It is not, in fact, cheaper to impose the death penalty.

I was given the con side of the death penalty to argue once in forensics. I was actually pro death penalty and one reason was that I thought it was cheaper. I went to do research on this because it was certainly a point I’d have to contend with from the pro side.

It is vastly more expensive to execute a prisoner than to imprison them for life. https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/

Now you might think, hey that’s a link to a group that wants to get rid of the death penalty, of course they are going to say it’s more expensive. Go read the studies, I did, and again and again it is far more expensive to execute.

Why? Because we, pretty reasonably, put a high burden in front of the state before we allow them to kill a citizen. The legal process for both reaching the death penalty and then the numerous appeals to that decision is not cheap. It is a massive cost that the taxpayer has to bear to uphold the ruling and actually carry out the execution.

So it is far cheaper to house a person for life, and this shouldn’t really be that shocking. The prisons are built, the daily care of a prisoner is minimal, we provide them with the barest living conditions and food. The number of people we even could execute is a tiny percent of the prison population, so it’s not like they are taking up some huge amount of space and require us to build huge facilities to house them. If you could thanos snap every prisoner that could reasonably be executed out of existence, you wouldn’t free up enough prison housing space to close even a single facility, even more so when you consider that these prisoners are a handful in each facility.

The danger with “common sense” things that confirm our beliefs is that they can be wrong. The world is more complicated than it seems. I used to believe that it was cheaper to execute than to house. I was forced to argue the other side and because I’m competitive and want to win I did the research. I’m glad I did, it taught me an important lesson in not just believing something because it felt obviously correct.

All told, I’m not really sure I’m even against the death penalty. Some people are irredeemable and their deaths don’t weigh heavy on me. On the other hand, the idea of making it any easier for the state to execute me if they want to is unsettling. The common arguments in favor of the death penalty don’t really hold up. I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe the person is going to some eternal torture, they simply cease to exist. And it’s more expensive. From a practical standpoint I see little benefit for imposing the death penalty, but I understand the point of view of people being so reprehensible they don’t deserve to live even if it’s a high cost on society.

If you would like to continue arguing in favor of the death penalty though, you’ll do yourself a favor to go research the subject. It is more complicated and nuanced than you might think at first glance. And at the end of the day, if the thing you care about is cost, you’d never execute another person. It is far far more expensive to execute a prison than to house them.

I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

I bought a $20 cast iron pan at target, I season it like once a year. I just wash it and make sure to dry it, I’m sure this is against the rules. Seems to work fine for me though. I wouldn’t say it’s nonstick but it’s mostly fine.

A $20 Teflon pan would be flaking and unusable, so for $20 it’s a good deal.

Oh for sure, I remember anecdotes like that too, but unless the person is still a friend I’m not going to remember who exactly did it.

But that could be a me thing, my wife always tells me I’m bad at remembering details

Honestly the teacher laughing was enough, literally no one is going to give a fuck after that.

People need to realize that they are not the main character, if you want something embarrassing you did to go away just don’t bring it up. People aren’t jotting down notes to bring up later, they have full lives of their own, no one in college has time to commit this to memory any more than a funny anecdote and they won’t bother to remember who did it.

Board of Directors shocked, absolutely shocked, that they were supposed to be directing the company. When reached for comment several wealthy looking people were seen with dictionaries in hand looking up the word “director” looking absolutely aghast

Don’t want to be involved with politicians, stay out of politics.

Don’t want to be involved with the police, follow the laws. Absolutely do not get involved with sovereign citizen bullshit, it is based on nothing and has never worked in a court of law. I mention this because you seem like someone that might be attracted to that, and there’s nothing that’s going to get Johnny Law up in your shit faster than some bullshit “I’m just traveling in a private conveyance license plate I bought off Facebook marketplace.”

Don’t want to be involved with the underworld… again just follow the law. Mobsters and human traffickers aren’t heading into the suburbs to recruit new operatives.

Don’t want to be involved with the elite, kinda shit out of luck, they own everything and will squeeze you with all kinds of predatory capitalism. This means you get to pick between hundreds of brands all produced by 3 mega corporations, not that Elon musk rapes your kid in the basement. So basically the same advice, don’t go to billionaire cocktail parties (don’t worry they aren’t inviting you) and you’ll be fine.

You live in the statistically safest time for a human being to live if you are in the USA. If you consume a bunch of media you’ll get a different impression, but you literally could not pick a safer time to be alive if you are some upper middle class nobody.

tl;dr - No one gives one wet shit about you, my dude. You aren’t the main character, there isn’t a cabal of politicians and elites and cops and billionaires plotting your destruction. If you are feeling paranoid go seek out mental health support, and do it from a doctor, not Lemmy.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

Really enjoyed Farcry 5 but Farcry 6 was ok gameplay wise but the story was really underwhelming especially with the amazing talent they got in Giancarlo Esposito.

The real problem with Ubisoft games is that they are all 95% reskins. If you’ve played one farcry game you’ve played most of every farcry game, same with assassins creed, etc.

Now those games often end up having relatively fun mechanics so when another farcry comes out I’ll still play it because it’s a fun game to me.

I do wonder how much they are just hitting a saturation point where the same couple games reskinned over and over are just underwhelming

Pico8 carts are just a special flavor of png. I would try running it directly or if it won’t run them with the png extension just rename the file from .png -> .p8 without converting and see if that works

Relevant section of the user manual

There are three ways to share carts made in PICO-8:

1. Share the .p8 or .p8.png file directly with other PICO-8 users

Type FOLDER to open the current folder in your host operating system.

Although if you are having trouble you might have more luck getting started with the built in SPLORE command

Relevant section of the user manual

This might be easier to get started with since it will all get wired up automatically for you

I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

There’s a weird feel from this comic for me. I’m glad that these two people could have an amicable divorce. I think the thing that feels off is how casual the decision feels in the comic. I suspect this might be why some people are having a negative reaction as well.

Even if you think marriage isn’t forever, it’s still a promise to love and care about someone, to cherish them and share your life with them. I think if you’ve been in a marriage and seen your loved one through hard times together, this comic just feels capricious. A discussion about ending such an important component of your life happening in the span of two panels in a car ride just feels abrupt and unserious.

I imagine in real life the conversation was more serious and the impact of changing you relationship from one of romantic love to friendship weighed on both parties more than the comic has space to show.

If you’ve loved and supported your spouse through difficult and unexpected change or been the recipient of that love and support, this comic can feel dismissive. If you’ve gone through the heartache of losing your special person, even if they are still a part of your life, the celebratory tone sounds wrong.

I am happy that they can separate and still care about each other, but I also understand why people feel like something is wrong about the comic.

Rush Week might be a good match

I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.

That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.

For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.

My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.

If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.

So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.

This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.

I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.

The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.

A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.

People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.

The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.

RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.

I think this is the main disconnect for people.

What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.

Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.

It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.

A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.

People that are upset about electron should consider it’s not:

Electron App vs Wonderful Fully Supported Native Linux Application

The reality is that your choice is largely:

Electron App vs No App (maybe running their windows app in wine if you can get that to work)

It’s not like companies are going to go build a native linux app but electron got in their way. It was always electron or no support.

So if you like the app, remember that the ram and the cpu you paid for doesn’t provide value unless it’s doing something. There’s no trophy you get at the end of your life for “most cumulative ram left idle”