They go through the same hole as the mouth in the end, though.

Yes, but they’re distinct openings, which means we’re not topologically equivalent to a doughnut when you take them into account. Topological equivalence implies that you can transform one object into another without changing the number of openings. Classic example is a doughnut and a coffee mug (the handle of a coffee mug is the opening). A human would be equivalent to a doughnut with two holes poked through the side into the middle.

Two more out the nose

Any political party has a variety of “factions” that have different opinions on different topics. The kind of system you’re seeing here is what happens when these “factions” have a lower bar for splitting out and forming their own party. In practice, this means that instead of having a binary or ternary split in the parliament, you get a smoother transition between the extremes, so it’s much easier to find parties that will collaborate.

If you have only two or three parties, the distance between them will typically be so large that they can’t really collaborate on anything. However, when you have 6-8 parties, you’ll typically be able to find a group of 3-4 parties that are able to form a majority compromise on any given issue. Collaboration becomes more fluid (instead of constant “us vs. them”), compromises become easier, and voters get to express a more nuanced opinion at the polls (not just “left vs. right”, but “I want left-wing tax policies, combined with this specific environmental profile, and these specific stances on education”).

This only becomes dysfunctional if the parties/politicians are unable to collaborate and compromise effectively. However, countries with a parliament like the one you see here will typically foster politicians that are able to collaborate and compromise. You won’t survive as a politician in this kind of parliament if you’re a hardliner that refuses to budge on anything.

Honestly, a fragmented parliament is a good thing.

There’s a balance to strike though. As long as there are enough parties willing to collaborate that you get a kind of semi-stable majority coalition, all is good. There have been situations though (e.g. recently in Belgium I think?) where no-one is able to build any kind of stable coalition, and you just end up with a government that’s unable to get anything done.

The Danes have a long history of having very many parties in their parliament (I think their cutoff for “equalisation mandates” is at 2 %), so their politicians are generally quite good at finding compromises and building coalitions. I think that long-term, having this kind of parliament is healthier for the political climate, since it forces everyone to compromise much more often, as well as making it easier for voters to express more nuanced opinions, and forcing voters to consider a broader spectrum of options.

For my own part (Norwegian), I’ve only ever voted for left-wing parties, but which of the parties I vote for can change between elections. I know that these parties will typically collaborate on most topics, so I can use my vote to push that block in the direction I want. It also becomes easier to get cross-block collaborations, because you can have cases where e.g. the “environmentalist” party on the left and right collaborate, or where the more centre-leaning parties of one block collaborate on certain issues with the other block.

Lemme stick my hands in those fissures!

Isn’t it canon that they can turn down the power of the lightsaber to make it safe for training situations? I seem to remember reading some story where one guy is berated for injuring someone with a lightsaber that was turned down to training conditions, implying that he had actively tried to hurt them.

Had something like this happen to me. Luckily, we have laws in place stating that collections companies cannot follow up disputed claims. So I emailed the collections company, with the people that sent the claim to them on CC, telling them I disputed the claim (with some attachments to back up why). They responded by basically saying “sorry, our bad, the people that sent this claim can pound sand.” Then I never heard anything more about it.

What sucks though, is that it’s really stressful to have something go to collections. Most people would probably just have paid, because they get stressed out and don’t know the law.

Full disclaimer: This law may very well not exist where you live.

The worst conceivable argument: When someone tries to shut you down by claiming that “you’re always so combatative, why can’t you just let this go?”

My brother in Christ… you are arguing with me. You are provably being at least as combative as myself. Why can’t YOU just let this go? And of course, if you do anything other than let them have their way, they take that as proof that you never let anything pass.

Which is still utterly absurd, because it implies that a harder working dev would be spending more time chatting to a bot.

Awesome, thanks!

I’ve been thinking of self-hosting a server (and some other stuff)for a while. I hope you don’t mind that I post this comment just so I (hopefully) can try getting back to you for tips when I get around to buying the hardware.

I agree with the premise of “simple but hard”. However, I still want to underscore that large areas of the ocean will at any given time be covered in clouds or fog. Sure, once you find the ship the first time, you’ve narrowed your search radius significantly, but a ship that can move at 30 knots can move around 1500 nautical miles (2800 km) without being seen under just 48 hours of cloud cover. That means any intel on the position of a ship carrying weapons that can easily strike at ranges of 500-1000 km is fresh produce. Just a day after you spotted that ship, it can have moved almost 1500 km, and if you lose track of it under clouds during your next satellite pass, it can suddenly be 3000 km from where you last spotted it.

What this means is that the “hard” element here is significant. Even the “simple” element becomes complicated by stuff like night time and cloud cover. All this taken into account, there are very few countries in the world with enough surveillance satellites and processing capacity to actually keep a pin on a ship at sea over any significant period of time.

“Urolettelse” is probably what you would get in Norwegian, the German equivalent would probably be very similar. It’s not an established word, but people would probably understand your vibe if you used it.

To be absolutely fair: “Shot down” usually means the pilot was either killed, or had to bail, and that the jet crashed uncontrollably into the ground and was completely destroyed. It’s pretty common to differentiate between “shot down” and “hit, but was able to land”.

I’ve heard that it was based on a reasoning that if you end up in the water at sea, you’re going to drown anyway, so it’s better to not be able to swim and just get it over with.

However, knowing that most sailors came from coastal communities, it’s probably pretty unlikely that learning to swim wasn’t a natural part of growing up. Kids have always enjoyed playing in the water.

Wait, you didn’t have some git-based thing with an off-site upstream?

One of the worst things about this is that the person vibe coding just ends up shitting on the reviewers time. Like… you couldn’t even bother to write a real PR, and now you want me to spend time filtering your shit? Fuck off.

It’s 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite.

Pretty much my experience with LLM coding agents. They’ll write a bunch of stuff, and come with all kinds of arguments about why what they’re doing is in fact optimal and perfect. If you know what you’re doing, you’ll quickly find a bunch of over-complicating things and just plain pitfalls. I’ve never been able to understand the people that claim LLMs can build entire projects (the people that say stuff like “I never write my own code anymore”), since I’ve always found it to be pretty trash at anything beyond trivial tasks.

Of course, it makes sense that it’ll elaborate endlessly about how perfect its solution is, because it’s a glorified auto-complete, and there’s plenty of training data with people explaining why “solution X is better”.

They don’t think gender and race are social constructs.

Whether they think that has nothing to do with whether they believe there’s an objective answer to the question. What they do, however, is take positions that are in blatant violation of the observable facts around them. The whole “alternative facts” this is basically an exercise in “taking responsibility for your perceptions”, and choosing to believe whatever you think is right, regardless of the objective reality around you.

but why countries?

For the same reason as personal property, just on a larger scale. You don’t want some rando to come and set up camp in your kitchen, so we draw lines on a map and say “this is your spot, you make the rules in your spot”. Similarly, we collectively don’t want some other group of randos to show up and tell us what clothes we’re allowed to wear, or that drunk-driving is suddenly allowed. So we draw lines on a map and say “this is our spot, where we make the rules”.

Of course, ideally, the whole world would agree on a reasonable set of laws and mode of administration, and countries wouldn’t be needed anymore. However, we’re pretty far off from that being possible. To put it on point: If we had no countries today, would you prefer the russian, Chinese, German or other set of laws and administration? How would you decide which to apply globally?