This is the deep secret of Bernie Sanders' long-time success with Vermont voters. He sounds like a fiery radical, but he actually spends his time doing boring but important committee work well.

ALT text: A bar chart titled "Top 10 countries" shows the ten countries that sent the most requests to a system. The largest portion of traffic, represented by a long blue bar, comes from Brazil, significantly outpacing all other countries. The United States follows with a much smaller bar. Other countries in the chart include Turkey, Argentina, Iraq, Russia, Morocco, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Mexico, each with minimal request counts in comparison. A dropdown menu labeled "Filter displayed data" is present above the chart, and a link to "View in CloudWatch" is displayed for further analysis.

Apparently, language learning is very popular with bots in Brazil this week!

I am working on it this weekend and hopefully next. There will be some scheduled downtime which I'll announce in this thread. More details as I figure them out.

Once again, my apologies for the problems—this site has some creaky parts and far too much traffic. 🏗️

We appear to have two major underlying issues here:

1. We are handling a surprinsing amount of traffic—enough to stress older forum software with poor caching. This costs real $$$.

2. Some parts of the infrastructure can be upgraded easily. Others need multiple days of hard work.

language-learners.org is failing under a ridiculous level of traffic (and possibly some other complicating issues). All data is backed up daily, and I am planning a major overhaul this weekend and next. More news in this thread as it develops. My apologies for the inconvenience. 🙍

Basic authoritarian stuff: the government revolves around protecting the President and punishing his enemies. Completely inconsistent with democratic norms, but will barely be a blip in the news in our new regime.

The Washington Post editorial page is going to start pushing Bezos' personal version of "personal liberaties and free markets". This is on top of his censorship of anti-Trump editorial cartoons, and his blocking of the editorial board's Harris endorsement.

Bezos is 100% in on MAGA Republicanism.

From the ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM community on Reddit: The NY Times, 1934 Explore this post and more from the ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM community

The NYT has been trash for a very long time. Check out this puff piece they wrote about Hitler, about 10 days before the start of World War II: www.nytimes.com/1939/08/20/a...

Artistically? Writing programs sometimes feels like cabinet-making. A "craft", perhaps?

But people rightfully take pride in their work! I want to build people up. Thoughtful feedback is important, yes. But not like that!

(Sorry, this is a pet subject of mine, lol.)

One big challenge with coding is the "leaky pipeline": www.yalescientific.org/2020/11/by-t... Women were 35% of CS grads in the 80. It's now below 20%.

That kind of off-hand trashing of people's work likely discourages students who already feel like the odd ones out.

That sort of behavior isn't any nicer or more effective for teaching people to code, tbh.

Several conversations today w people in the key executive departments. And while the particulars are hard to pin down my impression is that the Musk take over stuff is considerably worse than is being presented in the press. By this I don’t necessarily things they *done* yet but the level of …

Trump’s emergency water order responsible for water dump from Tulare County lakes – SJV Water The sudden announcement Thursday by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that Kaweah and Success lakes would immediately begin dumping water was in response Trump’s emergency water order responsible for w...

“A decision to take summer water from local farmers and dump it out of these reservoirs shows a complete lack of understanding of how the system works and sets a very dangerous precedent." sjvwater.org/trumps-emerg...

I've heard of a few Christians who take it terrifyingly seriously. Marist nuns who hike alone into the poorest and remotest places, with no resources or backing, just to help people.

Or just people who move through the word with deep kindness, something they strive daily to achieve. I respect it.

Mathew 25 goes hard.

Or as I read it, "Walk outside and night and look at the glory of the stars, and imagine their Creator."

"Now think about some prisoner in the nearest jail. A guilty one. However you treat him is how you treat the Creator."

It's an unpopular text in too many churches.

Aside from the third-story upstairs neighbors who played techno through their subwoofer from 1am to 3am, yeah, those dodgy 90s apartments were fun.

And we knew it, even then.

Our landlord once replaced our 30yo broken fridge in under 24 hours. With a 30yo working fridge. Gotta respect it.

Alright, whoever had "24 hours" for how fast one of the J6ers would end up arrested for another crime, please head to the desk to collect your winnings.

Uh, please form a line.

Wait, did everyone pick the 24 hour or less pool?

Uh, we, uh, we may not have enough prizes, please hold.

It’s D&D Night and the party has wandered into a narrow canyon full of undead.

SKULL LORD: Halt! You have trespassed on sacred ground!
PALADIN: Oh no! Sacred to who? How do we make amends?
GM: …I did not actually see that question coming.
PARTY: Um, paladin?!?

Joan Jett And The Blackhearts - "Science Fiction/Double Feature" YouTube video by Demented Punk

But for anyone who watched Rocky Horror too many times, Joan Jett also did at least one cover of "Science Fiction, Double Feature." This one's rock, it's a lot faster than the original, and I am totally here for it.

Seriously, she did some great covers. 3/3

m.youtube.com/watch?v=r7tn...

Joan Jett - Dirty Deeds (Official Video) YouTube video by JoanJettVEVO

Joan Jett also had an appropriately sinister cover of AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Cheap."

Totally different vocal inflections this time. She's an extremely versatile performer. 2/3

m.youtube.com/watch?v=2sky...

Nirvana w/ Joan Jett – "Smells Like Teen Spirit" | 2014 Rock Hall Induction YouTube video by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

One of my favorite obscure musical facts: Joan Jett is a fantastic cover artist.

She fronted for Nirvana when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." They inducted her a year later. 1/3

m.youtube.com/watch?v=y5uH...

There are a lot of weird statistical trends which become much clearer if you break responses down by political party. (Or sometimes by education or economic class.)

Yes, there are real problems with affordability and sexism. But politics is a huge driver of attitudes about _everything._

Reading Discworld is rarely the wrong choice.

(The first few books are quite skippable, though.)

Elon Musk is a good example of how terrible people become increasingly radicalized into the far right simply because the far right is a community that accepts cruel, terrible people.

It's tempting to say Elon is going "mask off", but I'd wager Elon didn't know who Tommy Robinson was 5 years ago. 1/

I enjoy reading Julia Serano's work about gender, because she's nuanced and precise in her arguments, without being impenetrably academic.

The two links in the quoted post are a good "sampler" of her style. If you like them, you'll probably enjoy her longer work.

Well, the US put citizens in detention camps during World War 2. It just needed war hysteria and the Supreme Court that ruled 6-3 in favor.

Screenshot of XDoom showing the usual game UI (ammo, health, weapon in hand, etc) and a number of enemies. Each enemy has a red process ID displayed over them.

Reminds me of a classic 90s DOOM hack, which linked enemies to Unix processes, and allowed you to 'kill -9' them using DOOM weapons: www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flak...

Person of Interest was such a fantastic show. I should go watch it again.

Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather