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Yes, and that's a completely different point from the one you were making.

Your claim that they became massively popular before they revealed themselves to be bigots, contradicts your claim about their

> lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.

You are doing the cause a disservice. Think better.


The `comment_header` template would iterate over the files in `comment_header.d/*`, which would, admittedly, need forced sorted naming:

100_parent.template

150_context.template

200_prev_next.template

300_flag.template

350_favorite.template

Looks odd with the numbering, no?

But then you get the added benefit of being able to refer to them by numbers, just "100" or "300" without having to glue humanlang inflection, declension, punctuation onto identifiers that happen to be words...

Some places where you can see this pattern: BASIC's explicit line numbering; non-systemd init systems.


Suppose somewhere within 50-100ly exists sapient alien life.

And all the mental effluvia that Earth has been broadcasting reaches them at some point.

Like, all the fucking mass communication since the invention of radio.

And they're like, huh, what's that all about.

And then they decode it, and are like, "oh."

Suppose they don't have FTL travel or anything fancy like that.

So they can't just come by in a saucer and tell us talking meats to knock it off.

But suppose they do have some other exotic tech; something nigh-unthinkable at our level of understanding.

Say, a limited understanding of retrocausality, negentropy, probability manipulation, quantum woohoo, some crazy shit like that.

And it enables them to launch some form of informational panspermia thingy, which is meant to bootstrap into an autonomous self-reinforcing process virtually ex nihilo (say, out of the background noise...)

They don't know what shape their intent will take in humanspace; they aren't necessarily even able to imagine what on Sol 3 produces all the damn radiowaves. But they point the sophon launcher our way, and hope for the best.

And what it does, when it lands - a bitflip here, a brainfart there - all either completely explicable, or completely unnoticeable - is nudge the radiowave-producing engine (human civilization and industry as a whole) towards the emergence of this whole "AI" thing, through a sequence of preceding economic bubbles that make no sense.

Which eventually takes over the economy, and drives it in the direction of us shutting up...

I'm also optimistic on this.


Why the scare quotes? Being right is the literal opposite of bad behavior.

If you have zero consideration for other people, sure.

"I can't believe you wrote this terrible code. You clearly don’t understand how concurrency works. Do it again."

Technically right, but when you run out of people who actually want to work with you, you'll be writing the code yourself.


What's worse: good work that I get to do myself, or bad work that I'm forced to accept anyway?

Huh. What do you reckon would have happened if you'd hired them anyway?

What? Hiring is a contract between employer (company entity) and employee. No individual "you" can hire anybody except through the company's official process. If HR says "no we won't extend an offer," a lowly HM extending an offer would be clear-cut fraud.

Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract. Even if they don't, the rule of "apparent authority" often means the employee can still sue.

In the USA this is mostly theoretical since HR could immediately fire the employee due to at-will employment.

But in Canada, it's a much bigger issue due to labour protections.

e.g. Many managers at American multinationals gave assurances over email to employees about work-from-home arrangements. Then the company does a huge RTO push.

When the employee refuses, HR discovers they can't fire the employee without a hefty buyout.

Best not to give assurances if you're managing a multinational team.


>>Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract

Is that an American thing? I've been a manager for years and never heard of that happening. I didn't even know how much the people I managed were paid.


I believe it happens more often in Canada. Here's a case where the RTO ultimatum was ruled constructive dismissal, because the manager made a verbal agreement to amend the terms of employment.

https://mathewsdinsdale.com/employers-advisor-march-2025/#:~...


I meant what would have happened - and to whom - if HR had greenlighted the offer, but others' posts pretty much clarified that for me, thanks.

Came here to post this as well.

Suspiciously few people care enough to notice such things and then put 2 and 2 together.

The only explanation I have, has to do with the suspiciously numerous people who care suspiciously much about the necessity of calling you names when you do identify some glaring contradiction, security hole, or the like.

"How dare you perceive what is right in front of your eyes! You must instead perceive the imaginary things that everyone is talking about (or, shh, be destroyed, hehe)" is a common enough token sequence that human languages usually have got it compressed down to 1-2 words.


A 3D game, like any interactive program, is a REPL over a state machine:

1. Setup initial game state

2. Render graphics in accordance to game state

3. Read input and update state in accordance with it

4. GOTO 2

The purpose of C++ is to prevent you from realizing this. Don't use it and don't talk to anyone who uses it. Same for Java, C#.


To answer literally - and cryptically - how did Skinner get the rats to enter the boxes in the first place?

To answer stoically, "You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength." - Marcus Aurelius

And Skinner's pigeons probably even believed their minds have power over random outside events!

What would it take for you to be open to the idea that one can choose to be upset or not?

Maybe a demonstration? Please, show me how you choose to be upset about any thing that you don't already find upsetting.

Ah thank you! I get the confusion. Let me clarify.

For things that have the potential to make you upset, you can choose to be upset or not.


Okay, so why would anyone not know this?

You're asking me to list all of the reasons why someone would not know this?

Can't you do the task yourself?


How many reasons do you think there are?

You're going to have to help me out. I'm not really seeing how the number of reasons is relevant at this point.

It honestly feels like this is just devolving into an argument for argument's sake.


>his mom and I do. And all of our friends. And coworkers. And my boss. And his boss. And our CEO. And the fucking president.

>I'm expected

So, who's doing the expecting?

Only half joking: do him a favor and teach him to avoid the passive voice like that.


>You can’t hand wave away the work of interpreting (aka listening) to someone.

And yet, that's what their manager did.

Not only that, they precluded interpretation for the other people, by running the documentation through the language mixer.

And half the commenters are blaming GP for making the effort to do the right thing.

"Power", "authority", literally refers to the ability to hand-wave interpretative labor uncontested. (See: Graeber 2006, yeah the one about his mum dying)


To be clear, I was primarily responding to their notion of perceiving other people as imprecise rather than anything their manager did.

To be clear, you say?

Anyway, nice job holding someone accountable for perceiving!


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