I disagree. The margins seem thin enough that people fed up with either party can absolutely ruin them in the swing states. If you were to disagree with one of the parties, you could absolutely give them a signal by not voting. Preferably such a person would also make very clear why they refuse to vote for a party, because otherwise it’s indeed just lazy and empty.

Again, I think that people who do so are shooting themselves (and everyone else) in the foot. But I can see their motivation.

I agree that people should’ve voted, but I disagree with this one-dimensional line of thinking. I can see the argument that by voting for the democrats their current behaviour and this fucked up system as a whole is warranted. It’s not as simple as “why not vote, it costs you nothing”. By voting this horrible “democracy” is legitimised and the democrats and the system will not change their approach. The US deserves a democracy that actually allows for representation instead of this duopoly of garbage and more garbage

I’ve had a colleague say that tea is “homo water”. I’m aro/ace, but most of my colleagues don’t know that. Similarly a straight colleague of mine got mocked for wearing pink (but not feminine) shoes. After some of these incidents we’ve kinda started pushing back against this nonsense by deliberately triggering these people and calling them out, which has worked so far.

I work as a Java programmer, which means that I spend about 50% of my day complaining about Java. Why doesn’t it have enums like Rust? Why are there no tuples? How many goat sacrifices do the Java gods require to support named optional arguments to functions like Python? In the remaining time I have meetings, write docs, write tests, and sometimes even code. Nothing to complain about though, seeing how we are treated compared to people I know who work as taxi drivers or in elderly care, we programmers are basically treated as gods.

As for music, I like Hardstyle and Drum and Bass primarily. Examples: “Phuture Noize & Devin Wild - Waves”, DnB: “Telomic & Susan H - Underwater”. I’ll be visiting the DnB festival “Liquicity festival” this weekend so I’m very hyped right now

Oh I never knew, but it seems true. On his Wikipedia page both researches are mentioned. It’s so impressive how these researchers are behind so many different but interesting papers.

Machine learning and compression have always been closely tied together. It’s trying to learn the “rules” that describe the data rather than memorizing all the data.

I remember implementing a paper older than me in our “Information Theory” course at university that treated the creation of a decision tree as compression. Their algorithm considered sending the decisions tree and all the exceptions to the decision tree and the tree itself. If a node in the tree increased the overall message size, it would simply be pruned. This way they ensured that you wouldn’t make conclusions while having very little data and would only add the big patterns in the data.

Fundamentally it is just compression, it’s just a way better method of compression than all the models that we had before.

EDIT: The paper I’m talking about is “Inferring decision trees using the minimum description length principle” - L. Ross Quinlan & Ronald L. Rivest

Uhm, not sure where I lie on this scale I guess. Is this the real scale or some abstract representation? Personally it’s a 1 or 2 for me, but the image constantly changes and is never quite stable. There can be quite some detail, but it’s only very temporary. Once I focus on some other part of the apple and go back everything is different

Maybe it’s just my “golden touch”, but like 70% of the games I’ve tried to play have had some kind of issue. I recently got a steam deck and I regularly have crashes where the whole deck just does a full restart. Usually while I’m already gaming for a while. On the deck most games do generally start though, which is better than my own PC. On my PC I tend to have to hack around a bit before it works. For now I’m still gaming on Windows because of this instability, but I will have to switch at some point due to Micro$oft’s ever growing greed

• Actually being the owner of my phone. Apple decides everything for their users and allows them little freedom. I want to be able to put random apps on my phone, including maybe even my own.

• Price. Shit’s expensive. I now got a Pixel 8 for less than 500 euro’s. Before that I had phones around the 300 euro price range.

• Their ecosystem. They try to lure you into an everything Apple ecosystem. Stuff like iMessage is horrible for consumers. With an Android phone I have choice of apps, smart watch, earbuds, etc. Apple will always try to force you into buying their fancy but expensive things.

• No benefit, there’s plenty of cool Android phones.

Etc etc.

I’m on Arch (actually a converted Antergos) and I have an NVIDIA card as well. My first attempt a few months ago was horrible, bricking my system and requiring a bootable USB an a whole evening to get Linux working again.

My second attempt was recently, and went a lot better. X11 no longer seems to work, so I’m kinda stuck with it, but it feels snappy as long as my second monitor is disconnected. I’ve yet to try some gaming. My main monitor is a VRR 144Hz panel with garbage-tier HDR. The HDR worked out of the box on KDE Plasma, with the same shitty quality as on Windows, so I immediately turned it off again. When my second monitor is connected I get terrible hitching. Every second or so the screen just freezes for hundreds of milliseconds. Something about it (1280x1024, 75Hz, DVI) must not make Wayland happy. No settings seem to change anything, only physically disconnecting the monitor seems to work.

It’s not like I totally didn’t enjoy it, but Red Dead Redemption 2. The game was good in many ways, and I totally get why it’s so we’ll loved, but I just have nothing with the setting. I don’t like cowboys, I don’t like playing as an asshole who makes bad decision after bad decision, and I also don’t like a setting where women are basically property. Just not really my vibe. I just came from Cyberpunk 2077 and the contrast was quite big, even though Cyberpunk is supposed to be more dystopian

My 10 year old laptop (which has been running Linux for 9.5 years now) has an SSD, so it’ll restart in a normal amount of time. Even old laptops no longer have HDDs only

I mean, yes and no. The festivals I visit and my gaming PC are also a complete waste of energy when you view it like that. I hate the dangerous situations we have every year in the Netherlands with fireworks. The heavy fireworks and loud bangs, the vandalism. But I’m okay with the people who send a lot of nice colourful fireworks into the sky around new year’s eve, and the farmers with their loud “carbid” launchers.

I like it. It’s sort of a follow up to Rollercoaster tycoon 1 and 2. Same kinda play style, but then in a modern game. I had some good fun with it. Personally I like it more than Planet Coaster, where I found the customization too overwhelming.

Block out the heat and sun during the day. Have everything open during the night, with a tactical fan placed wherever it helps the most.

But this only really helps the first few days. After that it’s down to accepting the situation and being so tired that you fall asleep anyway.

2K per year, subsidized by the Dutch government afaik, because International students pay way more.

Maybe it’s the same thing I recently had. After running a half marathon in April this year and cycling another 20km from and to the course, I also had some weird muscle cramps when finally taking a rest. It was almost like something was crawling under my skin. My muscles felt like they were cramping together and releasing very quickly and very locally in tiny spots all over my calves. It was such a surreal feeling. Kinda creepy and weird, but at the same time also kinda nice and satisfying.

Not anymore, since I got a real job… They do sometimes give some money as a present to buy something nice, but it’s no longer necessary. They did help me during my study though, paying the ~€2K uni fees every year and some other smaller stuff, so I could focus on rent, groceries, study material, etc. Combined with that, I had some side jobs to keep the study loan pretty small and manageable .

Based on anecdotal evidence, that was kind of the middle of the road. Some friends had very rich parents, who basically paid everything. Other people basically had to pay everything, which lead to huge loans. I think this level of support was pretty much optimal. It forced me to think about money instead of just buying everything I wanted, but also made it easy for me to focus on my study instead of surviving.

Yeah the bots were fine. I definitely liked splitgate more than the new tribes though. Even against humans I felt like I had way more chance to get some kills and overall the game felt more polished.

I was interested in the game, but for me the problem really was the skill level of the player base. Getting killed 20 times before getting a kill is no fun at all. I played during the test period, and I think it definitely would be fun with other noobs, but every game just has people in it who are miles above the rest.