I don't understand the first "combat" level. There's no real defining pattern separating the good from bad hex strings, so it's just a typing speed contest to type all the enemy patterns, right? What am I missing?

As far as I can tell, the first combat level enemies all start with "ALERT-" and have exactly 3 digits.

sorry, second combat level. It's all 6 digit hex color strings, some good some bad.

Ah, I see. Yeah, that one definitely took me multiple attempts to see what it wanted.

I believe that the "enemies":

1. Must start with "#"

2. Must be exactly 6 hex digits

3. Must be lowercase

Ohhhhh I swore there were friendlies with lowercase too! Thank you!!

There are, just not lowercase characters that are valid hex.

Detroit rap rock neatly broke along the prevailing political tendencies in the US

1. Kid Rock is the MAGA candidate. This makes sense: he was the scion the owner of many car dealerships and grew up in a house with an apple orchard and a horse stable but claims to be salt of the earth focused on kitchen table issues and also endless moneyed personal delight. Great article on the 2023 NADA convention, btw: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans...

2. Juggalos went lumpenprole left. Bad optics, problematic past statements, ultimately proudly unsophisticatedly populist

3. Eminem made "awfully hot coffee pot" and Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann went apeshit for it. MSNBC lib.

I'm not sure if I totally agree but this is an amazing breakdown.

The thing about Eminem is that I would have just as easily lumped him in with South Park Man-bear-pig style "actually it's square to care about politics" but "awfully hot coffee pot" having already made "Mosh" put it over the edge.

Here's the thing about "fucking magnets; how do they work?" How do magnets work? No less a science communicator than Richard Feynman—he of the rubber sheet gravity spacetime analogy—had no analogy to communicate why ferromagnetism creates attraction and repulsion. Here's his incredibly shaggy dog non-answer to the question about how magnets work wherein he says that there are no pat answers to "why" questions. He gets to the money line: "I cannot explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

So I will defend that line in the song. I will only accept answers from people who can explain why ferromagnetism works to me assuming I know how electromagnets create magnetic fields.

And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist

Y’all MFs unable to address the replication crisis, and getting me pissed

And that archetypal soccer ball design is called the Telstar and named for a communications satellite, fun fact. I think before 1968 the volleyball shape was more popular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adidas_Telstar

make caps lock control on hold, double quote on tap. Make control hyperkey on hold, angle bracket on tap. My keyboard firmware is very odd. This is not easily done with soft remaps to the point that I don't bother trying.

If you're on macOS have you tried Karabiner Elements? It seems to do just fine with software mapping my macbook keyboard.

I do use it. Before the way config worked changed I had hold/tap control/double-quote working. But they changed the way config works and I didn’t bother to fix that because I made a keyboard that does what I want exactly and when I’m on my laptop keyboard I don’t care toooo much.

This got me curious, and yeah it turns out Elm's dictionary implementation uses values, not pointers when retrieving values.

   elm repl
  ---- Elm 0.19.1 ----------------------------------------------------------------
  Say :help for help and :exit to exit! More at <https://elm-lang.org/0.19.1/repl>
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  > import Dict exposing (Dict)
  > nan = 0/0
  NaN : Float
  > nan
  NaN : Float
  > nan == nan
  False : Bool
  > naan = 0/0
  NaN : Float
  > d = Dict.fromList [(nan, "a"), (naan, "b")]
  Dict.fromList [(NaN,"a"),(NaN,"b")]
      : Dict Float String
  > Dict.toList d
  [(NaN,"a"),(NaN,"b")]
      : List ( Float, String )
  > Dict.keys d
  [NaN,NaN] : List Float
  > Dict.get nan d
  Nothing : Maybe String
  > Dict.get naan d
  Nothing : Maybe String

maybe it's that multiple bit patterns can be NaN and these are two different ones? In IEEE-754, a number with all the exponent bits set to 1 is +/-infinity if the fraction bits are all zero, otherwise it's NaN. So these could be values where the fractions differ. Can you see what the actual bits it's setting are?

> I suspect the escort ships would be fine though. They can defend themselves.

From underwater drones? Does that technology exist?

I know nothing of the rise of the underwater drone but I highly suspect they are loud and slow and no match for ships designed to look for modern submarines.

No match for detection, but do countermeasures exist? Can torpedos target them? Do the ships in question carry such torpedos, or any kind of torpedo?

Started doing what? Distributing Maoist literature and rifles, or donating to Act Blue, or something in the middle?

Not recommending first point 3 letter agencies! but if we all did something, volunteer, protest, donate, boycott, we would win tomorrow. Boycotting seems particularly effective, would start there.

Win what tomorrow? An election? There's no election tomorrow. A coup? Intriguing! Probably take a while though.

Volunteer doing what? Donate to what? Boycott what with what demands? What's the most successful boycott in your estimation? I can only really think of buses in Montgomery and the Swadeshi movement in India, but even that started in like the 1910s and they didn't get independence until 1947 and who knows how much it mattered. If there were a big crank somewhere and you could guarantee me that turning it gives better than 50% odds that the world gets better in the ways I consider better, I'd be turning the crank. We'd all be turning the crank! But what's the crank?

these choices are really up to the individual and what is important to them. as for win what, I am specifically talking about opposition to the current admin and political gravity, to which they are not immune. If say a protest of 30 million people happened tomorrow, the Republican's would see the writing on the wall and things like impeachment which previously seemed impossible now become required if you have any hope of maintaining a political future.

As for a recent successful boycott, see Disney Plus cancellations in response to Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air.

here are some concrete things I can think of: - don't like that Sam Altman is aligned with the regime? boycott chatgpt, it fell from the top spot in the app store and Sam Altman felt forced to address the controversy to his employees, it wouldn't take much more to turn the tide and other companies take notice and be disinclined to do similar - don't like that your elected representative was mum on the Iran war? write them an email, call their office - think that a candidate is best chance at change? donate to their campaign - show up at the next No Kings protest, politicians take notice of the coverage and what people are mad about

If you are waiting for a guarantee your actions will affect change I can't help you, but I can guarantee doing nothing won't.

The pathological case with scheduling is: It's 2015. You live in NYC. Your pal in Santiago, Chile says "hey next time you're here let's hang out." You say "great, I have a business trip there next April. Let's have dinner at 7pm on the 15th." They agree. You enter it into your calendar. If you store it as UTC, you're going to show up to dinner at the wrong time—the DST rules changed in between when you talked and when you expected dinner to happen. If you'd stored it as a local time with tzdb name America/Santiago you'd be there at the correct local time.