I probably agree with your position in general. I would note that from my position it's more about the politics of the right and how that's more tolerable for folks in power.
In most cases where these agents are violent, good luck even getting a name tied to the violent action.
It's been wild watch folks who couldn't say out loud or to themselves "secret police are necessary and good" say "well, this police work is super dangerous and needed so we can't know who these brave men are".
It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm.
Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists.
AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things.
What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years.
And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing.
I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works.
Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing.
And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D
My vote had absolutely zero impact on the election, and I haven't been able to vote for a person I actually liked, supported, and believed represented my interests in any national US election.
I'm mostly wouldn't like an external coup because it'd activate all my neighbors and we see a whole lot of violence in that struggle. I imagine I'd feel the same way if I lived in another country and some 3rd party deposed my government for arbitrary reasons.
That's explicitly not true. The vast majority of your life is managed by much more local politicians where your vote matters a lot more. Not to mention, if the only time you vote is once it's "red vs. blue", you've missed the primaries, which is your chance to say which red or blue you want to see up there.
Having been involved with local governments and served on city council committees, my experience has been that they literally only care about things that are legible to them. If I have an idea about parking or a preference for landscaping, they are pretty responsive. If I want them to remove flock cameras they tell me I am a crank. And all the canidated running feel the same way.
But honesty, national politics are very local for me.
Because you can answer this question, maybe:
in what way did my vote in rural Colorado effect -any- election at -any- level in a way that I could have avoided this situation where I go to weekly protests against ICE?
Cause, hoss, I hate this shit. There is literally -nothing- more that I would love to believe than I could just, like, vote for a better local school board.
I am almost 50 and I am in the streets with kids because I know for a fact that mass deportations which started under Obama are the root of what we are seeing.
Or how about this:
literally what voting action have I have taken that makes me responsible for the two children who were kidnapped from my community by ICE, for whose sake I got pepper sprayed by DHS Federal Police and ICE, and who we were unable to prevent from being stolen.
Because while I feel culpable for not following up on all actions that I had at hand, I don't think that it was voting that led the feds to assault me and 20 of my comrades.
So you're smart- tell me how my vote caused that in a way that I can "do better next time".
I get why folks saying "if you don't like it don't read it" feels jerky, but "if you don't like it, don't participate in it" seems pretty reasonable, I'd think.
That's fair, but it's also fair for me to have priorities, and to participate in something I think should change.
I think the non-political threads are where HN shines, and I believe in playing to your strengths. This is a wonderful place where subject-matter experts come crawling out to give you wonderful, deep knowledge about some esoteric discussion on the regular.
We don't get political experts here as often, and the average political commentary on this site probably rivals...well, the rest of the internet.
But while we're rooting around in the mud, I might join in. And I'm okay with occasional politics, I just wish it didn't get enough upvotes to make random political stories the front-page news here. In the past, much bigger stories either didn't make the front page, or were moderated--I'm not sure which.
Anyway, I'm not really complaining here about the moderation, either. I think they do a great job. I can live with the amount of politics we have here, I just hope it doesn't increase.
Consider that it's possible that the person's partner may have exposed them to their then-unknown extra partners, creating one of the conditions for the divorce.
There are other STDs that you'd still be at risk of getting/giving in the case of infidelity, so getting this one vaccine doesn't actually make things all good. I imagine for some people, the thought of possibly bringing home a disease would actually be a sufficient deterrent to prevent infidelity. Not just because they wouldn't want to infect their partner, but because they know it could lead to them getting caught.
I'll elaborate: if you are worried about being unfaithful, or your spouse being unfaithful, then protecting yourself against one STD might seem like a good idea. And if the risk of unfaithfulness is very high, then it is better to mitigate one STD rather than none.
But the fact remains that you are still at risk of many other STDs, so you can still bring home (or have brought home) plenty of other diseases.
The last point, which I knew some people here would dislike, is that the possibility of HPV transmission could, on the margin, discourage some people from being unfaithful. This is because it would be a telltale sign of infidelity, and would cause the spouse to investigate.
Granted, this is only the case where the spouse knew he/she did not have HPV before (mostly people who remained celibate before marriage). If you had many partners before marriage, this advice probably doesn't resonate, but for people who did it makes perfect sense. It acknowledges the risk of infidelity and creates additional accountability by not shielding one's self from a likely telltale sign.
That's interesting, could you tell me more? Like which side and port (front/back) was throttling, which side and port was not? Were you using a power supply to charge or was the mbp connected to a display? Did it only throttle during charging or also during while fully charged? Thanks!
According to a response elsewhere on this thread, it's not an unknown problem and there are links to more specific answers than I care to write. But to answer your question, it throttled with either left-side thunderbolt ports, with nothing else plugged into the machine using the Apple-supplied charger. I cannot remember if this issue stopped when the device battery was at 100%.
