azertyfun

The phonology of "moth" is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I'm sure linguists could pick apart). It's adjacent to "moist". That's the kind of name you give something you don't like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like "fly", a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it's just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

I didn't even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

Guess why? In French they are called "night butterflies". It's just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it's brown, duh.

This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they're trying to give children nightmares?

Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.

Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don't gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.

I'm not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.

"The system must be destroyed" implies, assuming we're talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.

This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.

Of course everything in the world isn't so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn't diminish the difference between black and white. "The system must be destroyed", by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to "the system must be fixed".

Uncut diamond is a good way to put it.

The scenario, world building, graphics, and acting are world-class. Combat was decent. Most side-quests were forgettable and clearly worse than the main quest. The open-world was mechanically massively underwhelming, especially considering TW3 came out five years earlier.

This game received a lot of love and took a long time to make, but failed to achieve in some key areas. CDPR didn't have the means to do what R* or Larian could, and that's fine. I can't help but feel that if these developers had put the same time and energy into a (semi) closed world à la Mass Effect or Deus Ex, not having to spend so much time filling in a huge open world map would have allowed them to make the whole game as tight and polished as the main quest stuff, and this could have been the best game of the decade or close to it. Only downside is it doesn't tick the mandatory "Open World" box for AAA games, but does anyone actually care if the RPG elements are good? Mass Effects fans would surely disagree.

Stop it with the sugarcoating. He's a fascist, a Nazi. He promises to inflict pain on others, and that's what's appealing to half of American voters. Not the "confidence". They get off on the hate and cruelty, whether they admit it or not. They are, in every literal sense of the word, textbook fascists. No need to make excuses for them.

The FBI apparently learned some lessons on how to deal with Russian interference since 2016 and made some arrests this time around. Way too little too late though, and in January Trump's cronies will take over and that'll be that. Other countries should take notes though and start being much harsher on Russian trolls and their puppets. Unfortunately Von Der Layen recently fired the guy who was prosecuting Musk over Twitter so I'm not too confident anyone in power learned their lesson. Which is mind-boggling because russian-backed far-right parties are a meaningful electoral threat to people like Von Der Layen.

I mean, she did try other things as well and that characterization is a bit reductive. More correctly I think we can say that "she's not him" is the only thing the Sanders->Cheney spectrum could ever agree on and nothing else she did "stuck". Sanders wasn't happy about the pro-israel stuff and Cheney probably wasn't happy about the "tax the rich" stuff.

Choosing one clear ideology and sticking to it might sound great to the progressives on here (and to people like Hasan), but I don't have the hubris to think she or anyone within the Democratic party establishment actually had the charisma to pull that off either (maybe Michele Obama but she didn't wanna do it so that's the end of that plan). Especially considering Harris had like 4 months to pull a campaign together and did not have any previous popular good will to rely on.

4 months is very short and no matter how right you play your cards a lot of voters will not know anything about you other than "she's not Him". Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose (not that she did everything right but I think a postmortem will need to look back way further than that at Biden and Hillary and those who supported them).

Everyone from Sanders to Dick fucking Cheney endorsed Harris. Anyone who was paying any attention and wasn't a literal fascist voted for her. The direction of the swing seems irrelevant.

The swing fell short because it's not so much about direction than strength. Macron in 2017 ran the most "hard center" presidential campaign imaginable. Difference is it worked, not because his centrist program was particularly novel but in large part because he is a very charismatic figure and managed to create a voting base of hopefuls for himself. The same can broadly be argued about Obama (whose first act as president was to essentially absolve the previous administration and Wall St of their many sins in case anyone forgot how moderate he was).

Harris ran on a platform of... "I'm not him". Which to any reasonable person is an obvious "yeah OK", but unfortunately most Americans are apathetic cretins who will refuse to move their asses to a polling station if the guy on the telly doesn't promise them a blowie at the voting booth. And the Democrat establishment is simultaneously too big to fail and incapable of producing an actually charismatic leader.

Well, all that and the obvious election interference from Musk, Putin, and the ontological inability of traditional media not to platform literal fascists.

Whether it's 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don't seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.

Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is "yeah, mostly". Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.

Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn't force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.

Don't forget about the regular capitalists. Many of the richest German industrialists today are direct heirs of Nazis who actively helped Hitler gain power, built a personal empire from slave labor, faced no consequences for their actions, and were allowed to keep operating after the war.

My cheap scale will not work with my freshly recharged amazon basics AAAs. Apparently those do not hold up well enough under load. And of course any set of batteries that does work, discharges over a few months.

So I just bought a cheap mechanical scale (not from Amazon) and I eyeball it for weights under 50g. Good enough and dead reliable.