Kill them with kindness.

Plenty of people want to inflict pain or see pain inflicted, as long as it’s on the appropriate victims, and these people aren’t all on the right. It’s a common human trait.

The Hobbit trilogy. It’s hard to understand how Peter Jackson could mess up movie after movie after movie like that.

The tiefling children could have increased their survival chances by not all being obnoxious little shits.

In my admittedly limited experience, women willing to kiss a guy are still often going to be reluctant to do something that they think might hurt that guy, even if the guy insists otherwise.

But if there are no bisexuals, there are no unicorns…

the official app doesn’t have a way to save images from comments anymore

Now even the web interface doesn’t make it straightforward to save images. “Open image in new tab” and “Save image as” don’t work.

I liked the low taxes/few government services way of doing things in New Hampshire, as well as the emphasis that voters and politicians placed on the importance of being left alone. Taxes are way higher in California, and while I get that keeping big cities running is expensive, does it have to be that expensive? I suspect that it doesn’t, especially since even with all that tax money the Bay Area (the part of California that I’m familiar with) is not very pleasant compared to some big cities in other states, including states with lower taxes. It’s true that the Bay Area, rather than those other cities, is the biggest tech hub in the country, but I suspect that that’s the case despite of rather than because of the taxes and what they do and don’t pay for.

(I’m not 100% confident in my claims about the Bay Area. I’ve spent a lot of time there but I haven’t ever lived there full-time.)

I assumed that the VC is talking about small startups, the sort that have a dozen employees and just one project.

I do generally lean towards lowercase-L libertarianism (I don’t support the Libertarian party) but running a huge deficit isn’t libertarian. Taxes shouldn’t be lower than spending in the long term.

Huh, the state of South Carolina as a whole has about the same murder rate as the city of Oakland, CA. I wasn’t expecting it to be that high.

Anyway, while this is a sick burn, I think that one could argue that the very real advantages that California has are not caused by the way that it’s governed and in fact I have heard California residents claim that those advantages exist despite the way that California is governed, but I don’t know how representative those California residents are. I can see how a person could reasonably prefer not to have her state governed the way that California is without being ignorant, but that sort of discussion won’t be happening on Twitter.

(I personally love the way that New Hampshire is governed, and that’s a state very unlike California. I hope to live there again someday, but I acknowledge that it’s not for everyone.)

Temporarily having the body of a woman would let me learn the answers to some interesting prurient questions, but if I had my choice of temporary body then I would definitely pick to be a bird and experience what flying feels like.

(I don’t identify as much with my body as some other people apparently do. It’s the only flesh I have ever been incarnated in so it has a lot of sentimental value but it fundamentally isn’t me. It’s a thing that I have.)

I didn’t mean to imply that Trump’s overall budget is a good one - maybe the cuts could be justified as part of a serious effort to reduce the deficit, but I don’t support them when they’re accompanied by even bigger tax cuts and the deficit grows.

And here I am stuck babysitting an inferior human baby.

So far, Milei has been right and his critics have been wrong. I assume he’ll veto this again.

The thing about government spending (and I’m seeing it come up a lot in the context of Trump’s budget cuts too) is that pretty much all of it is important to someone sympathetic who will experience hardship without it. Reducing spending means taking money away from people who need it, but reducing spending is still sometimes necessary for long-term national prosperity.

they can just hire more people

In software development, it’s not that easy. Having multiple people working on the same code adds a lot of overhead. Also, finding another excellent programmer is slow and expensive. (The “fast, cheap, good: pick two” rule applies.)

Plus, do you want two software developers with a good work/life balance and fulfilling ways to spend their free time, or do you want one software developer with mental issues that, among other things, leave him with nothing to do except work and no source of meaning in life except getting work done? The first option is more dependable, since the guy in the second option is crazy. However, if you’re building a startup then you need to take risks and the second option is the one more likely to create something amazing. (IMO, of course.)

“This actor isn’t acting upset” seems like a rather shallow analysis. When a person does something that can upset me, I ask myself whether becoming upset serves my interests. Usually it does not and so I don’t. This has let me maintain important relationships, but it doesn’t mean I like when people are rude to me. I still feel a flash of anger in the moment, and while I genuinely don’t hold on to resentment, obviously I prefer when people are nice.

(The actor repeatedly doing something that angers the director also seems less than ideal.)

The funny thing is that I empathize with the robot here - there’s no point in doing something like drawing a picture yourself if a machine can do it better, faster, and cheaper. Despite that, I insist on driving a car with a manual transmission. Let robots have art, but they’ll never take mechanical linkages from me! Using a lever to control which gears engage with which other gears is what it means to be human.

I enjoy a challenge.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. There’s no way that anyone except Mamdani will win unless something really bizarre happens. He’s not going to lose to forced-to-resign-in-disgrace Cuomo or should-have-been-forced-to-resign-in-disgrace Adams, and he’s certainly not going to lose to Silwa. People who are afraid that the Democratic establishment will succeed in sabotaging him don’t need to worry. In fact, I’m surprised that Paterson is apparently willing to embarrass himself by trying something so clearly futile.