English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

jlliagre

00:23

@Cerberus or vote their own way :-)

Cerberus

00:37

@jlliagre Well, there is no difference between those two ways.

jlliagre

00:49

@Cerberus You mean there is no difference between men votes and women votes? That's not what news are saying lately.

Cerberus

Yes.

As far as I know, each member of the Diet voted like any other.

It was divided into three colleges, though.

jlliagre

01:11

@Cerberus I was kind of kidding. I'm afraid you missed that. I guess vote like the men can have two meanings. The one you used have the same rights of vote and this other one follow what the men believe is the right choice. So vote their own way would for example mean 'vote a less bellicose way' or something.

Cerberus

Oh, I understood.

Just responded seriously out of reflex.

jlliagre

@Cerberus Okay, so who were these women, sovereigns?

alphabet

01:36

@Cerberus All you woke feminists and your "women voting." And they wonder why all the kids nowadays are so confused about gender. /s

Cerberus

@jlliagre Abbotesses of powerful female monasteries.

@alphabet We could put them all in convents like in the olden days.

I mean the ones that talk back.

alphabet

@Cerberus First you let them vote, then you let them drive, ten years later they'll all be dyeing their hair blue and identifying as cats. And in Springfield, people'll eat them. /s

CowperKettle

> Until 1974, women in the U.S. could not apply for and own a credit card in her own name.

Oh. My random quote might be timely

Cerberus

Quite.

CowperKettle

Depression as a functional response to adversity - an anthropologist's hypothesis of depression

Edward Hagen (anthropologist)

Edward Harold Hagen (born June 1, 1962) is an American biological anthropologist and professor in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University Vancouver, where he has taught since 2007. His research has focused on evolutionary explanations for mental health phenomena and substance use. He has studied the Yanomamo people of Venezuela, West African Pygmies, and the Aka people of the Congo Basin. == References == == External links == Faculty page Edward Hagen publications indexed by Google Scholar

Cerberus

01:51

@alphabet I doubt whether the abbesses would dye their hair blue.

jlliagre

@Cerberus Ah okay. I was thinking about regencies, the only way for women to be heads of state under salic law.

alphabet

@CowperKettle Credit cards are a gateway drug to lesbian witchcraft, duh.

Cerberus

@jlliagre Perhaps some could vote in the Diet that way too.

> Under the abbesses Henriette Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Elisabeth Ernestine of Saxe-Meiningen there began a new golden age of the abbey. The abbesses promoted arts and sciences.

Earlier:

Sophia I, Abbess of Gandersheim

Sophia I (September 975 – 30 January 1039), a member of the royal Ottonian dynasty, was Abbess of Gandersheim from 1002, and from 1011 also Abbess of Essen. The daughter of Emperor Otto II and his consort Theophanu, she was an important kingmaker in medieval Germany. == Early life == According to the chronicles by Thietmar of Merseburg, Sophia was born to Emperor Otto II and Theophanu. She may have been the first surviving daughter, born in 975, though other sources indicate that her sister Adelaide, born 977, was in fact the eldest. Sophia is first documented in a 979 deed of donation, when her...

Daughter of a Byzantine princess, too.

alphabet

@Cerberus Dunno, the Pope seems pretty woke these days, acting all politically correct.

Cerberus

02:07

Encouraging abortion and gay marriage?

Female priests?

alphabet

@Cerberus He won't use anti-gay slurs without apologizing, for some reason.

Cerberus

That is something.

Not quite blue hair.

alphabet

All these liberals trying to groom children. Back in my day, we only let priests do that.

Mitch

@tchrist Quel dommage.

You knew I was going to say that.

alphabet

04:33

Discriminatory college administration threatens to ban raccoons from all campus buildings

Vikas

11:21

> Experts say the same rumours and false allegations about widespread fraud that inspired the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 are resurfacing in advance of this year's election

Brace for the impact.