I am writing this comment from a 2019 i9. I have to charge it from the right hand ports. I think that is dumb, but it did solve the issue. I have no idea how I came to that conclusion (i almost certainly read about it somewhere), but there were certainly a couple of weeks where it was driving me crazy.
A dumb thing for sure. I still like macos better than windows and I'm heavily invested in a production workflow with logic. Moving to linux would be my next move, but after making that dumb change it's quite a functional machine.
It was so much of a problem that at work we added a check that you were charging from the right ports to our internal doctor script (think like `brew doctor`).
I help out with an emulation community. Any time anyone with a 2019 MBP comes in with issues, I stop them from giving any more details and just have them check this first.
FWIW, I replaced that MacBook with a Thinkpad (AMD Edition) about a year, and i have been extremely with it. Not only was it one of the easiest Linux installs I have ever had, but the hardware feels solid, the keyboard (while not one of the legendary classic Thinkpad keyboards) is nice to type on, the 4K screen looks nice, and everything just feels well built and snappy.
Outside of the terrible speakers, it is a nearly perfect computer. I don’t really mind a crappy speaker on a laptop since it usually lives on mute and when I need decent-enough quality audio I will plug in headphones or Bluetooth to a speaker, but YMMV.
Still, if this computer ever breaks then I will likely buy another thinkpad.
> I have to charge it from the right hand ports. I think that is dumb, but it did solve the issue.
I _had to_ do this for a while (around 2023, I think, not that it matters), but I no longer have to. I don't know what has changed, unfortunately; I haven't reinstalled anything, and I can't say I have uninstalled anything either. It's really weird...
To be honest, it's pretty easy to surface useful content on TT. Its algorithm is far more responsive to, say, immediate skips and likes/follows than Ig or FB.
I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.
Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.
The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.
Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.
I've tried multiple times with a TikTok account to get me useful videos and its always kids playing some weird games. FB/YT are much better and instantly switching content when I skip past a video.
I get a lot of stuff I care about (some scientific papers overviews, blender/davinci editing tips and tricks, bits of high-quality podcasts) on tiktok, even if I just go for 5 minutes to entertain myself with some audio-visual crap. Mention of its algorithm being responsive matches my observations here.
Well, I think the point it is even beyond "how many grains of sand is a pile," which seems like a legitimate point to me. If we don't understand how we got here, it's really hard to figure out hat to do, so pretending as if someone flipped a switch in January of 2025 is not helpful.
I say this as a person who has been pepper sprayed by DHS while resisting ICE:
the conditions to led to the current bonfire have a lot to do with centrist folks piling up wood as if could never be lit.
If you ignore how we got here you will be unable to understand where really are.
> If you ignore how we got here you will be unable to understand where really are.
Exactly this is core issue with a lot of people here on HN. The argument goes “oh shit, look what the current 2025 looks like, OMG so bad, we were this amazing bastion of freedom before this and now this administration is doing _____” so shortsighted and un-educated
I'd say someone did flip a switch in 2025 - the rejection of the standard norms of good faith execution of all three branches of government. The government has always been authoritarian. But it had been predominately bureaucratic authoritarianism, while now it's driven by autocratic authoritarianism.
I say this as a libertarian who's right there with you on the "piling up wood".
There are many angles from which to analyze how we got here. Yes, the "centrists" supporting lazy authoritarian laws and agencies because they couldn't bother thinking one step ahead to how they'd be abused. The sprawling surveillance industry pointed out by a sibling comment. Narrower issues of destruction of the fairness doctrine and campaign finance limits. Even many of the refrains of the Trumpists point to problems that were slowly allowed to fester until they reached a breaking point (although as usual for Republicans, the answer they've been stage-managed into is completely self-defeating).
For all of these things it's understandable to want to say "I told you so" - for catharsis, and trying to establish some authority of having a larger context of what direction we need to head in.
But none of that justifies downplaying the situation we're currently staring down, which is what I take issue with.
(also re being pepper sprayed: what's left of your country thanks you for your service)
"But none of that justifies downplaying the situation we're currently staring down, which is what I take issue with."
Maybe we read things differently- I don't see folks who say "this is nothing new, the US has always been ethically questionable" as "downplaying" anything.
As I've written here before, there is a difference between "hey, welcome to the party" (radicalization) and "hey shut up, this is a thing we've always done" (normalization).
I take issue with (and find very frustrating) the idea that somehow things have just now reached a breaking point.
I find that incorrect-to-me idea worrisome on two levels.
First of all, if Clinton or Harris had been elected we'd still be walking down this same road but liberals would be at brunch and telling us that nothing is wrong. But Ferguson and Standing Rock both happened while Obama was in office. And we don't need to run another experiment to see how it would have run under Harris, as she explicitly was moving to the right from Biden.
The flip side of your suspicion that folks in my position are just perversely enjoying some kind of schadenfreude might be that folks who believe this situation to be new and unique is to note that while this violent empire has been violent-empire-ing for far longer than any of us have been alive, the violence hasn't been overtly staged within the spectacle confronting the "middle class" folks until very recently.
