.

In retrospect, if Biden thought Trump would abuse his power to such a degree Biden should have taken advantage of that enormous power given to the office of the POTUS by SCOTUS before he left office.

Unfortunately, the “smaller bag of shit” party, whether or not they win the vote, keeps passing legislation to fund research to pack more shit into these bags, enabling the “bigger bag of shit” party to increase their ability to force shit on us. Then the “smaller bag of shit” party can up their own quantity of shit and still point to the other party and say “Well, you won’t have to eat as much shit if you vote for us.”

I’m hoping to find a way to not eat shit at all. When I vote for the “smaller bag of shit” party I question if this is really the way to do that. The same party fights against those in their party looking for ways to reduce the amount of shit. They are funded primarily by those that are producing all this shit.

This is why I empathize with those who are drowning in shit, thrashing about for a solution to their problems. I also empathize with those who look up and just see shit and don’t bother to make a choice. I even empathize with those who see the “bigger bag of shit” party claiming “No shit this time, we swear” and vote for them out of desperation to get away from all the shit. It doesn’t make me feel better knowing I voted for the “smaller bag of shit” party because it didn’t save any of these people from drowning in shit.

I do struggle to empathize with people who blame those drowning. I really struggle with those who voted for the “big bag of shit” party because of promises that “oh, yes, there will be bigger bags of shit but don’t worry you won’t be the ones that have to eat most of it. If you vote for us, we’ll make sure they drown in shit”.

I voted, because I’m aware that not voting is a fast track for eating a 5 lb bag of shit.

However, what would you say if in the next election, it was a choice between a 2 lb bag of shit and a 7 lb bag of shit? Then the next was the choice between a 5 lb bag of shit and a 10 lb bag of shit? When do you decide that you just don’t want to eat shit anymore?

I don’t think it’s at the point where it helps people code more easily, but maybe I’m just exclusively experiencing edge cases and turning to it for the wrong uses. I’ve only had failures. Hallucinations that waste my time, and flawed algorithms.

My favorite was a few weeks ago when I was having a rough day and needed a complicated algorithm to make a decision based on an inputted date. I told it that if I plug in value A to its algorithm, the answer is wrong. It went step by step explaining its "reasoning"and it returned the correct answer and then at the pivotal step it plugged in a different year than was in A, for just that step, and then proceeded to confirm to itself that if you plug in A, you get the right answer.

Maybe someday it will help, or maybe some problems it is useful for, I’ve just never had that experience.

Lol, my partner loves BTBAM. I was going to mention them as well.

Yes, in part, and also because the party is actively trying to prevent those voters from getting the progressive candidates they want. It’s more blatant these days (Bush, Bowman, Mamdani) than it has been in the past, but it was still happening. They don’t want pressure from the left. They broke their promise to not support primary opponents (over incumbents) specifically when progressives started gaining ground. Many are openly hesitant to endorse Mamdani now if they aren’t openly skeptical or critical. Vote blue no matter who, eh?

I know Plini, will check out The Omnific!

Another great band!

Arch Echo
Intervals

I’m also a fan, I just didn’t want to go too nuts with my list because I needed to get to sleep! I’ll check out the rest.

Also; I think mentioning Protest the Hero in the context of instrumental music does a HUGE disservice to Rody Walker’s vocal talents and lyrics.

Agreed. I honestly mentioned PtH just to mention them and they do have deluxe albums with instrumental only versions which I really appreciate. I often can’t work to their music because my brain fills in their vocals for me, which is sometimes too distracting.

I’m also a huge fan of Opeth, Caligula’s Horse, and TesseracT with vocals but I haven’t ingrained every track’s lyrics in my brain like I have PtH.

if the public wasn’t so apathetic, ignorant, and/or misinformed.

I don’t think all of the apathy is inherent. Some of that’s on her and the democratic party demoralizing their constituents. Yes, following game theory it is in their best interest to vote for the lesser evil and against the greater evil. I am politically active and I get that, so I voted.

Regardless, it still bothers me that a not insignificant portion of the Democratic party also knows this and takes advantage of this by coasting and doing the bare minimum. They seem more willing to spend their resources countering internal threats from progressives. It’s not easy to stay motivated to support a party openly hostile to your own values.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them would rather have a fascist opponent. Then voting comes down to, basically, vote for me because the alternative is fascism. How dare you question my policies (or lack thereof) or my soft stance our ally’s obvious genocide? I’m your only hope. Vote for me or else.

It only works for so long, then apathy takes over.

I disagree. Even high level languages will consistently produce the same results. There may be low level differences depending on the compiler and the system’s architecture but if those are consistent you will get the same results.

AI coding isn’t an extremely human readable higher level programming language. Using an LLM to generate code adds a literal black box and the interpretation of the user and LLM’s human language (which humans can’t even do consistently) to the equation.

I love working with instrumental metal, typically prog or “djenty” stuff, in the background. Sometimes a bit of post-rock.

I was surprised how many of us there are. A lot of “professionals” I know listen to metal. Engineers, developers, IT folks. It will randomly come up and everyone will say something along the lines of “Oh, really, you too?”

Been listening to a lot of Their Dogs Were Astronauts recently. In the interest of sharing my personal favorites bands to work to, because I found a number of them from random mentions in forums:

• Their Dogs Were Astronauts -mostly instrumental.
• Wide Eyes - mostly instrumental.
• Caligula’s Horse - instrumental only tracks available.
• Polyphia - mostly instrumental.
• Protest The Hero - instrumental only tracks available.
• TesseracT - instrumental only tracks available.
• Apocalyptica - started covering Metallica as cello quartet instrumentals, now has a drummer and a number of original songs, often with guest vocalists.
• Collapse Under The Empire - post rock, mostly instrumental.
• Parhelia - post rock, mostly instrumental.
• Opeth - occasional instrumental tracks, started as death metal, evolved into more prog metal. Huge fan of most of their work in general.

Edit: I’m stuck at work with my PC being worked on so here are some more random artists whose music I appreciate:

• Anup Sastry - very djenty, mostly instrumental, some guest vocals occasionally.
• Scoredatura - djenty, mostly instrumental.
• Rishloo - psychedelic prog rock? not instrumental.
• HAKEN - instrumental only tracks available.
• Brass Against - brass and other classical instruments. They cover Rage Against The Machine as well as other random songs and make occasional mashups of them. Not instrumental.
• Pomegranate Tiger - prog metal.
• Modern Day Babylon - djenty, instrumental.