I am sorry to hear you think everybody abroad enjoys your suffering, but I think you are getting the wrong impression from lemmy (which does not represent the average people). I admit that it’s often hard to feel sympathetic towards someone who voted for what’s coming to them, because believing in karma feels good. But I do also feel pity for all the people that are struggling economically or are getting deported without fault.

If you meet normal (=not from lemmy) people abroad you will find that most will want a very hardline stance against the US as a country, wishing to punish the US administration even more for all the wars and hostile behavior, while also be very welcoming to any US person that want to escape that hell.

I wish you the best in changing the system there, but unfortunately I fear there’s at least 2 more years (likely more) of things becoming worse and worse ahead of us.

PS: upvoted because I think you are not alone in your feeling, and it’s something worth discussing.

Luckily I have been playing a skyblock peaceful pack (Star technology) so I would be doing quite well.

Though before this I tried a bit Gregtech GTNH, and I would have been super-duper fucked. I was scared of the infernal monsters while playing the game, I can’t imagine how it would feel being actually in the game myself.

This “promotion as next obvious thing you want” needs to die. I don’t want to go manage people and have told my manager that I’m happy in my current role and I don’t want a promotion. He was quite happy to know he did not have to worry about that.

You can implement an agent loop in any language, and modern languages can do everything that lisp can, so there’s nothing magic in lisp. At the end of the day lisp is just another weakly typed functional/procedural language.

Personally I didn’t find lisp that much elegant due to the loose typechecking and the excessive parentheses, but the macro system allows some very terse and smart (and mind-bending, as you said) solutions, which do feel pretty cool when they work fine.

IMHO it’d be probably better to give your agent access to a python interpreter because it’s much more prevalent in the training data than lisp…

I self-learned lisp last year using the old SICP book, but I do consider myself a fairly expert programmer, and I felt that book was a bit hard at the end of it.

IMHO the key difference of lisp’s eval wrt python’s eval is that it takes in input a parsed expression (a lisp list) and not a string. In lisp though you don’t have to use eval much, because the macros allow you to transform the expressions from your programs directly (take in input parsed code, return a different code structure to be executed). The quote and quasiquote functions are there to make that easy!

I don’t know javascript enough, but in python you’d have to use eval and use some kind of parsing package crazyness if you wanted to implement a similar macro system!

If you are into exploring programming languages or writing interpreters, lisp is quite an interesting language. I can also see it working quite well if you need to embed a small scripting language somewhere, because it’s so minimal and easy to pick up, but also very powerful if you go into the metaprogramming side of it.

I don’t see many reasons to use it for anything else though.

I think it was not meant to convince anybody out of being flat-earther. It makes a fool out of them, but also it shows that there are humans behind the movement and their motivation (they went down the wrong path and got indoctrinated by the wrong people, and are now isolated by everybody else). I started the documentary thinking thar they are all stupid, and ended it feeling a bit sad about them and understanding a bit why would anybody continue to be part of a group spreating such an obvious lie. They really need some friends outside that group, support and some good education… the flat earthers and many conspiracy theory groups would have already died out, if society did not treat these people as a lost cause. It also explains indirectly why even some very intelligent people do fall for other conspiracy theories (like qanon).

I think it has changed how I would talk to a conspiracy theorist in real life, and I think it’s great that it managed to do that.

In some countries (like Iceland), children have sex for the first time at age 16 on average [0]. That’s the average age, which means 50% of all people have already had sex before then.

If you wait to talk to them until 14, there’s probably a good chunk of them who will have had sex before even knowing what sex is, and many more that will grow up with the very skewed idea taught by porn. And nowadays kids will stumble upon porn even if you try to prevent it (friends, etc.).

You might not like this and it might be different from your experience in the past, but it is IMHO better to have a discussion and teach them that most of what they see is as fake and scripted as an action movie, teach them what is safe, than having them learn dangerous stuff from friends and porn or improvising by themselves. IMHO making this such a taboo topic also helps abusers and pedophiles, because it makes it harder for the kid to actually talk about abuse and report it.

[0] https://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/virginity-map-average-age-people-first-have-sex-by-country-33094921.html?guccounter=1

I don’t think I ever worked in a company doing real agile (involving customers early and directly, shipping frequently, gathering feedback, and changing the process if it becomes an obstruction). It always ends up being all about random metrics, velocity reports to management, and “”“requirements”“” dictated from high up. It’s always just chaos that names itself “agile” as a poor excuse for the lack of planning. You get the worst parts of waterfall (lack of feedback and validation) with the worst part of agile (lack of specs and medium-term plan, no project management). No estimations, no requirements, no plan, no coordination between teams, but the deadline is fixed anyway and the feature has been sold to a customer already. The customer is going to see the product for the first time after 6 months of development, after which the priorities shift immediately and no feedback is ever addressed. AI is not going to magically make management write good requirements and have a good planning session with everybody involved… it’s just going to create even more unreviewed AI slop documents that are just noise and will be ignored by most anyway.

At work claude code, at home zed+deepseek. I loaded up a few dollars in deepseek’s API and they are lasting a long long time (many months). I also tried qwen locally but it’s too slow for me (it runs on the CPU…). I use AI though only for repetitive and boring implementation tasks, or throwaway one-time scripts that I don’t feel like coding by hand. The point of coding at home for me is to have fun, and having the AI solve all interesting problems for me defeats entirely the purpose of why I’m coding. At work we are unfortunately being pushed to use AI a lot more, and the amount of slop code is increasing :(

Other EU countries have a similar unfair system. They’re quite easy to spot because they usually have 2 parties that get 90%+ of the seats.

Once that system is in place, the incentives of the party in power are to keep it, because they’d lose a supermajority if they win the next election cycle.

I honestly don’t know how you could fix the system once it’s so entrenched. I think it can only change if people become aware of how their shitty political situation (only 2 viable parties) is entirely created by this electoral system, and somehow demand a change.

For splitting the app in the taskbar I found it useful to “install” the PWA (you got to find the hidden option in chrome for that…), if it’s supported by the website… It still uses the same cookies and addons, but at least it doesn’t easily get merged with the main browser window and behaves like a proper desktop application. I mainly use firefox though and it doesn’t support PWAs (easily, at least). It’s a shame it’s not more common, because it’s a much better way to run software than the many electron apps, each having their own chromium installation (no download, no long installation process, full sandboxing, and you can have addons & adblockers affect the pwa!)