The coalition of the ascendant concept is kind of insane when you remember for a moment that the popular vote is kinda worthless in winning elections. The electoral college is structured in such a way that conservative whites have a larger share of the electorate relative to their minority peers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lock for California and New York (enclaves of coastal elites and minorities alike) if you lose the entirety of the South, Southwest, and Midwest, enclaves of…the opposite of those things, really. This 538 article on it has links to other discussions related to this and represents a fascinating look into the relationship between popular votes and electoral votes. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/

Democrats suffer from a condition that I’ve come to call “Democratic Realism,” named after Capitalist Realism. No matter how much they get their shit kicked in. No matter how badly they do. No matter how little they accomplish. No matter how badly they look or do in debates. Democrats always believe, beyond a shred of doubt, that they’ll win elections without trying. Not because of their own merits, but because they’re just the only “real” choice; they simply can’t fathom anyone willingly voting for their opponents.

Hillary barely campaigned in the “flyover states” that she needed to win because she couldn’t be fucking bothered to actually try. It wasn’t worth the effort to try and persuade people she thought of as her lessers. And the DNC just went “well, it’s obviously her turn. She’s been waiting for the chance at the presidency for 20 years now. We should go ahead and let her be president.” Because that’s the mentality. They don’t have to “win” elections. They just pick a candidate and they get to win, because there is no “real” alternative. That Bush and Trump won don’t indicate that, yeah, actually, you do have to fight for the people who are voting for you, otherwise they’ll vote for the schmuck that appeals to their basest and most venal instincts. Those were just flukes…right? And you don’t have to inspire confidence and admiration in others, because they should just recognize how smart and accomplished and inoffensive their candidates are, and that they’re told to vote for them by people that are smarter than they are, so they should just shut up and do it.

It’s a party driven less by any kind of ideological goals and more by a pervasive sense of smug, impotent, lazy egotism. And, yeah, they’ll get a shitload of votes in the elections because the alternative always seems to be someone who is one goose-step shy of a literal Nazi. Biden will probably even win the popular vote. Y’know…just like Hillary did…

Fuck, the original Pacific Rim wasn’t even good. Like, how you gonna set such a low bar and somehow slide under it with room to spare?

“This woman, who suffers from body dysphoria and constantly gets more and more plastic surgery (a behavior which harms no one but herself) is the same as this fictional serial killer who tortured hundreds of people to death.”

But in all seriousness, I don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people’s appearance.

First time?

Churchill was a master of historical non-fiction. Not “history books,” per se, but basically books about historical topics pertaining to England that interested him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_English-Speaking_Peoples. They were very popular during his day.

Ah, yes, Drawn Together. The perfect show for people in the early oughts who thought South Park was both too clever and not nearly crude or mean-spirited enough. I’ve seen every episode at least twice.

Great thing is that since it’s open source someone can just fork the project and continue development in a different direction.

On reddit, there’s a subreddit called r/lrcast, which is the dedicated subreddit for the Limited Resources podcast. The primary purpose of the subreddit, however, is not to discuss the podcast, but to discuss the “limited” format of Magic: the Gathering, which constitutes draft and sealed. It’s a very difficult, very expensive format of Magic to play and is a niche subsection of an already fairly niche hobby.

Extrapolating from this, we can say that Youtube hosts around 2.5 to 3 exabytes (2.5 to 3 million terabytes) of data. Interestingly, the total volume of data on the internet is, as of the end of 2023, around 120 zettabytes, so Youtube only makes up around 0.0025% of the total volume of all that data.

XBox has always been a weird console. It never really competes with Nintendo because NIntendo always does its own general thing and also slides neatly into the kids and family market. So it competes with Playstation by default. Except Playstation actually has contracts with good studios to make exclusive games. What’s a non-Halo exclusive for the XBox? Back in the day, you’d play games like Gears of War, Halo (obviously), Fallout 3, Psychonauts, KOTOR, COD, etc. I can’t think of a single meaningful game on the most recent generation for the XBox.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about HTMX

I’ve only ever heard anything “bad” about HTMX and it was here on Lemmy, actually. I ran into someone who was absolutely certain that HTMX was unsafe by design because it leveraged HTML over the wire and was therefore susceptible to HTML injection attacks, specifically by injecting malicious scripts that could be ran from domains you didn’t control. I tried explaining that proper utilization of access-control headers innately prevented this because they worked on the browser level and couldn’t be intercepted or interfered with by HTML injection by design, but he kept insisting it was unsafe while refusing to elaborate. He was very wrong, of course, but also very confident.

I do a lot of systems and backend programming and HTMX is the only way I can actually be productive with frontend work when I have to do it. It’s so simple and straightforward.

This is the only actual explanation I’ve found for why numpy leverages its own implementation of what is in most languages a primitive data type, or a derivative of an integer.

I think there’s a difference between “python guidelines encourage” something and “this is a common coding pattern.” Yes, you can use try/except for flow control, but there’s a lot of people, myself included, who try to use that style sparingly.

it alleged that local developers cannot compete on Steam with international developers, because those do not have to apply the local regulations:

That’s not really contrary to the point, but orthogonal to it. Steam is outcompeting on the basis that it receives special privileges on the basis of its international status. It’s still outcompeting because of a resource advantage. But that advantage exists because domestic developers are disadvantaged by virtue of national regulations over domestic developers.

what is my opposition that doesn’t encompass a de facto defence of free market capitalism? The damage to the users. What about all the Vietnamese people losing access to Steam’s online features, which are arguably necessary nowadays for many games, especially multiplayer ones.

Your argument is the same kind of “consumer rights” argument that I’ve seen everywhere on the internet, because you are implying that there is material harm to the people of Vietnam caused by Steam’s banning. Which is a fairly specious argument. It’s the loss of a luxury item. No one is materially harmed by it. It’s not like Vietnam banned insulin. And while you may not use the same language, you are effectively saying that every consumer on the planet should have free access to the best products available for whatever “thing” they want. In this case, video games. It’s a de facto argument for free market economic policies.

Everyone has accused every workplace of toxic culture. At this point I’m pretty sure going to someone and asking them to do their fucking job is toxicity.

We have reached levels of bootlicking with this comment that shouldn’t be physically possible.

It is impossible to criticize any actions taking place by any entity against a capitalist entity without defending capitalism yourself.

It depends on the purpose and shape of that criticism. If you criticize a communist nation banning a particular corporation’s marketplace from their country on the basis that doing so is a part of a grift that seeks to engineer a national-level monopoly over a particular corporate sector by banning external competition, then, sure, that’s a valid criticism because the intent is innately unethical. But if the Vietnamese video game industry is actively harmed by Steam, an American company, using its vast resources to outcompete Vietnamese publishers, then what is your opposition to this that doesn’t encompass a de facto defense of free market capitalism?

I hate capitalism. And Valve. Because it’s a capitalist institution and I’m at least consistent.

For anyone curious, it’s around 150 million USD.