MetaEd

13:15

Wordle 1,234 4/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛
⬛🟨🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

alphabet

13:26

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Nov. 4, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 🎉

My Score: 2290

Robusto

14:37

#travle #691 +2
🟧✅✅🟧✅
https://travle.earth

@jlliagre Tell me how this one is not completely idiotic.

jlliagre

14:48

#travle #691 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

@Robusto Why? All well-known borders, aren't they?

Robusto

@jlliagre Spoiler

jlliagre

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Nov. 4, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ 💔 ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 🎉

My Score: 2080
I was lucky on G, I picked an answer at random.

@Robusto Spoiler

Robusto

@jlliagre But the one you suggest is called "wrong" on my version of the game.

jlliagre

@Robusto You've been hacked! :-)

Robusto

All I know is that there are two countries that could link the original with the next in line, and both are labelled WRONG.

jlliagre

15:11

@Robusto Spoiler

#WhenTaken #251 (04.11.2024)

I scored 896/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 390 km - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 184 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 111 km - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 191 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 22.2 metres - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 1350 km - 🗓️ 17 yrs - ⚡ 127 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 586.3 metres - 🗓️ 5 yrs - ⚡ 195 / 200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,234 4/6

⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟨⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Robusto

15:34

@jlliagre Spoiler

Robusto

15:50

#WhenTaken #251 (04.11.2024)

I scored 868/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 391 km - 🗓️ 2 yrs - ⚡ 186 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 479 km - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 182 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 894 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 172 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 1762 km - 🗓️ 8 yrs - ⚡ 144 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 350 km - 🗓️ 5 yrs - ⚡ 184 / 200

https://whentaken.com

jlliagre

@Robusto Nothing wrong from travle here. It didn't state these two countries were wrong (that would be red: significant detour) but just 'pretty good' (orange: close but doesn't get you closer.)

Robusto

Wordle 1,234 4/6

⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟨⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

@jlliagre sighs

A red check looks wrong from where I see it.

AI slop site sends thousands in Ireland to fake Halloween parade

@Mitch ^

Mitch

@Robusto “This was not on purpose!”

The law is more lenient towards those with no bad intent, eg manslaughter vs premeditated murder.

But still manslaughter isn't so great either.

"typically of poor or no quality"? -no- quality? wouldn't that just be blank space?

"An easy tool is to focus on words like “the,” “it,” or “is,” which will sometimes appear more often than is necessary, as generative AI is likelier to use common words instead of bigger and more descriptive words." ...

um

maybe.

But I'm not so sure about it.

The usual way to figure out if a document is 'out of distribution' (ie not like the others) is to use TF-IDF... words in the document that are rare elsewhere tell you the doc is special.

And if 'special' means AI generated, then
Delve
Tapestry
Vibrant
Landscape
Realm
Embark
Are all high TF-IDF for ChatGPT documents.

(other LLMs like Claude or Gemini may have different high TF-IDF words because trained on different docs and different word-vectorizer and different RLHF (post training fix up by humans))

more words from plusdocs.com/blog/the-most-overused-chatgpt-words

Most of those special words have been documented to have come from the vocabulary choices by the RLHF trainers, who happen to be a lot from Nigeria, and had a particular educated way of writing responses (not always the natural expected manner).

(I can't remember where I heard that)

@Robusto Awesome label "AI slop site"

Robusto

16:11

Daily Octordle #1015
4️⃣9️⃣
🔟3️⃣
6️⃣7️⃣
8️⃣🕚
Score: 58

@Mitch Did you watch that "cosmology" video I linked before? I suspect it is AI generated because none of the images make sense.

yesterday, by Robusto

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Betelgeuse Has Just EXPLODED & Something TERRIFYING Is Happening Now!"

►

Also very clickbaity and with a terrible narrative (computer-voiced).

They're talking about Jupiter and showing a potato rotating in a microwave (or something like it).

Mitch

@Robusto watching now

First impression: I want to gouge out my ears with rusty darning needles every time the narrator says beh tuhl GUS

Robusto

@Mitch Also GINT for giant.