The distinction between "bureaucratic authoritarianism" and "autocratic authoritarianism" only matters if you show up the bureaucracy in a legible way, and the fact that this is a distinction you draw places you in a very specific relationship to the power which "it's always been violent" seeks to critique.
Or to say the same thing in a different way, for the same reasons you might point to some perverse enjoyment by hipsters, you might look at your own psyche here:
to admit that the US has always been violent is to admit that you didn't care because it wasn't happening to people about whom you care.
However, that possible reading of your position is -wholly immaterial- to the folks who are pointing out "it's been bad for a long time".
The catharsis you seem to be projecting isn't really there for the people who could see there was a problem before it became visible even to middle class liberals. So an aside, nobody cares that folks ignored the problem until we are where we are, so feel your feelings about your blindness and then get to work, and stop projecting.
Do, however, consider that the lines of thought which lead people to directly and painfully confront power in a physical way can only come from the idea that the power being confronted is not and has not been legitimate.
I only dive into the phrenology of your position because it seems funny to me, but I do think that position is an active and harmful impediment to actually doing anything- if we could just vote our way home, why bother walking?
That is, if it really was okay a while ago, why not just do the blue version of making America great again?
And that leads to a second level at why I find the idea that "things have just gotten worse this year" to be almost dangerous:
the situation can and likely will get more authoritarian.
The reality to me is that these systems have been violent in the past- I live on land next to the Southern Ute folks' reservation, and I have had Navajo roommates, and I can see a former residential school every time I drive to town.
There is no amount of being white or tall or "well-educated" that would save me if the ancestors of the folks who built those things decide I am no longer a "citizen" because "reasons" and burn my corpse so it ascends to some gulag in the sky.
But if these systems haven't been incredibly harmful, abandoning them seems foolish and dumb. Any action to undermine their authority takes on the same character of a "rejection of the standard norms of good faith execution of [the] government".
I wholly understand why anarchists and communists seem stupid and dangerous to the folks who have historically been able to ignore the harms of these systems.
For that reason, though, folks are going to have to give up some of their ideological attachments to those systems if they are going to work against them.
So from my position, actively being unwilling to admit the past harms cause by those systems is a very easy way to prevent oneself from coming to a position where you actually have to do anything material.
Sorry for writing a novel (as an aside I dislike AI because writing things like this is how I think through things and I think the adoption of AI writing says a lot about the willingness of folks to think). But as a person incredibly worried about the very real shift in character of the current political spectacle, I think that "it's new and improved" is a harmful idea that you should reconsider.
There is a lot to chew on here and while I generally appreciate that, you completely missed where I am coming from. I had tried to acknowledge enough in my previous comment that you'd see I wasn't fresh to the larger topic, but I guess that didn't work.
I had never voted for either major party in a national election until 2020, when I consider myself having voted for the conservative option of Biden. In 2016, I completely understood why people voted for Trump - I was the one telling my aghast blue tribe friends that he was speaking to people's longstanding frustrations and had a good chance of winning.
I do constantly examine whether I've reverted to my latent tribe or have become caught in a filter bubble, but I still do not think so. I've always been allergic to groupthink, and the Trumpist groupthink is still overwhelming at this point, whereas the opposition groupthink is much more narrowly-scoped. (and I hate it as well, as it makes for poor opposition)
So back to the main argument -
I don't see folks who say "this is nothing new, the US has always been ethically questionable" as "downplaying" anything.
To me, it often does comes across this way. Note how the comment I initially responded to put "madness" in square quotes, as if we're supposed to believe the concerns are just all in our heads.
It's adjacent to the Trumpist talking point that everything being done isn't any worse than what "the left" already did, which is clearly coming from a place of wanting to downplay. And there is a long pattern of Trumpists abusing appeals to lofty ideals and liberty in general to get people to support the openly fascist agenda [0]. It's not a matter of being "unwilling to admit the past harms", rather it's about bringing them up in the appropriate context - Trumpism revolves around a long litany of real grievances and hypocrisies, but then channels that anger into highly destructive "solutions".
And as far as the caricature of "middle-class liberals" that you were addressing? If people are just now waking up, I do not see this as something to condemn! To me the actual concern is preventing them from falling back asleep (eg that "just vote Democrat" fallacy)
> The distinction between "bureaucratic authoritarianism" and "autocratic authoritarianism" only matters if you show up the bureaucracy in a legible way, and the fact that this is a distinction you draw places you in a very specific relationship to the power which "it's always been violent" seeks to critique.
Care to elaborate on this? My initial reaction is that we should take such legibility as a universal goal, in the sense that we should aim for everyone to have this legibility. We often shit on the idea of bureaucracy, but if it's the best way we've found to neuter autocratic power, then maybe we need to stop taking it for granted? (FWIW me of 15 years ago is screaming at current me for having written that)
[0] actually I just glanced at the poster's comment history and this is exactly what they're doing.
Consider Michael Reinoehl.
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