Dystopian sci-fi idea: a society where ordinary people can buy powered mechanical exoskeleton that can crush humans at a whim, and are encouraged to identify personally with these vehicles, and to express their manliness through operating them in a risky way The arms race lead to increasingly larger, more difficult to pilot mechs, which further increases rage and incidental conflict. Soon the entire society is built around these mech pilots that the political system is reshaped for their needs. The landscape itself changed for them.

"rare and very notable" DO NOT WANT 😬😬😬😬 nzherald.co.nz/nz/major-81-qu… more "common and boring" pls

uncle keith's thread on how to make checkable, updatable spreadsheets when it's getting crazy complicated and all you've got is a spreadsheet and four colanders 1/n (no not a joke) 1. Each sheet should have a clear function - if one sheet is serving many functions, split them out. In particular, for reasons extremely obvious to National right now, put your external input data - things that you expect to change - in their own sheets.

what do these numbers mean we may never know reveal: they were, in fact, not edible

Like I enjoy the irony of the new fiscal hole, obviously, but the whole idea of an alternative budget as an actual budget - rather than glorified spreadsheet fanfic - is ridiculous, doubly so when it's about hitting an arbitrary "surplus" point in this fantasy world. Like, if the forecast for this *one* thing changed $4b in these last four months, using the latest forecast is no guarantee at all that the forecast is going to be correct. These are arrows with crayons on a paper map, not flight simulators where you gotta land the thing.

I think the lesson here is: have better spreadsheet workflows and data hygiene, including automated validation. In short, I am the only viable candidate this election vote me to be your supreme spreadsheet wizard.

https://twitter.com/coughlthom/status/1307461307197603840?s=19

One of the things that I always do is to split out the lookup cells from the cells that use the lookup to access the data, which makes it easy to do validation - eg. Have a validation cell that look up the label for that column, so you know that column is the column you're...

oh no uncle roger i fucked up * failed to drain mushrooms and gai pan properly

seems bad while simultaneously losing half my men fighting *scotland*

I bought a house! It's very well insulated oh wait I bought a jacket. Nevermind. No, I mean I actually bought a literal jacket. That's it. That's the joke.

Spending my day off attempting to purchase clothes I wish I was working working > dead > clothes shopping

Is it an explicit thing that National/ACT ads refers to the viewers as "you" where as Labour ads use "we/us"? I think National used "our" once, but in reference to National, whereas the Labour ad never used "you" at all.

I'm basically trying to reproduce the chilli oil dumplings from Cha circa 2008(?) - quite sweet, very chunky sauce. There was a garlic paste with it as well, I think it was semi-cooked? Any idea what the deal is with that? Raw garlic? Garlic with hot oil poured on top? Raw garlic it is! yolo!

It's hard not to feel shit about this. Like staring at a crack in the dam, and just feeling a sense of dread. But I think the thing we all share is a deep sense of powerlessness, as our futures disappear into a haze, and as our worlds shrink.

https://twitter.com/janepatterson/status/1304585881542483969?s=19

I surprised myself that my response to that powerlessness is to put my faith (yes, faith) in the collective - it's not what I'd assumed I'd do. But it's also understandable that some people run towards their own collective, their own leaders...

staycation is going well i mean, gotta hand it to CK3 for doing the math - it's genetically the same as a second-cousin marriage

If there's one lesson we should learn from the last decade, it's that mockery is no way to build anything. I laughed with Jon Stewart, along with the rest of my cohort, but boy did that - that conception of what "winning" looks like - lead us all down a dead end. I wrote satire back when the Onion was cool. I appreciated how good satire meant to really understand the internal logic of an idea, and to expose its fundamental inconsistencies. But to understand the logic so well is to *misunderstand* the emotional and social context...

great once again nz looks like it's 10 years behind everyone else in *checks notes* the apocalypse

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1300297333893197824

raining frogs?? lol are u still on the 5th seal on the book of life you small island nation

What if the reason these random bunfights escalate is that everyone is expected to take a side (and subsequently defend it), because that's the bunfight-of-the-day? What if we just... ya know, didn't? ie. That at the rando tweets angrily level, it doesn't need to be dealt with? I think at a broad level, we should acknowledge how toxic the "look at this asshole look at what an asshole he is" genre is. It's designed to make us mad at the asshole (which is fine), but it's also designed to insinuate that other people you don't agree with are just like that.

can't believe i failed to watch Avenue 5 during level 4 omfg the airlock scene(s)

tfw, to test the very sophisticated model that you've spent weeks building, you build the dumbest thing you can to set a baseline and the dumbest thing turns out to be quite good actually is my smart thing actually dumb?

no. it is the dumb thing which needs to be dumber.

I was fairly... blunt with an acquaintance who told me last night about what his mate who works in govt told him was going to happen blah blah.

Thinking about it, it bothered me more than it should - after all, if he said the same thing as "seems likely that..", I'd have agreed. The substance of the rumours wasn't particularly contentious. I guess I was really rolling my eyes at the feeling that they were expressing - that they *knew* what was going to happen, that they had some certainty and insight. It felt like smugness.

my computer thing worked!! my data science workflow