Mitch

Noting some of the meta-data... few upvotes, few viewers

@Robusto I didn't even hear the word

but that's awful

Robusto

As in "supergint star"

Mitch

I dont know what this all has to do with NDT

@Robusto haha yeah my mind just didn't even register that there was a problem, just some kind of 'super-whatsit star'

OK, the voice could easily be AI reconstructed from the transcript.

Robusto

16:24

@Mitch How about the video? Lots of irrelevant material.

Mitch

The transcript itself makes sense and is somewhat coherent. I suppose it is a reasonable narrative about the dimming of Betelgeuse.

Laurel

@alphabet He apologized the first time. (yeah, this short sentence says a lot)

Mitch

The individual clips in video sequence each look... like the usual clips I see in videos on youtube...I always wonder where they came from (beause the production company that produced it (or teenager in their basement) did -not- preduce each one just cut and pasted from somewhere else).

Robusto

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Nov. 4, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 🎉

My Score: 2270

@Mitch Yes. I first suspected they were just poor choices, but then they were really bizarre choices.

Mitch

I'm no expert on vision genAI but have heard some of the things to look for (like symmetry and number of teeth, hair wisps, number of fingers on hands. BUt those may be 'fixed' in current models.

@Robusto Right. What each clip is seems to have little to do with what is being said at the moment, but sure, would be mostly appropriate for that narrative

(there was one short clip of a woman berating someone like she was complaining about their office work - very ... random and not appropriate for the whole)

Robusto

16:31

Did you see the potato yet?

Mitch

I stopped before I got to the potato thing that you're wondering about... do you have a timestamp?

alphabet

@Laurel Incidentally, the remark he made--that some seminaries are full of closeted gay people--is, I've heard, entirely accurate.

Robusto

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Betelgeuse Has Just EXPLODED & Something TERRIFYING Is Happening Now!"

►

This starts on a meaningless diagram of some sort.

Then ... the potato!

Daily Sequence Octordle #1015
5️⃣6️⃣
8️⃣9️⃣
🔟🕚
🕛🕐
Score: 74

Mitch

@Robusto Yeah, wildly random.

Robusto

@Mitch Do you think this could be someone's attempt to judge how well YouTube viewers actually pay attention to something that makes no sense?

Mitch

16:45

1) if the individual video clips were created by some genAI, they are all superimpressive. I can't look at them and say yeah that's generated definitely (or even probably).

2) the selection of clips though ... seems -way- too chaotic to be done by a human. chaos my term for not random noise like static but somewhat relevant but also some randomness (inconsistently inconsistent).

@Robusto how did you find it?

Robusto

@Mitch It was in my feed. It looked like something outrageous that Neil Degrasse Tyson would never say, so I investigated.

Mitch

@Robusto could be. youtube attracts all kinds (people just trying shit out, but also state actors who intentionally mess with viewership)

Robusto

State actors?

Mitch

@Robusto The youtube feed choices are AI driven with some randomness popped in (also some very intentional upping of possibilities of things that would never otherwise get traction).

@Robusto Small parts of defense departments IT areas that are doing cyberwarfare.

Robusto

@Mitch With that?

Mitch

16:51

That sounds extremely superstitious, but there's evidence the Russians are doing it.

And I presume the US is doing it. (and other major players (Europe, China, India))

@Robusto Probably not that. Maybe some teenager from Kazakstan (my term for someone super tech brilliant and with a lot of time on there hands and just wants to press some buttons) was trying out some new tech they've been working on.

I was just giving examples of places using genAI and what there ends might be. YOur linked video is probably not a state actor (unless maybe they're super clever and are trying to test things out on something innocuous)

This example is really testing my paranoid abilities... I don't usually do that.

I usually can't be bothered... my mind stops at "Why would someone bother/take the energy to do that?"

I mean I'm sure there are bad nefarious maleficent people out there, but I just want to take a nap.

Ohhh... DST -> EST

Robusto

@Mitch Here it means MST.

Mitch

Im going to repeat myself... Car accidents and heart attacks increase (statistically) significantly after every time change.

Solution: stop driving cars or using your heart.

