Imagine living in a place where you could see the stars at night.

As long as he’s on the road I got no problem with that! A brave man.

I like to drive it at 30 miles an hour on the pavements and footpaths, scattering and scaring pedestrians and children. I am too much of a nancy to ride it on the road where it might be me that gets hurt, but at least I have a plastic hat so I don’t have to pay attention while I’m driving.

Soon no place outside will be safe from hurtling steel, and we will have won.

I am planning to buy an off-roader, so I can get the vermin who try to hide from the traffic in the parks and gardens.

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.

Not that that particularly helps…

This, and block the meme subs explicitly.

Thank you for the correction! Where can I find the list of philosophical axioms espoused by the Whigs?

So kind! Thank you.

Forgive me, I am editing it in-place as more thoughts occur to me, so do make sure you still agree with it when I stop doing that, and edit your comment appropriately.

I can’t answer for America, but generally in democracies you get two and only two parties. Anyone taking a middle position cripples the side they’re closest to.

Before Socialism was a thing, England had ‘Liberals/Whigs’ (what yanks would call libertarians, because they’ve somehow managed to repurpose the word liberal to mean the opposite of what it means) and ‘Conservatives/Tories’ (king and country and church and don’t change things because you’ll break them and hurt people).

And of course, like all political groups do, they hated each other.

The Church of England was once known as the Tory Party at Prayer. The Liberals were the radicals, the party of industry and progress and free markets and who cares who it hurts as long as it’s the future.

With the rise of socialism/fascism/anarchism/progressivism, a truly radical program to rebuild society on utopian lines and use totalitarian terror to enable even more freedom and progress and human happiness, represented in England by the Labour Party, the ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ were squeezed, and combined to oppose socialist thought, which hated them both and wanted to destroy everything they thought was worthwhile in the world.

So there came to pass an uneasy alliance in England between classical liberals and religious loonies, who’d naturally detest each other.

That’s the modern Conservative party, who want to use radical social transformation and the power of the free market to go back to the glorious past, and are very much in favour of freedom of speech and thought as long as it’s the sort of speech and thought that they approve of.

The Liberal Party effectively ceased to exist, because in its radicalism and desire for progress, it was more sympathetic to socialist thought, and so it got crushed.

Socialism has rather collapsed as an idea after an hundred years of practical experience with utopia, leaving Labour as the party of ‘every problem can be solved by stealing more money and spending it on subsidies’. A position which is popular with those who benefit from subsidy, and unpopular with those who get their stuff stolen.

And of course, few of the people in either party actually believe in the causes they publicly espouse. They’re not stupid. But public communications have to be simple-minded and rally tribal support.

Obviously this is a terrible system, but it’s better than regular civil war, which is what you get in all other systems of government.

Seed oilz baaaad!

Oh God, yes! I’m old enough to remember when people thought it was important to have quiet and privacy to think.

I used to love my job. All my life I’ve loved programming, and I used to love being able to solve other people’s problems for them by doing the thing I love.

The open-plan curse killed it for me. For years I’ve done as little paid work as I can get away with because I hate trying to think in an open-plan horror so much. It’s like having my brain in a blender.

I still program, and think, a lot, but I only do it for other people when I need the money.

Wakarimasen, Toronaga-san!

It’s wonderful! There was a terrific BBC TV series when I was a boy which inspired me to read the book, which is even better.

Clavell wrote several other books, all great, but Shogun is the masterpiece.

Oh that’s nice, thanks, looks like if I can figure out how to submit a form from anki I’ll be home and dry…

I can feel some python coming on…

Yes, I’m confused about why engines play so badly in endgames.

If you start them off a piece down then that’s presumably a theoretically lost position, but they don’t just make random moves because it doesn’t matter…

What is it about the endgame that means that they suddenly start to favour the move that drags the game out the longest rather than the move that allows their opponent the biggest chance to screw up?

And actually, they often don’t even play the ‘drag it out longest’ move, they seem to just pick moves at random for no reason.

And that means that I can often beat stockfish in positions which I have no idea how to win against someone who hasn’t given up.

Maia does seem to fix this. She plays well in the endgame.

I wonder if it’s possible to layer the two things, so that if standard stockfish sees that all moves are equivalent, it can hand off to maia to choose which one to play rather than rolling dice?

I hate the way Big Concrete Slab is always trying to put down independent film makers in favour of yet another Hollywood blockbuster. #SmashTheSystem #SmashTheSlab

Behold:

https://lichess.org/?user=maia9#friend

maia9 is a chess bot who plays in a human style. She keeps whacking me in positions where I can beat actual stockfish easily. Just what I wanted. Thank you iceman on reddit.

That’s a nice app! Free and open source, and now a permanent addition to my phone. Thank you!

I can’t tell you whether it solves my problem because it won’t let me set up a position where I know that standard stockfish runs away, but I played with it for half an hour and it doesn’t show that behaviour in the games I played.

Nice, thank you! Also kudos to lemmy in general for providing a useful answer before reddit’s r/chess did!! Maybe there is hope!

I knew it!

I personally like to use really really bright LED lights pointed straight into the eyes of oncoming traffic.

Occasionally an oncoming car will take a swipe, or a cyclist will stop and punch me, but it’s well worth it for the widespread misery I can effortlessly cause.

It also makes it quite hard to see anything that isn’t in my ‘cone of death’, which is good in the same way that peril-sensitive sunglasses are!