yepitwas

That's funny, I often love learning for the sake of.. experimenting, building things. I just recognize that I cannot do it all and prioritize immediate needs first.

You've misunderstood, I think: if I have something I want to experiment with or build, then I can learn what I need. What I have such enormous trouble doing that I'm nearly incapable of it, is going "I should learn this so I can do something, to be determined later, with it..." and then learning. Making up projects for the sake of learning, when I don't really care about the ends, also doesn't work.

I need the goal first, then I can learn what I need.

I do also learn things just because I want to and for no real purpose, but have never been any good at directing that impulse.

It's been such an obvious self-own for tech workers not to capitalize on any of the multiple booms they've seen, and unionize.

I say, "you're going to need to pay a team of PhDs to work on this to maybe get a solution, eventually, or change your approach. Here's why: [evidence]"

I've never worked with or for anyone who wanted to hire the team of PhDs.

I stop when I find a solution to the problem

That.

I’ve embraced that I cannot direct which topic my self-directed learning will take up and sustain (almost none of which ends up going toward tech stuff, aside from a span of some years in my teens and early 20s—and all of that was motivated by wanting to accomplish specific things with computers) and rely on assignments to motivate me for career-relevant learning.

I’ll learn whatever it takes to get the job done. Then stop, because I don’t actually care about the tech per se, most of the time, and trying to force myself to learn “just because” does nothing but make me miserable and waste time.

This isn’t even “how I approach learning as a generalist”, it’s how I became a generalist.

My interest in continuing to fiddle with stuff after the job’s done is basically zero.

My experience has been that it takes amazingly little effort to be above-median among practitioners at a lot of things. How many React developers have spent one entire hour reading through the core logic of React itself? How many people working with LLMs have read the Attention Is All You Need paper? How many people read about the disk storage layout of a database they’ve been told to use? It’s way less than half. It takes so very little to stand out.

"Go fuck yourself" would have been a less-insulting reply. Lovely.

I've tried to figure out what the evidence is for this and come up with extremely little. I've tried, and can't find it. A lot of people seem really confident in it. I want to read what they're reading, and I cannot find it.

[EDIT] FWIW I've yet to see anything that makes me confident enough to assign any strong and specific guess about the guy's motivations. I'm confident in "he was very online" and "he played Helldivers a lot, or at least spent a lot of time communicating with people who do" and that's about all I'd feel comfortable confidently asserting if someone asked me for the "TL;DR" on where we're at on that.

Which answers do I need to give for you to help me out here? Are you going to? I'm not looking for an argument.

I would (no joke) appreciate any pointer the actual evidence for this. I’ve seen only extremely vague hearsay and a screencap of using a filter to look like a video-gameish woman so far.

[edit] I’m not setting a trap, I actually would like to see it if there’s more than that, I’m not prepping to pounce on anyone who tries to help me out here.

This is almost an amazing thing. Some common top-level way to set parental controls across systems would be a godsend. That’s all a giant pile of time-wasting shit right now.

However, any system that just uses age is useless. They’re always excessively cautious, so you may as well just not provide access at all for kids between the ages of 6 and 12 or so, if that’s all you have.

No, block all + allow lists are still where it’s at. Please make those work better.

(If anyone knows the magic to make Minecraft [java] work with macOS allowlist-only network access, I’d love to know what it is. The fucking launcher wants to talk to a half-dozen bare IP addresses to work, and the addresses change seemingly every single launch, from a pool of what must be many hundreds, at least, it’s completely unusable)

Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.

Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.

(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)

It’s be really nice if they’d repudiated political violence by not electing Donald Trump president after he mused on stage about how his supporters could shoot Hillary if she won, in 2016.

That was the first big test of whether we were going to enter a new era of normalized political violence, and we (his voters, but collectively we as a country) flunked it. Wave of violence it is, I guess. Reckoned at the time it wouldn’t be much fun, and go figure, it ain’t.

This went out the window as a viable approach when McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat. We’re at minimum-two justices being on the take, post a coup attempt with the leader of said attempt back in the Oval Office, and Republicans have already declared intent to gerrymander their way to victory with no roadblocks to that in sight. And this is not an exhaustive list of ailments.

You can’t go in with legal gloves and no hitting below the belt et c. while your opponent is bare-knuckle and going for nut shots and headlocks. You’ll just get your ass kicked, every time, no matter how morally pure you feel about it.

Meanwhile, fixing gerrymandering almost certainly means getting Republican votes to do so. The only way to do that, in this environment, is going to be to make them believe their odds are better without gerrymandering, than with it. That means using it against them, until it’s made illegal.

If they went in blind, they chose to.

Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”

I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.

There was the (embarrassingly bad, even if you like gun control) “assault weapons ban” but since then democrats haven’t even been able to consistently achieve the thing that Republicans often say they want instead of more gun laws: “enforce the ones already on the books” (this is so common I assume it must have been pushed initially by some major Republican figure, but I’m not sure who it was) so the risk of their passing substantial gun control laws today is extremely low, even with decent majorities in the legislature and holding the presidency.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)

I think this is a misunderstanding of how he works, and especially how he got elected the first time.

I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.

Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.

R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).

Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.

I could go on.

Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.

If a good bit of what you’re writing about wasn’t “fire and motion” on Red Hat’s part, the effect, at least, is the same: it’s harder to justify picking a distro other than one connected to Red Hat than it’s ever been before.

You missed a bunch of other ones.