@Robusto "DT -> ST" is not informative enough even with context

MetaEd

17:09

@Robusto ... and you gave link juice to this why?

Conrado

Rather than something outrageous, do you expect Neil deGrasse Tyson to say, "Er, actually..." first, and then something outrageous?

MetaEd

17:28

@Mitch "love with your heart, use your head for everything else"

Vikas

17:41

@Mitch "every time change"?

jlliagre

Change everytime.

Mitch

@Vikas every time there is a switch from standard time to daylight savings (and also a lesser effect the other direction)

from which follows my suggestion that we only every move the clocks back.

I just realized, in the sense of became aware of the awareness, that pretty much most everything I write is an attempt at being ridiculous.

Whether it is true or not.

Like if there is some true thing that isn't ridiculous, I don't feel compelled to repeat it.

Like I couldn't give a rat's ass about people who claim the Earth goes around the Sun, when it is obvious that the Earth and Sun both revolve around their common barycenter.

Which totally ignores interplanetary effects.

I kinda like the spirograph-like epicycles in the Ptolmaic model.

jlliagre

@Mitch Which totally ignores inter star system effects.

Mitch

There, I took a stand.

@jlliagre Also, galactic cycles, and cluster and supercluster vectors.

and multiverse interactions.

jlliagre

Yes, I was about to talk about these.

Mitch

17:56

@jlliagre For once, I was able type faster.

jlliagre

:-)

Mitch

Now if you could give something between superclusters and multiverses, I'd love to add that to the ridiculosity hierarchy.

Robusto

@MetaEd Because of how confounding it was. Read my discussion with @Mitch.

Mitch

Yeah and really, by how much is it upping viewership? by the at most 5 extra people who will view it here?

From the numbers it's actually quite a big percentage (5/900 ~= 0.05%)

by just one post here.

Nobody is getting any appreciable advertising money out of that.

unless...

Robusto

Interactive Media Bias Chart

And yet another Media Bias Chart This one a bit easier to parse.

Interesting that The Weather Channel skews left. Is this because facts are left-leaning? Discuss.

MetaEd

18:45

@Mitch viewership is not the same as link juice

Laurel

@Robusto Cuz they refuse to say democrats are responsible for hurricanes? (Which, I must add, is something that too many people actually believe. It was a meme recently)

Robusto

@Laurel That, and the weather tends to bear out the reality of climate change.

MetaEd

@Laurel this is the electorate version of Eternal September

Laurel

@Robusto This is probably the real reason, though that's also an absurd reason to call them left leaning

Robusto

@Laurel Only the "left" seems to have any grip on reality, sad to say.

Laurel

18:58

The whole state of the election is depressing to me. Several friends of mine said they would leave the US if Trump won, and they might just do it. I wish I could say they're overreacting but it's hard to convince even myself of that

MetaEd

"reality has a well-known liberal bias"

Robusto

@Laurel Yeah. I actually investigated several "outs" like that when Trump won the first time. I decided there was nothing that would would be good enough for my wife and me. For one thing, my wife is rubbish at languages. For another, neither of us likes bugs (good-bye, Central America, or most tropics). And we're in our peak healthcare-facing years.

I'm not saying it couldn't worsen to that point, but for the moment I am really, really hoping for a Dem victory this year. Like never before.

@MetaEd Well put.

Cerberus

19:19

@Robusto Interesting where they put Russia Today.

Laurel

@Robusto I've also at least thought about leaving (at least this cycle), but I really don't want to. And at the very least, staying in the US means that your vote stays in the US, and hopefully that means something

Robusto

@Cerberus I didn't notice that one. Where is it? (I wish these maps wouldn't use logos. What's wrong with plain text?)

Cerberus

@Robusto Yes, it is annoying.

MetaEd

... and there's the rain.

Laurel

I feel like a lot of the reassurance I'm able to give myself rn is just "at least it couldn't be that bad for me" which is hardly reassuring at all, especially when Project 2025 would really screw over a lot of people both close to me and not.

Cerberus

19:24

Robusto

@Cerberus Ha, no wonder I didn't notice it.

@Laurel It's even worse for you than for me. I can't understand why any woman would vote for Trump.

Cerberus

A rather confounding choice of presentation.

@Robusto Because he's hot?

Robusto

@Cerberus You just shorted all my circuits.

Cerberus

Oops.

Mitch

@MetaEd OK fine point made but I can't tell how many links there are, just this one, no baseline.

@Cerberus use the C type fire extinguisher, smothering foam for electrical circuits.

alphabet

19:32

Poll: 53% of Israelis think that the time has come to end the war in Gaza

Cerberus

@Mitch Oh, I have foam.

Powder ruins electronics and water ruins everything.

Mitch

@Robusto Baron Harkonnen was intentionally chosen by the Bene Gesserit to further the chances of a Mahdi.

@Cerberus snort

Ew

some went up my nose

@Robusto People don't read.

They don't even read at those sources.

They just look at the pictures.

alphabet

@Robusto Would that the Democrats were, in fact, leftists.

MetaEd

@Mitch used to be you could ask Google. [link:(url)] but it doesn't work anymore

Mitch

Pictures of babies - centrist

Cerberus

19:35

@Mitch This is apropos.

Mitch

Pictures of puppies - right

Pictures of cats - gaddamned liberal cat lovers

alphabet

@Laurel I'd be concerned that, if the anti-Trump folks who can leave do so, then Trump will be able to consolidate his power much more easily.

Cerberus

Mitch

@MetaEd Really? They'd actually display somewhere how many links to a URL? (they surely know because that's part of the algorithm)

MetaEd

@Mitch the "link" search keyword would return pages that linked to the named page. And as with any search result Google tells you how many at the top of the page.

Mitch

19:38

@alphabet It's a fun idea to think about but no appreciable population movement would be made. People in general (the world over) just don't have the means to move to another country. People will stay and grumble.

Laurel

@alphabet Hence what I said about our vote counting here

Mitch

@Laurel Does Canada have a 'digital nomad' visa?

Or New Zealand?

alphabet

@Laurel Meanwhile, in my state Kamala is up by something like 27 points.

Mitch

I'm sure there's some former British colony that isn't malarial and not with impending annihilation from sea level rising.

Laurel

@Mitch No idea. Working across countries tough to arrange

Mitch

19:42

@Laurel Takes money, planning, language skills, actual skills (that are wanted by the new country) if you're serious about taking on a new citizenship.

Or be OK with an unskilled immigrant job (cleaning, driving, etc)

alphabet

@Mitch I could move to Toronto; I hear they're relatively raccoon-tolerant.

Mitch

I always imagined when the revolution comes and somehow I couldn't wangle being on the winning side, that the vocation I could very easily slip into would be...

night watchman.

of course with CC tvs

none of that walking around the premises crap

@alphabet they're super tolerant up north because...

because there -are- none.

jlliagre

@Mitch Gibraltar?

MetaEd

Laurel

@alphabet You know I live in a swing state, so there's no such relief for me. I'm not sure how much protection I'll get from state laws in the event more things go wrong federally either

Mitch

19:46

@jlliagre Hm... that -sounds- like it fits but... EU stupidities are involved.

@MetaEd nice

Laurel

In fact, I feel like I live in a swing area in general (suburbia) since it feels like it's a coin flip what side you're seeing a sign from (the urban and rural areas are more democrat and republican respectively). It does not feel great

alphabet

@Laurel On the other hand, your vote matters.

Mitch

@alphabet especially for down the ballot (state and local officials)

MetaEd

If you're a US voter and don't like the way things are going, move to Texas and make it a swing state.

alphabet

In pretty much every local race, including representative in the House, I had the privilege of voting for a Democrat running unopposed.

Mitch

19:49

The primaries are more important then.

Cerberus

@Mitch It's perfectly fine. The E. U. can besiege the rock for years, but the British fleet will bring in food forever since it is by the sea.

Mitch

@Cerberus The first Dune movie, by David Lynch, made the Harkonnens very repulsive.

