Yup. The "you can't make an omelette without killing a whole bunch of people" mindset.

The annoying part is that it's not entirely wrong, IMO. At this point I think the best hope America has is for those Trump voters to feel the pain of the situation they have brought upon themselves, and for the Democrats to be pushed far enough to finally shake off the DNC establishment. America needs another Roosevelt at this point and there's no way someone like that would have got on the ballot or been elected under the past few decades' conditions.

Sure would have been nice if everyone had just been smart about all this and we hadn't got here to begin with, but we go to the ballot box with the electorate we have rather than the one we hope for.

I think a lot of Americans did see Trump as an existential threat and that's why they voted for him. He was the "blow everything up" candidate, Harris was the "everything continues as it is" candidate.

This is literally the most charitable thing I can say about a subset of Trump voters. They actually did have a point there. A lot of people voted for Obama because he was the change candidate and this time around Trump was the change candidate. Almost entirely bad changes, of course, but some people were so desperate for change that they figured it was worth rolling the dice.

Just a subset of Trump voters, mind. Most of them were probably just awful people who saw a fellow awful person on the candidate and went "me like." But if a subset had decided not to vote for him we wouldn't be here now so they were significant.

You can ask AI how code works too, though. And it's always available, whereas the human who wrote the code may not be.

Several times now I've come across a project that looked interesting but wasn't well documented, and I just dropped the Github link into an AI chat and asked it to tell me stuff about how it worked. What algorithms were used, and so forth. Really handy.

Just use one of these.

I would like to see the world finally move to Swatch Internet Time and resolve all this silliness once and for all.

Why not just assemble all of Thomas' spare parts immediately, without dismantling the original? Same end result, should be indistinguishable.

There's no one "right" way to deal with it, for starters. People will give lots of advice and describe a bunch of scenarios but don't feel like you "should" do it any particular way or that you're doing something wrong if you grieve in your own way.

For me, I "talk" to my dad now and then. It's been six years now and I still find comfort in doing that. I'm an atheist, I don't believe he's actually hearing me, it's just a thing I do that feels nice psychologically. I've been imagining I'm keeping him "up to date" on stuff, since one of the things I told him on his deathbed was that I'd let him know "how it all turned out" - he was always future-focused and I'm sure it annoyed him that he wouldn't be around to see it.

I wouldn't worry too much about any deep and meaningful "final words" and such, though. I think the words that were exchanged throughout life were just as important, if not moreso.

Normally I would also call the conspiracy stuff silly. But so often now the Trump administration has done the stupidest things to buy "just two weeks" as if expecting some undefined miracle to save them, then when it doesn't just doubling down again and again. I could imagine them doing this.

Aww. Reality once again spoils fun.

Exhibit A: the Kuznetsov. Yes, it genuinely is supposed to look like that - it was designed to burn the absolute cheapest bunker oil, the utter dregs of what's left over when oil gets refined. Here's a view of the Kuznetsov from orbit.

I don't seriously think these tankers aren't burning, of course, I just take every opportunity I can to rag on the Kuznetsov. Won't get too many more of those in the future.

Are we sure they're burning and that's not just their usual exhaust plumes?

And yet perhaps this time we can use MAGA's stupidity and conspiracy-mongering for good instead of evil. If they latch on to this perhaps Trump will start thinking Russia's naughty or something.