Karellen

I don't get this. What does the proportion of blue fish have to do with the total number of fish you catch?

Is there some stats knowledge I'm missing?

    Marty: Organised crime?
    Cosmo: Trust me, it ain't that organised!

> “What the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to do is what GitLab does,” Robins said.

...well, fuck

The underlying goal of horseshoe theory is not to create a meaningful comparison between two positions, but an underhanded attempt to demoralise those on the left, and to swing undecided centrists by convincing them that the left isn't really offering the progress that it claims. I think it's also used as a shield by people who are right-leaning but don't want to admit it out loud.

...unless you can find a single good example of a notable left-wing proponent suggesting that horseshoe theory is valid, actually.

Naturally, that brings to mind the classic:

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

-- Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

And also:

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

-- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Programmers who rely on them will stop learning machine code, and won't know how their program really works. That's if the compiler actually compiles your code at all, without throwing an internal error, making you change your (correct) code around arbitrarily until it actually accepts it. But at least with an internal compiler error you know the compiler has broken - rather than it silently miscompiling your code to do the wrong thing.

But even then, even if the compiler accepts your code without barfing, and generates correct machine code from it, it still won't generate as efficient machine code as you could write by hand yourself.

Nope, these compilers will never catch on, and never get reliable enough to be useful for serious software engineering.

-- Some programmer circa 1975, probably, who lives in my head mumbling this to themselves whenever I'm sure generative-AI-based "programming" is a crock of shit. Although, to be fair, the 2005-era developer who is drunkenly ranting that UML diagrams will make programming 100x more productive any day now, is a handy counterpoint.

Need's got nothing to do with it. Bullies don't take what you have because they need it, they take it because that's what you have, and they want to take it away from you, just to be taking it away from you.

For Trump, it is not enough that (as he perceives the situation) he wins, rather than (as he perceives) everyone else loses. Even people's whose backs are up against the wall. Especially people whose backs are up against the wall. If you don't exploit the weakest player at the table, why are you even playing?

(Not that Trump knows anything about gambling... who the fuck loses money running a casino... on multiple separate occasions...)

Trump isn't making deals based on carefully considered advantages and concessions. He's just grasping his tiny hands at whatever comes in reach, whether or not he needs it, like the half-wit schoolyard thug he is.

If I think of a competition, then I'd expect the rules to be determined ahead of time according to some pre-imagined criteria. If someone manages to find a clever hack within the rules that allows for trivial "breaks", then that's good for them and they just get to beat everyone else at it.

But if I think of a game, then it's much more natural for the rules to adapt over time as people realise that some types of "play" make the game less fun, or straight-up boring. They don't have to be self-consistent, or logical. They're essentially arbitrary, and just whatever they need to be to make the game "better".