Cerberus

I know.

I liked everybody's looks far better in that film than in the recent films.

Mitch

@Cerberus Making the meme even closer to what it is analogizing.

Cerberus

Yes.

I think there was talk of Texas becoming a swing state, some years ago?

alphabet

19:53

@Mitch I did get to vote for Ed Markey in the primary that was just...incredibly weird. Though he did still win by a fairly large margin.

Mitch

@Cerberus The UK should just take the shameful hit and re-establish EU membership. Better for everybody.

Really. -Everybody-

Cerberus

@Mitch It may do so eventually.

But that will be a while.

jlliagre

> Local News
Permanent daylight saving time? Senator from Massachusetts says "we gotta get it done."

Mitch

@Cerberus I mean we're not go know for sure about the US for a few days, but if they go one way, all sorts of world wide shit will be pushed in a bad direction almost immediately, and the EU and the UK will have to worry about that first.

jlliagre

I agree with that senator.

alphabet

19:56

@jlliagre The guy who, before that race, was mostly known (at least to people my age) as "That person who exists and is probably okayish."

Mitch

@jlliagre I thought the current scientific-consensus trend was for permanent standard time?

@alphabet wait... which one?

tchrist

@jlliagre No, that's bad. You need to just leave it on standard and put an end to all the fox clucking.

You don't want permanent clock skew compared with solar soon.

jlliagre

No, I wan't sunny evenings!

I don't care about mornings, I sleep anyway.

tchrist

That doesn't change anything.

alphabet

@Mitch Exactly. Our other senator, the one who suddenly became a progressive icon for like six months in 2020.

tchrist

19:59

But you're talking to someone who gets up at 3 or 4 in the morning every day, which now has become 4 or 5 in the morning. I'm heliocentric so I never change anything in my own schedule.

yesterday, by tchrist

@Robusto Metering out one's days from a heliocentric reference frame is as natural and humane as doing so from an horological reference frame is unnatural and inhumane.

@jlliagre Move to Spain. :)

Laurel

@alphabet That's true, and sometimes I think I should've done more. Maybe I'll at least try to make sure my parents are both voting democratic (some more distant relatives of mine definitely aren't, not unless they've thrown out the Trump bobble heads recently)

alphabet

@Laurel Certainly we all could have done more, as with every other cause in existence.

jlliagre

@tchrist Spain is moving to France, as far as weather trend is concerned.

Cerberus

@Mitch Yeah I think there is no real conexion between the two.

Laurel

@MetaEd I was actually recently in Austin, and the only big downside there is that you're surrounded by the rest of Texas. (My friend calls Austin the blueberry in the cherry pie)

tchrist

20:03

@jlliagre I meant their longitudinal double summer time. They should be in Portugal and England's TZ but are not.

Cerberus

@jlliagre Becoming cooler and wetter?

tchrist

No, France getting hotter.

Laurel

@alphabet I guess I should cut myself a break because I've already driven myself insane once in the last rolling 30 day period, and that was unrelated to the election. It would have been a lot out of me to do more

alphabet

I'm skeptical of the idea that Trump is going to go full Putin and turn the US into a two-bit dictatorship, but ya never know.

jlliagre

@Cerberus Less temperate, less regular. Periods of drought followed by torrential rains. There were only some of the latter around the Mediterranean before, but now we have much more frequent floods in the northern half of France. Fourty years ago, it rained a little drizzle for days in Paris area, nowadays, rain falls by the buckets in a few hours.

Even the small town where I live has experienced in October two floodings in 10 days apart.

Laurel

20:11

@alphabet Even if that doesn't happen, there's enough in even the first pages of the Project 2025 doc to make me dread this election

Mitch

@alphabet I don't expect that either. But there's a lot of room between the cuurent state and Russia for things to get worse.

alphabet

Otherwise I personally probably won't be affected much. Probably. But he'll screw over a lot of people elsewhere and we'll have to deal with another four years of the news media hanging on his every word to make clickbait headlines.

Mitch

@Laurel Jink!

