PhilipTheBucket

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I really don't think that Nixon was strongly motivated by eco activists. I mean, I get what you're saying... like I said, the overall climate does make an impact on the "establishment" policies absolutely and the activism has to lead by about a hundred miles before the government starts catching up to it. I think on that front we're saying more or less the same thing.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 18 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Nixon, at this point, would be a progressive Democrat. He was an absolutely legendary piece of human garbage, but he did care about the country and attempt to do big good things for it sometimes, in a way that most of the campaign-contribution-fueled crop of ghouls that are "congress" today do not. Reagan and Clinton really redefined the whole scope of what even being in charge of the country was supposed to mean.

Seriously. This is what I've been waiting for. Resistance from people already recognized in authority goes ten times smoother and further than resistance from random people (which can also be fine, depending, but the other way is better when it can happen that way.)

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago (7 children)

What are you basing this all on?

$ time (cat optimizer.bin | bzip2 > optimizer.bin.bz2)

real	0m4.352s
user	0m4.244s
sys	0m0.135s

$ time (cat optimizer.bin | zstd -19 > optimizer.bin.zst)

real	0m12.786s
user	0m28.457s
sys	0m0.237s

$ ls -lh optimizer.bin*
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 76M Oct 20 17:54 optimizer.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 56M Oct 20 17:55 optimizer.bin.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 59M Oct 20 17:56 optimizer.bin.zst

$ time (cat stocks-part-2022-08.tar | bzip2 > stocks-part-2022-08.tar.bz2)

real	0m3.845s
user	0m3.788s
sys	0m0.103s

$ time (cat stocks-part-2022-08.tar | zstd -19 > stocks-part-2022-08.zst)

real	0m34.917s
user	1m12.811s
sys	0m0.211s

$ ls -lh stocks-part-2022-08.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 73M Oct 20 17:57 stocks-part-2022-08.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 26M Oct 20 17:58 stocks-part-2022-08.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 billy users 27M Oct 20 17:59 stocks-part-2022-08.zst

Are you looking at https://jdlm.info/articles/2017/05/01/compression-pareto-docker-gnuplot.html or something? I would expect Lempel-Ziv to perform phenomenally on genomic data because of how many widely separated repeated sequences the data will have... for that specific domain I could see zstd being a clear winner (super fast obviously and also happens to have the best compression, although check the not-starting-at-0 Y axis to put that in context).

I have literally never heard of someone claiming zstd was the best overall general purpose compression. Where are you getting this?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 5 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Yeah. This whole thing where voting for someone is "falling in line behind" them is very weird to me.

Politicians are not your friends. Even ones I like, I don't really look at as that I am "allied" with them. I'm just inputting that I want them in charge more than I like the other person; it's sort of the last stage of the process of trying to control what my government might be in a position to do to me or do to other people in the world (for good or bad, often for bad).

Do these people go driving and decide whether the transmission "deserves" to be in third gear or second gear or whatever? Do they set "red lines" about when they will and won't touch the steering wheel? Dude, the government is often terrible. Refusing to give any input to it until it gets better on its own seems guaranteed to be self defeating.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I mean conservatives have held power since Carter. He was the last non-conservative president we had, he actually tried to reign in the CIA and get Israel to stop killing Arabs in a big way, among other things. Biden was actually way further left than the norm, if that tells you anything.

We took a massive tumble with Reagan/Clinton, and then ever since then, we've been crawling our way back up towards some kind of humanity in government an inch at a time.

https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/126900/8008_FDTD.pdf

Book written by a guy who studied in detail how to solve this problem, how it has been attacked successfully and unsuccessfully in many different countries across the world.

Basically, if boiled down to its core, it is: Strengthen civil institutions separate from government. You need them to knit people together into an effective resistance, and they'll be doing good work regardless even separate from the resistance, and then after the revolution they will make it a lot more likely that the new revolutionary society morphs into something humane and civil instead of just a new breed of violent dictatorship (which yes is a huge question and issue which a lot of revolutionaries don't seem to give enough thought to.)

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social -2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Everyone except Bernie Sanders and a couple of other kooks. But yes, everyone else.

Young people don't realize how far things have moved left in American politics in the last 20 years, with Palestinian people in congress now and socialists running for president, and even people having big protests now without instantly just getting tackled and arrested by the NYPD by the hundreds and then stuffed in a warehouse.

It's still bad enough that I understand how people can't grasp it and just assume "everything's moving to the right all the time every year," because that's sort of what it feels like, but it's not what's happening.

Yeah, 100%. I feel like maybe he lost his mind because of trying to become the president. Hunter Thompson talked about it, he said he saw it happen to a few different people, he compared it to a moose during mating season, just losing his mind to go after the goal.

Maybe being embedded into a party that became so depraved took some kind of toll on him... having to deal with Sarah Palin. My God, I can't even imagine. But yeah, whatever it was I 100% agree, something happened to him.

I mean yeah lol. That's why I said "mostly." But my point was, more or less, that modern power tools can do stuff that you simply can't do with C, but C is still a venerable tool to me. I like it. The old pros can make fantastic custom cabinets, they do framing almost as fast as someone with a nail gun, it's just that it's not practical for most people to try to get skilled enough to be able to make solid stuff (and of course you can never make a skyscraper with just hand tools.)

