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JarJarJedi


				

				

				

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joined 2022 September 10 21:39:37 UTC
				

				
					
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation



				

				

				

				
				
				

				
User ID: 1118


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
JarJarJedi


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

					follows 1 user  

					joined 2022 September 10 21:39:37 UTC
				


				
					

					
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation



				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 1118


					
					
					
				

			




		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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	 Hot Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
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For me, the solution is communities so niche nobody is really interested in brigading them, and that attract mods who really care about the subject, not clout or wokeness or anything else. I don't know, maybe it not always works, but  for like half-dozen ones I am interested in, they survive. I'm a bit sad the place they survive on is Reddit, but I am glad they exist nonetheless.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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I remember when the whole federation hype started, the most popular discussions had been along the lines of "how do I block server X?" and "how do I block everyone who doesn't block server X?". I lost interest to it about that time, and I don't think it got better since.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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Wasn't my experience. I mean, tech has been always kind of leaning leftwise, but aggressive wokeness and Nazi-calling was not common, people usually behaved professionally even if they disagreed politically. The idea that you can't use certain library/platform/software or go to a conference because it's "Nazi" was not common. Something like what Mozilla or GNOME are now would be completely alien in early 2000s when it all started. It began to turn sour with CoC wars, and then it got progressively worse (pun intended) but I remember the period where the cancel culture was already rampant around but the tech was still relatively unaffected. It couldn't last and it didn't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Qeekly Finance Thread - 2026-11-07
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I expect that now, after Dems have won the elections, "affordability crisis" will be only ever mentioned when it is necessary to push some legislation through the feeble resistance of Republicans in the Congress (and of course when criticizing Trump). I find the idea that somebody up there cares whether I can afford certain house (or any housing at all) hopelessly naive. Somebody is always buying those houses. We're nowhere at the point where the market is frozen because nobody can afford any housing. Heck, even in California the housing market is pretty lively - I have absolutely no idea who those people who can afford it are, but the empiric fact is they exist, and there's enough of them to support the market. So why would anybody worry about anything?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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I don't know, I am hearing about federation for decades now, and I have never found any use of it. I'm still using RSS/Atom, but it's not true federation. I can not remember any true federated site that I had any use for.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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Yes, but also no. I mean, Reddit in general is 99% full of garbage. But there are some quite nice niche communities. If subreddit system did not exist, the garbage would envelop everything and the communities would not survive. But since each subreddit pretty much can exist in its own bubble and ignore what is happening outside it, it can survive. I don't think we really need it here at this stage, but I am very glad it exists on Reddit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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Those used to be called B&D languages.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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Unfortunately, a lot of this goes around lately, and now it's in tech too. People seriously calling others Nazi for using a wrong Linux distro or a wrong window manager. I guess whichever tiny bits of virtue signaling still left unharvested must be harvested.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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I have yet to see a website where it would matter. I mean, there are many workloads where pure bit shuffling speed matters. A lot of them run in real world on JVM which has GC, and it doesn't present a significant barrier (note that not having GC does not mean you just get free speedup - some code still needs to do memory management, and maybe your personal homebrew code is more efficient than decades of dedicated work by people writing VMs. Or maybe not). But these workloads tend not to be websites. For the website, it's network speed, I/O latency, memory, caching. But very rarely having GC is any serious consideration.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase




Don't tell me you're rewriting it in Rust?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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Housing is notoriously expensive, at least in the places that people want to live in




We all know why (or at least one of the reasons why). People are selfish and short-sighted. They want housing built, in theory, but not where the good housing is, because that'd ruin the value of the good housing. There's no real solution for it that does not involve somebody left unhappy. And usually already having an expensive house correlates well with being able to leverage your desires into policy outcomes. So guess who is going to be left unhappy.




Many younger millennials have given up on ever getting a house




There are plenty of housing that is affordable if you don't want to live within 15 minutes walk of 200 restaurants and 50 shoe stores. One just needs to see what their priorities are. Again, there's no solution that would make desirable places inexpensive - it's a contradiction in terms, until somebody invents infinite space and infinitely scalable housing, people with more money will always outbid people with less money for desirable living spaces.


Also, the millennials (not only them of course) have been voting for various state-allocated goodies for decades. Redistribution have been growing rampantly. We're financing and subsidizing megatons of stuff we didn't before. Where all this is coming out? From the pockets of the people, ultimately. Via taxation, via inflation, via costs increases, via wages stagnation, via standards of living reduction.




