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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • In the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest party as late as 1930, and had control thanks to a coalition with centrists.

    In 1931, the Communists of Germany (KPD) – who had long taken offense at the compromises of the SPD – caucused with the Nazis to topple the Prussian government and remove the SPD from power, believing that Nazi rise would accelerate the collapse of capitalism and would trigger a “German October,” a proper communist revolution that would eliminate the Nazis and solve the shortcomings of the SPD.

    On April 1, 1933, the Executive Committee of the Communist International stated:

    Despite the fascist terror, the revolutionary upturn in Germany will inexorably grow. The masses’ defense against fascism will inexorably grow. The establishment of an openly fascist dictatorship, which has shattered every democratic illusion in the masses and is liberating the masses from the influence of the Social Democrats, is accelerating the tempo of Germany’s development towards a proletarian revolution.

    They were… incorrect. Their gamble cost 85 million lives, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to the knock-on effects of the war. Accelerationism is creating a monster to defeat an enemy you cannot, then being startled to discover you can’t defeat the monster either, and then blaming your original enemy for the product of your own hubris. No matter how you justify it, no matter what issues drive you, refusing to find common ground and build coalitions against the fascists helps nobody but the fascists.




  • Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.

    This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.

    So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.


  • While I don’t say this as a criticism of the author, it is worth pointing out that she’s also failed to adapt to the new technologies. She talks about how teachers will need to adapt to the new tools but ultimately places the blame on the students rather than reconsidering who her audience is.

    How would you propose adapting to this? Do you believe it’s the teacher’s responsibility to enact this change rather than (for example) a principal or board of directors?

    The average teacher does not have the luxury of choosing their audience. Ideally you’d only teach students who want to learn, but in reality teachers are given a class of students and ordered to teach them. If enough students fail their exams, or if the teacher gives up on the ones who don’t care, the teacher is assumed to be at fault and gets fired.

    You can theoretically change your exams so that chatbot-dependent students will fail, or lower your bar because chatbots are “good enough” for everyday life. But thanks to standardized testing, most teachers do not have the power to change their success metrics in either direction.

    This article is about PhD students coasting through their technical writing courses using chatbots. This is an environment/application where the product (writing a paper) is secondary to the process (critical analysis), so being able to use a chatbot is missing the point. Even if it were, cancelling your technical writing class to replace it with an AI-wrangling class is not a curriculum modification but an abdication. Doing that can get your program canceled, and could even get a tenured professor fired.

    The author was really stuck between a rock and a hard place. Re-evaluating the systemic circumstances that incentivize cheating is crucially important – on that we absolutely agree – but it’s a responsibility that should be directed at those with actual power over that system.

    [Edit: taking the tone down a notch.]


  • If resin is a non-starter for you, FDM printing can also make cool miniatures, but it will take more effort and the details won’t be as fine.

    People are getting good results printing minis on the Elegoo Neptune printers which are around USD$190. The latest fad is multi-material printers like the Anycubic Kobra 3 combo (USD$380) and Bambu A1 combo (USD$490) which can make colorful figurines at the cost of wasted plastic.

    Tomb of 3D Printed Horrors has been getting pretty good results and is a good channel to follow if you go down the FDM route.

    (Elephant-in-the-room sidenote: If you look at FDM printers, you’ll run into fans militantly promoting Bambu Lab as part of an ongoing corporate-sponsored flamewar, and the community has a laundry list of grievances against the company. It’s a mess. Bambu printers are good but not spectacular, and easy to use but hardly the only user-friendly printers out there.)


  • I think for a small, detailed figure that you’re going to photograph, I’d recommend resin sprayed with a food-safe clear coat such as shellac.

    Resin of all kinds requires rubber gloves, cleanup, and a well-ventilated room because it’s smelly and generally bad for you in its unfinished liquid form. A small resin printer will cost under USD$200. Creality has one on sale for USD$100. They also sell washing/curing stations – I built my own stations out of junk, but for USD$99, I’d go with theirs. Much more compact.

    Nerdtronics made some excellent videos introducing resin and explaining how and why we print the way we do. These days, almost all printers are plug-and-play and the software is super smart, but I think these videos are highly educational anyways.




  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

    In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

    Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.




  • Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.

    States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I’d even say that’s what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others’ permission, you don’t have a state, you have a hundred states.

    You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That’s not their job. That judgement is our job.

    (You can also argue that the state shouldn’t exist, but that’s a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)


  • But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

    It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

    The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.




  • Maybe THIS will get the Dems to ditch the filibuster and pack the court. Of course, that would require the Democratic party as a whole to show some fight, something they refuse to do for some reason.

    To pack the court, Democrats need to secure:

    • A House + Senate majority (something they haven’t had since 2009-2011)
    • A wide enough majority in both that no small caucus could hold the vote hostage for a personal agenda (something they haven’t had since Jimmy Carter)
    • A president with a platform built on disruptive change rather than stability (which they haven’t had since FDR)
    • A plan to keep Republicans out of office permanently so that they can never wield this new power in retaliation (even Lincoln messed up on that one)

    They need more than just a git-r-dun attitude. Remaking the SCOTUS (rather than waiting it out) means throwing the old government away and starting over.