One my dad reliably latches on to is “they’re going to take your guns”. Trump used this, I’m pretty sure, all three races. Weirdly there were never even moves toward doing this the time he lost. It’s as if this was just bullshit. But, it gets voters fired up (getting people to show up for you is more important than swaying anyone to your side)

Lots of people voted for him this time for overtime and tips being tax-exempt. Some (especially on the overtime thing) have since come to regret it when the fine print didn’t include them, but it got their vote.

He ran on lots of issues. “Build the wall” echos what tons of Republican voters have been saying for decades. Their politicians wouldn’t do it—hell, Trump didn’t, he just half-assed a little bit of it and called it done—because it’s a really bad idea, but he sold people on the notion that he’d get it done, where “it” was something they’d long wanted done.

Many other issues like that, that did get him votes.

IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way.

But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.

I think from an encouraging-the-arts perspective, the worst thing about the current crazy-long duration is that artists aren't free to react to and build on the contemporary influences of their youths. We're missing out on so much good stuff because artists can't go whichever way the mood strikes when they play with elements of works of the living artists that they enjoyed and admired and followed as they were developing. Copyright's so long that they can't too-closely engage with anyone's work unless the artist was dead before they were born. There's a latent, invisible whirlwind of creativity in the heads of writers, directors, et c., that they can't do anything with, and that we'll never get to see realized.

I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.

What could “fight for this President” possibly mean when you’re sending people to the capital, after the election’s over, while telling them the election was stolen, on the very day that the election is to be formally certified? The election was over, the contest had ended… so far as legal options that follow the usual route for the peaceful transfer of power. What does “fight” mean here? What is someone using that kind of language around an event like that trying to accomplish?

I think it’s prodding people to do something dangerous and illegal and a risk to democracy herself, and I’m not really sure what else it could be.

(Why… would Trump hold a rally in DC on that particular day to begin with? And why did he and other speakers choose to say what they did? None of this is mysterious, it’s easy to read, but it still seems to be eluding a lot of folks in ways that it don’t think it would in any analogous situation that didn’t involve partisan politics)

Yeah at the time (and I’ve yet to see this contradicted?) it seemed like Trump broke the news on that one, which is certainly an unusual way for that to happen, which also made it more reasonable to put that on the “maybe, but let’s see” pile.

(I did believe it, but only because I’d watched the close-view video and regarded survival as all but impossible… without that I’d have “grain of salt”ed it, too)

Ah, thanks for the link. I saw several headlines about it when that “news” dropped, but only followed one, and it claimed an FBI source. It may have been even worse than the others, and downstream from them, so to speak.

Fred Rogers getting shot would have been a lot worse, and great mourning of his passing more justified, than Charles Manson getting shot. Clearly this is neither of those cases, but, as clearly, we don’t regret the murder of every famous person equally, even if we would rather the murder hadn’t happened in each case.

The canonization effort around an only-known-in-certain-circles propagandist has been utterly bizarre to watch. Air Force 2 escort? What, pardon me, the fuck.

[edit] I’ll add that the fawning wall-to-wall treatment and coverage has been especially wild to watch when it occurs so close, time-wise, to a murderer with a kill-list shooting two democratic politicians in their homes, killing one of them plus a spouse (and a dog, as everyone always seems to add) before being stopped, which news was so barely-covered and left the news cycle so fast (and saw the same kind of callousness from the right that they’re now perceiving from the left, including, as always when it’s this guy, from the President of the United States) that, when I’ve brought it up or seen it brought up after this event, it’s been easy to find people who didn’t even know it happened.

From what I’ve seen, Charlie stopped at promoting lies that if you believe them imply violence is on the table (and that have a history of inspiring violent acts). Nick has been willing to take the next step and go “We can’t do anything! Except kill them. But don’t do that! I didn’t say to! But what else can we do?” (So, Fuentes is closer to Trump’s level of flirting-with-telling-people-to-kill than Kirk was, AFAIK)

As far as their disagreements over doctrine of-late, I’m not sure. Their messages do/did differ in where they drew the line, though.

I’ve seen Loomer’s turning on Kirk (over his “turning” on Trump re: the Epstein files) cited as part of this, with Nick’s crowd being on Loomer’s side, but given Nick’s history with Trump that I know of I’d find that surprising, but I’ve not closely followed Fuentes so I’ve got some reading to do there.

Two right-wingers can disagree with one another to pretty extreme degrees.

This is like thinking Christian-on-Christian violence over religion is implausible and claiming someone suggesting it’s in-fact plausible is being “disingenuous”—surely it can only be someone from a different faith entirely.

Dude(tte) you’re on HN in 2025 and pretended not to understand how to google. Assuming trolling and that it was pretending is the generous reading of that.

The very first reports of the engravings to break, supposedly from FBI sources, just said they had “pro trans” messages.

The meaning and implications of these engravings is the subject of intense debate, and not at all an objective matter at the moment.

I agree. We can take away some things (like “very online” and some suggestions of certain connections to spheres or activities, like the Helldivers 2 reference) but there’s little more than rather mixed suggestions that could go multiple ways, as far as political affiliation and motivation that we can read from them, so far.

Nb this was said when this was breaking, and they didn’t even know anyone had been shot yet.

It wasn’t her hearing he got shot in the neck and going “lol maybe it was celebratory gunfire and bad luck?”

The statistics are bloodless, when attempting to dismiss them in the abstract. “Bloodless” modified “statistics”. That the real thing is not bloodless ever was the point, I believe.

Kirk’s own words, you ass. His own actual words. Which you’d have found by now if you weren’t a troll.

You have to click on the links and read, HTH.