"owned by Trump" enough that one can pin that one on him, being that enthusiastic about datacenter buildup




Blaming Trump for data center buildup is the weirdest complaint of the season, to be honest. Trump didn't invent the AI boom, he just didn't destroy US chances of being the leading nation for the next 50 years by suppressing it. Europe is pretty much non-contender in this, but China very much is. China already leveraged perfectly the reluctance of the West to have physical industry - now if you want to manufacture anything, you have to go to China. Trump tried to change the trend, but that has costs - so everybody is whining "why Trump is making everything so expensive?!" You want it so that if you want to have any AI-related development happen, you'd also have to to go to China? And have China - read CCP - own all the best data centers and all the data in them? That, plainly speaking, is hooting insane. Trump didn't do that - for which I can't even really praise him, as not being hooting insane is not something we usually praise a person for. We are in the middle of a technological change, yes, it will have some pains, and it has nothing to do with Trump. Trump could make it worse, but he did not.




not only did Trump not solve them like he implied a president could




Well, this is something you can indeed blame Trump - and any politician - for. There are limits of what a politician - even the President - can do, and they are not as wide as they like to imagine. But you can't really run on the platform of "You know, really I can't do a lot, shit just happens and I'll try not to ruin good shit happening and maybe make bad shit happening slightly less bad, but that's all you can really expect of me in the best of cases". That would be a honest and a realistic platform, and nobody ever could win any election with it. No, actually, I am lying, this guy did: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16223571/man-wins-council-election-qualified-money-politics.html - but not a Presidential election.




TVs are still cheap I guess, but they spy on you though.




Don't connect them to the internet. It's your choice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for November 3rd, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I use Claude at work, and it's pretty decent for most tasks, but for personal projects I don't want to rely on it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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If your problems is a newest ever fresh from the presses gaming toy costs too much, I don't think we have any issues with the economy. We have the issues with people's perspective. I mean you hear people talking in terms like they're on the verge of starvation, and then it turns out the problem is a newest shiniest toy is a little bit too expensive? Maybe diamond tiaras and Hermès handbags are too pricey too now? How can a simple working man get by in such an economy???


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for November 3rd, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What LLMs do you use for coding work?


I have a bunch of subscriptions from my employer for work coding, but for my personal projects I can't use those, obviously. I've been using Grok with some success but I recently had some login problems there and I discovered that even though I paid money for the subscription, they have absolutely no support. Like none at all. I mean, they have support@ email address, but nobody ever answers it. And that's all they have. So even though I figured out how to fix the problem, I don't really want to rely on them for anything I value anymore if I can help it.


I am also not very eager to use OpenAI or Anthropic offerings, especially given that they recently made a habit of restricting their models in various ways, I already hit it a couple of times even though I don't do anything illegal or even questionable, just plain old boring messing with code and looking for bugs. And they are all-in on controlling the industry, both by buying the laws that give them the advantage and restricting their own users so I am a bit reluctant to give them money.


So, I wonder what are my alternatives? Something you're using and can recommend? I'd prefer some low-maintenance, plug-n-play setup, reasonable pricing and preferably some free trial package so I could figure out if it works for my tasks. Somebody that hosts open models with good results? Local setup? I tried to run some models locally but it is pretty slow on my M2 Pro Mac (could be I am doing it wrong) so I wonder what is other people's experience here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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Average US gasoline price in October 2006 was $2.32/gallon, or about $3.87 in today's money




I just filled up yesterday at about $4.2. Yeah, it's a little higher. Not enough to scream "the economy is ruined!". Yeah, we have wars in two major oil-producing nations, it's going to affect the price of oil. But the economy is not ruined at all, and there are many more factors than the price of oil.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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Not only did the wealth tax fail but Prop 42 banned future wealth taxes and also retroactive taxes.




I am not happy about it. Since I don't live in California, I derive no benefit from it, but that means California is not going 100% crazy but will remain like 80% crazy. Which is making people think being California is not that bad. Which supports turning other states into California. By the time Texans realized they goofed up and 80% crazy is not that nice, it'd be too late to fix anything.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
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That's the very sad part. Trump created an option to stop America from turning into California and then to Europe, and then he himself - in close cooperation with the GOP - made sure this option was destroyed. Nobody outside Trump on the Republican team is even close to being able to do the same. So people that want change have an option between having no hope at all and having their hopes up and then immediately crushed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


would merely cause conservatives to stop trusting doctors, with horrible side-effects




I think post-COVID that ship has irrevocably sailed, at least for the generations that were old enough when COVID hit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Qeekly Finance Thread 2026-10-31
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They say the best time to buy is towards the end of the month because then you get the interest for the whole month.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for October 29, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
OK could anybody explain to me WTF is going on in Poland?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for October 28, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All existing juggling guides for me look like the infamous "how to draw an owl" guide. The first steps are like "yeah ok I can do that" and then there comes the step when they say "after you have learned that, you can easily do this" and no, I totally can't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Qeekly Finance Thread - 2026-10-24
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah sure, that's like the joke goes: "Can a woman make a man a millionaire? - Sure, if he's a billionaire!".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
O.C. Bible: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No. Bernie Sanders wants Soviet Union. El-Sayed wants Iran, and his friends who don't have to be polite because they're not in the spotlight want Afghanistan. Soviet Union is not nice, but Iran is worse, and Afghanistan is worse still.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	







		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for October 22, 2026
			
		

	




	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
OK I admit I have followed Ireland much less close than Canada or Australia, so it may be the news bias - I just hear something when something bad is happening.