Once you start finding yourself using malloc() all that much, you're probably using the wrong tool, and it's also just objectively less secure than other safer languages. But clean C code has a kind of beauty to me that is hard to replicate in the more powerful languages.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It used to be "beat the Nazis," "got the railroads built," and things like that. There is value to having some conservative values in government. The problems with America actually don't have a lot to do with partisan politics; it is that the right wing turned into Nazis, and the "left" wing of the establishment politicians turned into Roman senators too busy getting blowjobs to realize that people are starving in the streets and can't afford their insulin.

I would actually be fine with Republicans of the John McCain / Dwight Eisenhower mold in government. If we could get rid of Mike Johnson and Nancy Pelosi (ideally by just dumping them into the Potomac), and have it be AOC and Adam Kinsinger, I'd be fine with that. The MAGA people are more overtly evil, but it's not even really a party thing.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Not really. Civil rights absolutely, social security, kind of, the activists didn't create the idea but they gave muscle to the labor movement to the point that FDR got elected in the first place and had the momentum so sure, clean air act and clean water act, you must be joking, those were just liberal government things. The things from that end of the spectrum are actually really good examples of why having a functioning government is a good thing even if it means "electoralism," meaning it can't all just be people in the streets fighting. You need both sides of the equation: The vigor and blood to push things forward, and then the paper and system to lock it in. Without either side of that, it doesn't work.

More to the point, stop shitting on people who did good things. If you live in America, you benefit from all of the things on that list. Look for enemies elsewhere. This is the left's favorite thing, to turn its guns exclusively on its own side, and it's super good at it.

 

This article by Enrique Méndez and Fernando Camacho originally appeared in the September 30, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Mexico City. The Morena deputies who were assigned to the Mexico-Israel friendship group decided not to join, and protests against the group also prevented its installation and the visit of officials from that country to the Chamber of Deputies.

Representative Petra Romero Gómez reported that she had made “the firm decision not to accept this assignment and to request my immediate resignation. The reason is simple and profoundly ethical: I could never be part of a group that, in my opinion, represents support for a state internationally accused of committing serious human rights violations against the Palestinian people.”

She recalled that organizations such as Amnesty International have documented Israel’s military practices, “which constitute war crimes and apartheid against Palestine.”

Morena legislators exclaimed in the plenary hall: “Long live free Palestine!” Photo: María Luisa Severiano

The legislator made a statement to the media during Tuesday’s regular session, and later, a group of Morena deputies shouted in the plenary hall: “Long live free Palestine!”

Romero Gómez even said that she has requested to join friendship groups with nations with which she affirmed she shares principles of sovereignty and cooperation, such as Russia and Bolivia, “countries with which Mexico maintains ties of respect and collaboration.”

She also noted that the Mexico-Israel friendship group has not been formally established in this Legislature due to the lack of sufficient members to meet a quorum, “which reflects that many deputies are not willing to legitimize policies of aggression and extermination.”

In fact, the president of the friendship group and former governor of Zacatecas, Miguel Alonso Reyes (PRI), had scheduled the installation for yesterday, Monday, but ultimately decided to cancel in the face of protests.

Meanwhile, Petra Romero reiterated her support for the demand for a free Palestine and expressed her “absolute rejection of any initiative that seeks to normalize the genocide against that people.”

She also noted that Mexico has always been and must continue to be a country that defends peace, the self-determination of peoples, and unrestricted respect for human rights.

 

A new report on the state of the world’s oceans paints a grim picture. The ninth annual Copernicus Ocean State Report finds “No part of the ocean is untouched by the triple planetary crisis, as pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change are putting pressure on the ocean worldwide.” The EU-funded report draws on decades of historical and current observational data as well as satellite measurements to create a resource for policymakers, scientists and citizens to more fully understand the challenges facing the world’s oceans. “With all this information we can ensure that we are better prepared … to ensure that we can live with these situations which are evolving,” Karina von Schuckmann who worked on the report as senior adviser at Mercator Ocean International, told Mongabay at a press conference. Ocean change Global ocean temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates, and marine heat waves are intensifying worldwide. Sea surface temperatures have been increasing each decade since satellite records began in 1982. The northeastern Atlantic Ocean bordering Europe has been warming nearly twice the global rate at 0.27° Celsius (0.49° Fahrenheit) per decade since 1982. Tropical regions of the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, experienced record-breaking marine heat waves in 2023; some areas were affected for up to 300 days. Polar regions are also seeing dramatic changes: Arctic sea ice is declining, and the Southern Ocean is warming and freshening, contributing to shifts in global currents. At the same time, plastic is polluting every ocean basin…

 

With a new set of Microsoft 365 features, knowledge workers will be able to generate complex Word documents or Excel spreadsheets using only text prompts to Microsoft's chat bot. Two distinct products were announced, each using different models and accessed from within different tools—though the similar names Microsoft chose make it confusing to parse what's what.

Driven by OpenAI's GPT-5 large language model, Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel, and it allows the creation of complex documents and spreadsheets from user prompts. It's called "agent" mode because it doesn't just work from the prompt in a single step; rather, it plans multi-step work and runs a validation loop in the hopes of ensuring quality.

It's only available in the web versions of Word and Excel at present, but the plan is to bring it to native desktop applications later.

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