Can I get an advance in Xibucks to cover my expenses in the meantime?

As someone who would identify as being in your position about 5 years ago, I’ll still say regular group activities, hobby meetups (and volunteering if you have time/ability) are the best things. Joining a local walking group and board game group was a real turning point for me - Just getting used to people in a very casual context, with an activity to focus around, was great.

I was basically unable to converse (it literally took me a week of agonising over making a ‘casual enough’ text asking to join), and after about a year of going every few weeks, I improved to just “kinda bad” at conversing, which has been such a life-changing step up. I started feeling able to start basic conversations with strangers, I actively engage and reach out to more people/organisations/events to thrust myself into social situations. And every now and then people actually express a desire to talk with me which is mind-bogglingly flattering.

I think there’s plenty of luck still. If you can find one or two people who are good at starting conversations with you, then you can slowly steal their techniques and use them on others.

Making long term friends is still hard, but these things are the best (though imperfect) solutions I’ve found. I think you just have to keep trying? I’m not sure. I’ve made a couple long-term friends online with games and niche wikis, but there’s no denying: It’s super hard. I’m still looking for better ways myself.

I wonder if the review would also go down to 2/5 if they knew Orwell was a militant socialist. Even if he wasn’t a great one.

Chickpeas are a huge protein source and one of the cheapest foods available. They already have a texture different from most beans/pulses.

• Roast or fry them if you prefer them to be dry and crispy. (Add like 0.5 grams of salt to a bowl of these bad boys and I could eat them for all meals every meal)
• Mix 'em into hamas (hummus) if you want a tasty paste.
• Boil 'em in a curry if you want firm little 'uns.
• Mash 'em, mix 'em and fry them for delicious falafel (though this requires the dry chickpeas, not tinned).
• Get chickpea flour and use it to make lil’ protein-filled flatbreads.

There’s really no losing. Chickpeas are the ultimate bean (though technically a pulse).

Tinned chickpeas are very easy to throw into any dinner. Dried chickpeas are even cheaper at the shelf (and some say tastier), but require soaking/cooking first.

You can even grow them yourself and eat the leaves for bonus vitamins (but like wheat, you won’t get more than a handful without some acreage)

Potential tagline?? This is exactly it - Both libs and Trump voters believe in magic that will solve all their ills, while believing the others’ magic is their antithesis. I don’t see either of them facing reality any more than the other.

Exactly, it’s already a one-party fascist dictatorship. Why take off the mask?

The culture wars sure are a handy excuse for ‘progressives’ to not materially help anyone

I don’t think Hulu specifically are being sneaky or are alone to blame - Whatever entities license out shows seem to actually be including mandatory ad breaks when you license their media. No idea why or how, but I’ve seen other streaming services declare they have no choice but to put ad breaks in certain films (they usually just advertise their own stuff, so it’s not even about the streaming service’s revenue).

Spoiler: Congress does not act

What is this world where every high echelon of government is controlled by super competent sleeper cell chinese commie spies, except that they forgot to implement any pro-china policies and/or communism?

There’s a whole raft of things they decided to do when it was clear they had lost the election. It seems they only ever do good things to say “I told you so” when it gets undone, rather than actually trying to effect change.

McCarthyism is officially back on the table. Free speech is a fundamental right but anyone saying the wrong thing once again gets to officially be a commie spy

NAL, but done a lot of work with software licensing. If the source and model are all licensed under MIT, then Deepseek has allowed anyone else to copy, sell, etc. the software. But that doesn’t stop Deepseek being the intellectual property of its creators (and thus its ‘import’ prohibited per the wording of the bill).

As well as agreeing with other rebuttals here, I’d like to again rebut the weird American exceptionalist take many leftists have, that its allied western countries are effectively ‘vassals’ being indirectly subsidised by America’s magical super wealth. And the implication that without America’s guiding power they would fall apart.

They’re absolutely suck-ups to America’s big shooty power, but it’s a two-way deal. ‘western’ countries give America a free pass for war crimes, involvement in global diplomacy, and generous trade deals, and in return get to benefit from America’s military interventions. To say it’s a one-way subsidy is wrong, and almost lets other ‘western’ countries off the hook for their own awfulness part in global violence. They’re just partners in imperialism. If America pulls out militarily, ‘allied’ countries will (and already have started to) invest more in their own deadly military to do their own imperialism instead.

There’s a big reason most of Europe is still indirectly buying Russian oil instead of fully transitioning to American oil, it’s because they know needing America economically will actually make them truly dependent.

Exactly, reading these moves as some calculated idea of turning resources inwards is quite wild. They’re just trying to maintain their current position by being shootier with countries they once pretended not to be shooty with.

Great Firewall of America

Cool. That makes sense and figured it’d be something like that. My issue was less with China and more the dismissal of deserts being useful and probably necessary.

I have not looked into what China’s doing, it’s probably fine, but for the record, destroying deserts is not necessarily a good thing.

Deserts aren’t just useless land, like everything on Earth they’re a functioning part of a whole. Desert dust is an essential part of global fertilisation and the transport of microorganisms, climate change and affects basically every natural cycle and ecosystem on the planet. Destroying deserts on a large scale not only threatens extinction of a massive biodiversity, but threatens to change global weather patterns, temperature and water cycles in ways we are decades if not centuries away from significantly understanding.

Again, not saying what China’s doing is necessarily bad, I don’t know what they’re doing. But deserts are actually kinda cool and very important.

I was alive and played games during that era, so I am aware! I’m very personally aware how much work we crammed from a tiny slow processor and a few kb.

And though we probably wouldn’t describe those games as ‘poorly optimised’, there’s still absolutely huge room for optimisations. As you say, compilers have gotten a lot better, and we have better algorithms and data structures. In Quake especially, they basically did have order-of-magnitude gains by writing some parts in assembly. And they’ll have undoubtedly have written most of those parts very imperfectly.

I may be skirting the bounds of reality more than you, by talking about what’s ‘theoretically possible’ compared to what’s possible by today’s knowledge and human practices. We agree there’d be some graphical compromise, maybe we’re just disagreeing over details of the scale of that compromise and the hardware that would be ‘permittable’ by this scenario.