vaguely

Goodhart’s law strikes again.

They can’t tune their process for ‘win election’, because that’s only one sample every four years, and it’s a binary value.

So instead they tune it for ‘raise campaign funds’ as a proxy measure for ‘win election’, and that’s vastly more responsive; they can optimise the crap out of that.

This also means that a bunch of influential people are able to skim significant amounts off the top, so they’re not minded to change it. They’re stinking rich so they don’t have to care about the actual political outcome - and the more people are suffering, the more they’ll donate.

The trump win was a massive windfall for the next cycle of fundraising.

There’s also the point that he was continuing to kill thousands of people, on an ongoing basis.

Vigilante justice for someone who killed in the past, bad.

Someone taking down a killer mid-rampage? Hero.

Serendipity :)

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Killing in the defense of others is a legal defense to homicide.

If the guy were attacking people with a machete, nobody would dream of prosecuting the person who put him down.

The fact that he’s doing it slightly more slowly, but on a massively larger scale should not change anything.

I just browse subscribed-only.

aw hell yeah, that ruled back in the day.

Might be challenging to get it running in a modern environment, but I admire your taste in the classics :)

I know you’ve heard it, but seriously, the biggedst hurdle to learning programming is having a solution looking for a problem. You can learn all kinds of stuff in the abstract, but your brain will either handwave over it or bounce off, if it can’t contextualise the knowledge into a problem-solving tool.

A source of small but genuine needs is the scarcest resource.

I know the world has moved on to big cosy high-level languages that let you think semantically about everything but honestly I’m still a big fan of starting with C; it is something of an austere discipline, but it gives you a boots-on-the-ground view of the problems you’re working with, and I think that really helps shape your understanding of what you’re dealing with.

(you could do a fair bit worse than the game ‘human resource machine’ for a slightly gentler introduction, then pick up some exercises in C, then move to python or similar - it will let you appreciate the cosy high-level stuff, and have a better feel for why you’re doing stuff)

One dollar worth of sand, teleported into the lungs of my choice.

Nobody’s going to upvote shit takes, obviously.

If someone’s being an asshole or an idiot, I’m going to downvote them.

If someone says something that needs saying, or that’s interesting or funny, I’m going to upvote it.

That they’re held on a work-day, to disenfranchise those that can’t take the day off.

They don’t want to reconstruct it, they want to raze it to the ground and kill everyone, then oh look free land.