Clearly at least some of the Democrats are a Nazi as the Republicans.

As an EU immigrant, left the UK after the Leave vote but before Brexit and Covid.

It’s not a bullet but more like a whole lot of bullets.

Mind you, most of it was entirely predictable back then.

By this point it’s more like a new Holocaust, using starvation rather than gas chambers.

Had one too many succulent Chinese meals…

Maybe “travelling as a hobby” as a women’s preference with regards to men is at about it being a man’s openness and ability to deal with totally different environments, disposable income, time availability and possibly foreign language skills.

They’ll paint flames on the side to make it go faster.

I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program again (it’s one of those games you tend to come back to after a while without playing).

You can buy it from stores like GoG or even the maker itself.

Same thing for Factorio (jokingly called Cracktorio by many).

Both are about finding ways to create complex functional things from simpler elements to achieve goals.

Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Here’s an alternate theory:

Back then both parties tended to use the “slimy posh salesman” kind of deceit (half lies, misleading statements, promises left unfulfilled with twisted excuses given for it) and what happened was that Republicans, almost against their will (Trump was an outsider) stumbled upon the “strongman saying what people want to hear using straight talking language” technique of deceit.

It was a massive success because people had been fed the same kind of posh-saleman deceit (with pretty much all the media having gone along with it and turning into de facto propaganda outlets) for decades, found the new sort of discourse refreshing and comparatively trustworthy (even though it was still bullshit, just delivered differently, because it did not sound at all like the usual bullshit it seemed trustworthier to many and all the media that had chosen sides and gone along unquestionigly with the old style of deceit wasn’t trusted anymore so all their denouncing of the “other side’s lies” was ignored)

Whilst the Republicans did adjust to that unexpected success quickly, the Democrats did not and just kept using with their usual deceit techniques spread via the media-outlets to which lots of the electorate had built a resistance to, and acting to favour the usual people when in government.

So here we are today with a lying populist getting power for a second time in the American Two-Party system.

Even that is incredibly “murica” - he’s white and a rich guy from a rich family hence he’s not getting the same treatment for overstaying his visa a non-rich non-white African.

Racism and profound wealth discrimination are as American as it gets.

Welcome to the world of making software for random people, almost certainly made worse by she being a woman.

As others pointed out, most people do appreciate it, but they tend to be silent about it, whilst a small minority are demanding little whinny bitches (in a non-gendered way) who think they’re owed service and some are even trolls.

To those reading this, I suggest when you get something you like for free you at least give some feedback that you liked it and, if the person has some kind of sponsoring scheme going on and you really like it, consider contributing, if only to incentivise more of the same.

Those on the other side are people too and they will appreciate it.

Yeah, I’ve been there - it’s how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn’t just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).

I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.

Anyways, I still keep the “no waste” habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn’t want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).

Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is “lower TDP”) and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.

Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).

Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it’s normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don’t really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It’s worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).

Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the “neutral” majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.

The “Most moral army in the World” really showing their country’s “Western values” there…

The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like “least maintenance time required” or “maximum computing power lowest energy consumption” (or it’s companion “silent yet powerful”).

Maybe “I’m fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side” is the real mid-life crisis of techies.

Curiously, judging by my recent upgrade parts search, the peak of the capability-to-power-used curve on PCs (at least gaming ones) seems to have peaked about a decade ago.

Signed, a fellow Old Sea Dog Of Tech who has also gone through the same change over a decade ago

That’s not mid-life, that’s entire-life.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.

The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).

It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.

Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.