..ks!

alphabet

@Laurel I think he's probably sincere (for once) in saying that he doesn't care much about Project 2025. He doesn't like people telling him what to do--or really anything produced by people who aren't his handpicked loyalists.

tchrist

@Laurel Even if she wins by whisker, you still had half the country voting for us to to switch to an authoritarian system instead of a democracy. Longer term, that one is the greater problem needing solving.

alphabet

20:15

Unless it was called "Project MAGA" and written by Stephen Miller and someone with ties to the Proud Boys, who had run every word by him before publishing. Then he'd care.

CowperKettle

Laurel

@alphabet That's true, but he definitely shares a lot of values with them. And loose cannon Trump is a thing to fear regardless of what anyone else is doing

CowperKettle

Word of 01:15 am: capillary stalling

alphabet

@Mitch Though I have said it's not ideal that, if we have some low-level civil conflict, the other side will have all the guns.

@Laurel Yes.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle Interesting, but I wonder how those numbers are calculated.

Laurel

20:17

@tchrist Yeah, I think about this every time I pass by the giant TRUMP signs just outside my neighborhood. I wonder what policies of his they could agree with so much as to justify such a display

CowperKettle

@Cerberus I've picked the picture from Massimo's twitter feed. He usually posts interesting stuff, but is not known for being a good statistician.

So yes, could be some creative calculation.

MetaEd

@tchrist one of these days I'm going to make a TZ file for myself that sets my local clock to mean solar time.

Cerberus

@jlliagre France is less temperate than Spain?

alphabet

@Laurel Mostly keeping the ~~Blacks~~ criminals and ~~Latinos~~ immigrants out of their pure ~~White~~ suburbs.

Cerberus

But, yeah, I will believe that both countries move in the same direction, as most of the world, with respect to less temperate weather.

MetaEd

20:19

@tchrist and that only because getting Linux to show apparent time would be problematic

alphabet

Also the economy, which to be fair has been...okayish under Biden's leadership.

And of course Biden's sudden reversal on border policies means either his past policies were awful or his current policies are awful. Probably both.

jlliagre

@Cerberus Becoming less temperate than it used to be, so with a weather more similar to the Spanish one, although that one also evolves in the same direction (hotter, more extreme events).

Cerberus

@jlliagre Right so that is a different thing from from moving to France!

It is in the same direction, as you say.

Mitch

20:51

@CowperKettle I should stop complaining about housing costs in the US then

I can still complain about the cost of health care

tchrist

@MetaEd No need to be mean: just make each day use that day's solar noon.

MetaEd

@tchrist so a leap of a second or two every midnight

Mitch

21:45

@Cerberus wait... between which two whats?

@MetaEd I'd barely notice it.

MetaEd

@Mitch yes practically speaking I would barely notice it also. I'd have to think very carefully about how it would affect, say, cron jobs.

Cerberus

@Mitch Between the next American elections and a new referendum on joining the E. U. in Britain.

MetaEd

it's not like cron hasn't already had to take time changes into account.

Robusto

@alphabet As my gambler son would say, "That's loser talk."

MetaEd

@Mitch but the more interesting problem is that I'd have to use the equations of time and generate a huge, HUGE timezone file that leaps daily instead of seasonally.

Robusto

21:52

Why I'm not worried about the election.

►

2

MetaEd

22:54

okay the simple case is handled -- I was able to add a timezone to Linux that shows the mean solar time for my house. 12:00 will not deviate by more than about a quarter of an hour from actual solar noon.

Laurel

@Robusto Is Adam not here to Ruin Everything???

MetaEd

it appears the complex case entails a nightly leap interval of anywhere from 0 to 30 seconds.

alphabet

@Robusto Dunno, but it'd be nice to if we had a pro-democracy party instead of one that's pro-oligarchy and one that's pro-tyranny.

MetaEd

and one would want to leap just enough that @tchrist 's stipulation, apparent solar time (solar noon) should take place at 12:00, would be true.

Criggie

23:16

@Robusto I'm not worried about it, because I'm not eligible to vote.

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