That name, tho.

"Marky Mark needs ALL of his money to buy Calvin Klein underwear >:( "

The long, drawn out metaphorical explanation was unnecessary and frankly kind of condescending.

I’m not over here trying to be some champion of the electoral college and I’d be more interested in seeing a real push for ranked choice or one of its cousins.

The point I was making was that if you sat at home and didn’t vote at all, your chosen candidate would never see the inside of the oval office and I went into my understanding of why it is the way it is. Ultimately, voting under the current system is not entirely worthless as you seemed to claim in the original post I responded to.

We’ve had something like 59 elections in total and 5 of them involved the winning candidate losing the popular vote but winning the election by way of the electoral college. Only one of those elections - the very first - involved anything even remotely close to your example (but still not42.3% vs 31.6%). The other 4 had a difference of like 2% or less between the two leading candidates.

The electoral college was devised as a compromise between direct democracy and congressional voting and I’m sure it was done in good faith to try to make sure everyone was represented, but this system seems to truly show its cracks when we’re facing an insanely stark national split like we see today and there’s no argument that we should probably shake things up and get rid of it.

I mean, that’s not entirely accurate - a vote for a presidential candidate is a vote for the slate of electors tied to said candidate - effectively a vote for your candidate, albeit indirectly. Electors can, however, be required to vote according to popular vote as required by the state they’re electors in. Or they could have pledged to vote according to specific party. I don’t know for sure, but I assume state elector requirements override party pledges.

My understanding is that when it was devised, it was a compromise between direct democracy (which would honestly be potentially dangerous - how many people do you know where you can’t help but go, “Fuck… This guy can vote.”) and election via congressional vote. It certainly ain’t perfect and I have no bias towards it, but it’s a system like anything else that people tend to point at and blame when things don’t go their way or just ignore or even defend when things do go their way.

- George Costanza

I can’t remember what it was specifically, but friend basically ruined a major plot point in Witcher 3 for me fully knowing I was a good ways out from discovering it on my own. As a kneejerk reaction and knowing he was about 20 or 30 hours into Fallout 4, I told him who runs the Institute and what relation that individual has to the protagonist.

He was angrier than I was because I had assumed Witcher 3 turned out the way he revealed, but my spoiler absolutely blindsided him. He never ruined anything for me again.

How do they account for a service like privacy.com which allows you to generate multiple dummy card numbers for a single card?

If the cost of subscription is, instead, the barrier to entry then all we’ll end up seeing is parties who have the resources for wide spanning scams or propaganda or whatever it is - and if they’re paying then they expect to profit or score gains in some way that justify their costs, which likely means they’re effective at what they do

They’re there… err… the remains are, at least.

Pull off request, on the other hand (ha-HA!), approved.

Not like that bitch Stephanie is gonna be helping out with that anymore.

These dickheads always think they can translate the power they hold in civilized society to the wild post aoocalyptic free for all. Makes you wonder what will be going through their heads when some brutish psycho decides it’s his turn and is about to stomp their heads into the tightly packed wasteland dirt.

My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.

exactly. a little bit of elbow grease and greed is what got us all to the fairly awful future we find ourselves in, who’s to say it can’t get worse? never let the hope die. lol

I think there are a combination of factors intermingling, situations like the API backlash just jostle things a little harder and that’s when you see big spikes. Once a platform like Lemmy begins to see more and more traffic and, in turn, content, it starts to become a viable alternative.

Lemmy existed for at least a couple years before I joined, for instance, and I came with what I would guess was the biggest wave so far (June 2023). Provided the userbase can keep up a respectable momentum generating discussion and content, the next wave could be bigger or it could be more resistant to leaving because there’s enough content here to consume and interact with.

Reddit could take years to lose substantial portions of its userbase or it may shed some and stay solid, but Im not one of these people who obsesses over it’s ruin. If they survive long term, God bless, whatever, who cares. What’s interesting to me is seeing an alternative sprout up and actually generate traffic and start building a community, whether that’s Lemmy or something else built on ActivityPub or something else built on a different federated framework or even something else entirely that’s centralized… I think Lemmy is one permutation of this and it has undoubtedly got some traction.

I sometimes wonder if/when I’ll start getting random Lemmy links from people instead of ones to Reddit.

edit: I should also add that considering reddit is trying hard to get value on paper and probably still hoping to ipo, we probably shouldn’t put it past them be shitty once again at some point in the future.

That’s basically where I’m wedging myself in now. Ansible and Python, higher value but lower stress projects. Bigger wins, but ones that are able take the time needed to put them together, test, and refine.

It’s almost a back-to-my-roots kind of thing for me, but with a fresh twist in terms of approach. I’m basically writing automations that make life easier for ops guys, to boil it down to it’s essence.

exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i’d guess you could expect it to look something like:

• spike
• drop off
• plateau
• spike
• drop off
• plateau above the last plateau
• etc etc

sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.

Ah, alright, not quite me - I’ll be 14 years deep in November. Honestly, one of the things that kept me motivated over the years was moving around - I stayed at the same company, but I started out doing QA (by hand, no automation), then got moved to handle release management, then moved to IT as a general Linux admin and spent a few years doing that, made friends with an infosec manager and he offered me a spot on his team working remote and doing container/docker security which morphed into a cloud security thing after he left the company (I hated the cloud). A couple years back I moved back to non-cloud/non-infosec work doing automation stuff with Ansible mainly, and for the time being only for our on-prem infrastructure (this may change in the future and I’m not really looking forward to it all that much).

At this point, nothing is really helping get my head back into the game 100% but I can still put out work and I’m just trying to find the joy in small victories and chasing the high you get when the code you wrote works flawlessly. I’m blessed to have a solid management structure above me who a) know me, b) like me (and the feeling is mutual, they’re all great people), and c) are happy with my output.

I don’t envy you working with kubernetes - my time in container security came during the early days of large companies trying to move to turning everything into microservices. It was a wild west kind of vibe and I basically had free reign… nowadays, I don’t think I’d enjoy any of that in its current form.

I have great soft skills and I write pretty well, but outside of that my skillset is basically a degraded/decayed technology one because I’ve been treading water for a while now and not actively keeping up with all the shit in our sector that changes on a constant basis.

I’ve also seriously weighed moving into development, but I’m not sure if that’s just going to fix anything for me. I like writing Python, but I don’t know how that would feel full-time. Sucks, man.

oof its like you’re either me or i’m you. hope you find your way past the burn out or out of it if you end up sinking into it. i’m going on like 3.5 years of battling it and there are better days and worse days, but i have no idea what else to even do. managing infra and writing code have been my entire career up to now.