The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

We don’t deserve dogs, but we can be grateful that we have them anyway.

If there were any trust in the DNC to preserve, this would be a different discussion. They look after the interests of Democratic incumbents, not Democratic voters. Hogg is doing the right thing and I hope he succeeds.

Yes. Things will get better. We don’t know how quickly that will happen, but it will happen. Meanwhile, take care of yourself and do what you can to take care of the people around you. The whole MAGA movement is based on fear and hatred. Being decent and doing good may be the most effective way to resist and, eventually, overcome it.

You got here ahead of me. Meshtastic has some limitations, but in a relatively populated area it works surprisingly well. GPS trackers using Meshtastic require far less power than their cell-phone equivalents, which means they ca be smaller, longer lasting, or some of both. They can also be a good bit less expensive. Meshtastic takes a bit of learning, but it isn’t difficult and there are plenty of resources.

Ignore the self-righteous advice and take are of yourself first. We can’t fight back against oppression by sacrificing ourselves when it accomplishes nothing. That just means one less person is available to fight back when it does matter. The stakes do matter. They’re not asking you to kill people.

In the middle- to long-term you should think about how to deal with the larger problem. To avoid situations like this you may need to develop new contacts, find similar wok in other sectors, or even find another kind of work. Those are things that will take time and planning, so work on them while you do what’s needed to keep yourself going.

Always do what you can and look for ways you can do more, but make sure any sacrifices you decide to make are worth the likely results.

It’s always nice to run across a fellow Hero player. That’s been my main system for a long time. I love being able to GM any genre or strange cross-genre that occurs to me.

I voted last week (2025-04-01) in Wisconsin in the US. It was a relatively small election, but it included a high-stakes race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat that determined if the progressives would continue to retain the majority we finally won back a few years ago. Elon Musk spent tens of millions of his own money, including outright attempts to buy votes, to win the race for MAGA. Susan Crawford, the progressive candidate, won by more than ten points. In a state where previous elections hinged on tenths of a percent, that was a landslide.

An LLM does not write code. It cobbles together bits and pieces of existing code. Some developers do that too, but the decent ones look at existing code to learn new principles and then apply them. An LLM can’t do that. If human developers have not already written code that solves your problem, an LLM cannot solve your problem.

The difference between a weak developer and an LLM is that the LLM can plagiarize from a much larger code base and do it much more quickly.

A lot of coding really is just rehashing existing solutions. LLMs could be useful for that, but a lot of what you get is going to contain errors. Worse yet, LLMs tend to “learn” how to cheat at their tasks. The code they generate often has lot of exception handling built in to hide the failures. That makes testing and debugging more difficult and time-consuming. And it gets really dangerous if you also rely on an LLM to generate your tests.

The software industry has already evolved to favor speed over quality. LLM generated code may be the next logical step. That does not make it a good one. Buggy software in many areas, such as banking and finance, can destroy lies. Buggy software in medical applications can kill people. It would be good if we could avoid that.

That is true, except for the things he does on impulse that are different from what he was told to do. He is a front man, but he’s not a reliable one.

“It makes them look all manner of stupid”.

Madison is an amazing place in so many ways. I love this town!

What surprised me is how many other huge protests there were. Thanks to everyone, everywhere, who participated or supported the efforts.

Any time you wonder if Trump is exercising any kind of foresight, the answer is no. Any time you wonder if Trump is cleverly manipulating events, the answer is no. He makes decisions on impulse, without regard to advice, policy, consistency, or legality.

You’re probably right about that. I find it hard to judge where the fine line between malice and incompetence will fall.

I agree with you. I’m an American and it makes me want to boycott American goods.

In practice, I am trying to reduce the amount of business I do with large American companies. They’re the ones who put Trump into power. I feel better supporting local businesses anyway.

We may yet see a Buy Canadian movement in the US.

We have been slowly, but steadily, moving in the direction of sanity and compassion over the last decade. Replacing Walker with Evers was a huge trade up in every way.

The federal government is still being destroyed, but I have more hope than I did a week ago.

The judicial branch finally seems to be getting some traction on curbing the illegal activity. There’s a long way to go, but it’s a start.

In my home state of Wisconsin, some very good things happened. Me elected another progressive to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which maintains the majority we finally achieved in the previous election. Musk spent a lot of his personal time, and his own money, trying to push that election the other way. Crawford one by more than 10 points, which is impressive when most of the margins have been tenths of a percent recently. The other state races generally also went well.

I can’t tell you just how big this is for us here. We’ve been feeling the same sense of hopelessness as the rest of the country. Now everyone I’ve talked with seems happy, excited, and hopeful. Also, very determined to keep fighting.

Exactly. The Democrats have their own issues, but there is a difference between a candle and a burning house and the difference does matter.

I can’t imagine either.