Folks. Publicly traded companies will ALWAYS compare the expected value of breaking the law with compliance.

Say it costs $100 million to follow the law. Breaking it comes with a $300 million fine, but only a 20% chance of getting caught.

They compare a 100% chance of paying $100 million to a 20% chance of paying $300 million.

Average cost of following the law: $100 million

Average cost of breaking it: $60 million

If we’re gonna do capitalism (which I would rather we not, for the record!), we have to make that expected value calculation break in favor of following regulations. If it is cheaper to break the law than to follow it, you’re not just losing money by complying: you’re giving ground to your competition. Fines need to be massive. Infractions need to get caught and punished. Executives need to be held personally accountable. Corporations need to be dissolved. Fines cannot be just the cost of doing business.

Look at that dip right before 2020! Wonder why America dipped so much lower. Surely, face-masks as a way to prevent the spread of infectious disease wasn’t suddenly a controversial issue!

At first I thought “vibe-coding” was just writing code that felt useful at the time without having like design documents or a formal plan. Literally just coding based on vibes. And I thought it was nice that they finally recognized the way I have been writing code for the past ten years when all my bosses and managers haven’t.

Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be what it actually is.

I don’t know about you nerds but that skeleton is definitely part of me. I don’t live in it: I AM it.

You bring up a good point, but I don’t think religion necessarily involves the kind of unreality I have in mind.

A lot of religious claims deal with things that are unfalsifiable. Invisible forces, unreachable gods, consciousness after death, things like that. Not the most rational stuff in the world, but not obviously false on the face of it either.

Now, though, we’ve got folks believing things that are easily disproven. Climate change denial, anti-vaccine bullshit, the never-ending parade of moral panics churned out by the above mentioned propaganda machine, Jewish space lasers, pet eating immigrants, etc.

I won’t go so far as to say that religion never causes people to deny observable reality; it surely does. But I think the right wing media empire we have now does so intentionally and on a scale greater than any religious movement I can think of.

The bad news: The most evil people in the world spend billions every year on the largest propaganda machine in the history of man, and it enthralls a large minority of us.

The good news: That’s what it takes to maintain this! This many people living in a bubble of unreality is not natural! It is the product of a machine built by man, and all machines built by man are destined to eventually fail. Maybe the right person dies at the right time. Maybe the conflict between their narrative and reality eventually becomes too much. Maybe they lose control of the story and the movement splinters into hundreds of contradictory conspiracy theories that no longer move in lockstep. Maybe the magic just wears off one day.

Not in an emotional way, but like digesting news from around the world and seeing logically we are fucked so may as well just quit?

I would challenge that belief.

Things are bad, sure. Climate is gonna change, people are gonna fight and die over the dumbest shit, and billionaires are going to loot any public good they can get their hands on.

But good people are still fighting. It’s a lot less top-down and much less visible, but it’s happening. Lives can still be saved, the damage can still be mitigated, and the bad guys can still be meaningfully opposed. Things can change quickly!

We have to keep in mind that the news is never gonna be good. Even when it isn’t a glorified right-wing propaganda machine, it’s a business that thrives on attention. And things that make you sad or scared or angry are always gonna grab your attention more than anything else.

We’re not getting hit by a giant meteor. We’re not all irrecoverably fucked. It’s better to prepare for an uncertain better future than give up preemptively!

You may also want to check the extruder arm. The stock plastic one on the ender 3 is prone to cracking.

Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Ad-Nauseum is a nice way to inject a ton of garbage into the data corps collect.

Author’s website + followup comics:

https://www.nickmaskell.com/comics/

Looks like this is episode 1 of 4 so far.

Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.

Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.