baltakatei

they would rather sink AOC and Bernie forever so that the political equivalent of Assistant Regional Managers can get promoted to Regional Manager.

I agree and disagree. The ability to successfully lead a government as chaotic (i.e. democratic) and large as the republic of states known as the US is very rare. It requires not only a strong physical and mental constitution, but also a wide set of skills and intuitive abilities that usually only make themselves apparent during trials by fire. Compared to the sometimes explosively violent centralizations of power that occur when the rare charismatic tyrants fight their way into power (e.g. Napoleon, Hitler), democracies grow in fits and starts as they rely upon a panjandrum of popularity contests to find talented leaders. In contrast to dynasties that fiercely burn hot with their founder’s fervor then languish in subsequent generations, democracies have the potential for sustained competence as long as incumbent leaders continue to hold popularity contests with the goal of finding new leaders better than themselves from as wide a candidate pool as possible.

When the contests fail to find the rare talented leader, the process does resemble a farcical out-of-touch revolving door of mediocre middle managers like you suggest: because talented leaders are rare. And even when a talented individual does prove thenselves, they cannot cling to power lest they destroy the talent search apparatus that brought them to power in the first place and which will eventually replace them with an even more talented individual in the future. To destroy that apparatus reverts the civilization back into purity-obsessed gatekeeping fascism and boring dynastic tyranny.

So, if this decade’s popularity contest is restricted to late-night comedian talk-show hosts, I say that’s better than a Trump dynasty. But, I hope winners of those contests steer government to promote talent searches with larger candidate pools than they came from. That could take the form of government propaganda rewarding people to run for local elections. Without leaders consciously promoting wider popularity contests, the people of a democracy default to choosing the photogenic faces and entertaining voices they see and hear on their screens: actors like Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger or game show hosts like Donald Trump.

I’m pretty sure it’s gold and white.

The entire point of having a democracy is to avoid gambling on the next heir of a bloodline dynasty being fit to rule. So, a popularity contest among celebrity television entertainers isn’t the worst, but the qualities of personality this population selects for are generally those that assist maintaining distracting fantasies rather than engaging with harsh realities.

Sounds like military recruitment which is one ethical step away from conscription.

Free money code for SimCity 2000. Also, The Sims. I’ve got those on speed dial despite their complete uselessness today except to prove I played those games years ago.

Is this that thin little block holding up the Internet?

How frequently are images generated/modified by diffusion models uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? I can wrap my head around evaluating cited sources for notability, but I don’t know where to start determining the repute of photographs. So many images Wikipedia articles use are taken by seemingly random people not associated with any organization.

😑 — Yang Wen-Li

Translation: “I just signed a mortgage. I’m trying to please my parents, maybe get a wife and kid. I got responsibilities. I can’t tear down the system that got me what I enjoy. Let someone else do it while I take my fortune and go live on an estate writing my fantasies, enjoying the lucky fact that my doomer story resonated with enough of society to win several recent popularity contests.”

Here’s my Bash script for combining a directory of .mp3 files into a single .mkv container using ffmpeg. It also reëncodes the audio using the opus codec which can help smooth out weird encoding artifacts from sloppily created MP3 files. The script retains the original MP3 file partitions as seekable chapters named after the input file names. I find it useful for some audiobooks purchased from libro.fm which are only available in MP3 format.

Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don’t believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.