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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • 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…



  • rwhitisissle@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlThem cheeks be thicc
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    7 months ago

    “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.








  • 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’ve heard similar from the worst first year CS students you could ever meet. People talk out their ass without the experience to back up their observations constantly. The indentation thing is a reasonable heuristic that states you are adding too much complexity at specific points in your code that suggests you should isolate core pieces of logic into discrete functions. And while that’s broadly reasonable, this often has the downside of you producing code that has a lot of very small, very specific functions that are only ever invoked by other very small, very specific functions. It doesn’t make your code easier to read or understand and it arguably leads to scenarios in which your code becomes very disorganized and needlessly opaque purely because you didn’t want additional indentation in order to meet some kind of arbitrary formatting guideline you set for yourself. This is something that happens in any language but some languages are more susceptible to it than others. PEP8’s line length limit is treated like biblical edict by your more insufferable python developers.




  • Yeah, but it’s still a Ship of Theseus problem. If you have a ship and replace every single board or plank with a different one, piece by piece, is it still the same ship or a completely different one, albeit an exact replica of the original. It’s important because of philosophical ideas around the existence of the soul and authenticity of the individual and a bunch of other thought-experimenty stuff.