No. Your reading of it is unusual, in most contexts. It almost always means “agreement, and I have nothing of substance to add”.

It can be rude if the thing you’ve said should warrant a substantial response. Like if you wrote “my brother just died in a car wreck”, a thumbs up (or probably any emoji) would be an inappropriate response. Heavier stuff warrants whole words.

But if it’s like “Can you get cat food at the store? The kind we always get” then a thumbs up is an acceptable shorthand for "yes, I understand and commit to this request "

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

true, though sometimes i find the more verbose style easier to read, and more maintainable (eg: you want to do something else in the block, you can just add a line instead of changing your ternary / etc). Small things

Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of

if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true":   # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
  this_variable = True
else:
  this_variable = False

Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.

But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.

Is the backend Python and the frontend JavaScript? Because then that would happen and just be normal, because Boolean true is True in python.

I thought mercurial was older than git, but apparently it’s 12 days younger.

moving mouse targets. Like let’s say you have two pinned items on the start menu, Firefox and steam. You click Firefox and it starts to open. You go to click steam, but Firefox finishes opening and the icon gets bigger. Steam’s icon then moves to the right, so you click where it was but instead just hit Firefox again. It’s stupid.

Note how Firefox has solved this with tabs. Open a bunch of browser tabs. Enough so they shrink a little. Then rapidly close some, starting from the left. Notice how they don’t change size until you’re done closing tabs.

Mouse tunnels. Like you click the “File” menu, and then mouse over “New” and a long sub menu opens. Longer than the original File menu. If you mouse directly from the top of File to the bottom of New, your cursor will briefly be outside either menu. This often will cause the entire menu to close. Mouse tunnel. Have to keep the cursor in the tunnel. Annoying.

Had an old job that insisted this was fine and refused to let me or anyone change the interface to fix it (on a website)

Focus stealing. Like you’re typing, and some other application pops up and takes focus. The absolute worst is when it pops up and puts focus on a dialogue box, and you just happened to hit “enter”. Instead of adding a new line to your document, you just accepted something. Awful.

I would be absolutely shocked if we had anything approaching justice for what this administration is doing.

We barely got anything for that whole ass insurrection attempt.

I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.

The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.

They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )

If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”

This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.

So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:

• Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
• Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
• Get them to trust you.
• Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc

All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.

And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.

You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.

Most people don’t care about things. This is kind of a recurring problem. Imagine if people just cared a little bit more. All sorts of problems, like littering, would just go away.

But people are lazy and don’t care. They don’t care that their behavior today will be a problem for them tomorrow.

The big sites are where the content is, and that’s what they want. Suffering a little bit of hardship (fewer memes) in order to bolster a stronger future? Ridiculous.

I mean… I think a lot of right wing people hate all the parts of capitalism, but don’t connect the dots to see that. Instead they blame the queers or the foreigners or whatever.

But the segment of laborers who want to kill all the out-groups are real and a problem.

Not the person you’re responding to, but I think we should have open borders*. The whole “you were born here so you’re cool” thing is archaic and cruel.

We could use some of the immense wealth of the ultra wealthy to build more housing and infrastructure. (This is a US-centric visualization, but in case you forgot how much wealth is concentrated in so few humans: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ )

*I would mandate vaccinations and similar for entry, but would provide them free of charge. So not quite “unconditional” but I think “no measles, please” is a pretty understandable condition. Unless you’re some parts of the US right now, I guess.

This guy is going to be responsible for a lot of suffering and death.

If he was visited by a plumber, and I was on the jury, I would nullify.

Good. Escalate further. I want to see musk sobbing in fear before the lights go out of his eyes.

holy serpent - endless : favorite doom https://holyserpentband.bandcamp.com/album/endless

Joyride! - favorite pop punk https://joyride-sf.bandcamp.com/album/joyride

Hoping for more visitations from Saint Luigi upon certain people. Shit is bad out here.

Short answer: If they don’t know anything else about you except you’re “Christian”, they don’t know if you’re like a left-wing unitarian or a horrible “conversion therapy, make being trans a felony” evangelical. The former is pretty safe, but if you’re the latter hanging out with you could be dangerous.

Longer thoughts: Many christians are not good about queer topics. This can include “we should torture them” (“conversion therapy”), laws that make life harder for them (eg: banning marriage), and lower grade unpleasantness like “i’ll pray so you don’t go to hell”.

Many christians also don’t really do much to stop their peers. It’s not really your responsibility to fight everyone on every topic, but if you keep going to a church that wants to oppress queer people, you’re supporting something that’s hostile. I don’t care how nice their pastor is or how much fun the choir group is, if the church wants to rip apart my friend’s families and you support that, we can’t be friends. Find another church.

Lastly, and this is more general and less about queer folks, most christians are not very good at it. The bible has lots of stuff about love your neighbor (and your neighbor includes your out-group) and not fixating on material wealth, but I see a lot of so-called christians doing squat for the homeless and vulnerable, voting for cruelty, and sitting around in their nice house with their big screen tv. (All that prosperity gospel, “sin all you want and be forgiven” stuff seems like nonsense.

Could still happen.

Wait, did you mean the lawyers working on their behalf or the rioters? Honestly, either could go and I’d be okay with that.

Violence is not inherently bad. The badness depends on the context. So “doesn’t that make them more-violent??” appeal is technically true, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

“Cutting someone open and taking out an organ” is pretty fucked up, unless it’s in a hospital and they’re removing an appendix so the patient doesn’t die.

Punching someone in the face is usually bad, but if that person is planning to go on and do mass murder, it’s still in the black.

How do you tell they’re a nazi? Well, sometimes they tell you. Sometimes they wear a clothes that signal it.

Sometimes people act like “if you can’t write an algorithm to perfectly decide how to behave in all cases you’re wrong” and that’s just not how human behavior and decision making has ever been. People make judgement calls with incomplete information all the time, and that’s okay.

The whole “most startups lose a lot of money and fail, but some will be wildly successful” model is kind of rotten. Especially when the "wild success " often means breaking laws or becoming consumer hostile.