They should return it to France until they decide the inscription at the base is worth living up to again. You know, “give me your tired, give me your poor”? Doesn’t really jive with the whole immigration gestapo thing.

Republicans? Hypocrites? Noooo. Surely not.

Yeah it was exactly that deep despair I felt that made me want to donate it once it started growing back in – my hair is one of the few things I actually really like about myself, to lose it felt truly awful and I want to spare someone else feeling that way for long. I don’t know if I’ll keep growing it out and donating it forever, I might only donate the one time (long hair is, also, a giant pain in the ass); but it bothered me more than the nausea – and the nausea was fucking insane, first and only times I have ever projectile vomited in my life: being on chemo.

On that note, if you don’t already have a bucket handy at home: buy a bucket they can keep at the bedside, or something else with a wide opening that’s easy to aim for. Maybe also get some of those vomit bags they use in the hospital with the plastic ring that holds them open, they disappear easily into a pocket and are a great help when you’re gonna be sick while away from a convenient place to hurl.

And make sure once they do finish evacuating the entire contents of their stomach that they put something back in there after, even if it’s just a little soup or something; it is somehow even less fun retching on an empty stomach and they’ll need the energy.

yes

Smart. Easier to say ‘no’ to a shiny rock, hard to say it to a kitten.

been there, done that, try to eat some crackers or something if you can, keep your energy up. Chemo is brutal, I’m currently growing my hair out to donate it and I’ve still got these super tight curls for the first few inches of growth from the chemo making it grow back differently. Everyone says it looks great, so hopefully it makes someone a nice wig. But god, I remember how much I hated the nausea and how much more I hated and even grieved over the loss of my hair at the time (I like my hair, okay? And I look terrible bald.)

You got this. It’ll suck ass every minute, but you got this.

Shart of the deal.

if I could’ve been born just twenty years earlier, just long enough to have my childhood, adolescence and my early twenties during the fuck around period, I feel I would be at least moderately happier and possibly mildly more successful than I am now; having my earliest, strongest memory be the morning of 9/11.

I’m told the world sucked less prior, that the end of the 90s was an exciting and hopeful time to be alive and I have to take their word for it, as I was too young to remember much before the morning of the attacks. It would just be nice to have the memory of hope, too, instead of only the looming specter of the future. It would be also nice to maybe remember a part of history where we weren’t having a once-in-a-lifetime economic dumpster fire every few years, but I’ve already given up on ever retiring, so I suppose that memory would merely make me more bitter.

Plus being born in 1977 would’ve meant getting to experience the golden years of video games firsthand, before selling a complete, bug-tested product started to be thought of as “optional”. Or at least it wasn’t nearly so egregious, they didn’t have the capacity for microtransactions anyways. That would’ve been nice to experience more of, I only got the tail end of this.

weren’t you just gonna buy more yachts anyways, though?

Is it not also your responsibility as a parent to teach your child that many others (certainly not all, but many) have a strong moral compass and many will choose not to engage with them if they espouse repugnant views? Including you, the parent.

I can think of nothing more potent an indicator that maybe I’ve fucked up pretty badly than my own parents deciding my moral compass is so warped it’s not worth interacting with me. Assuming they’re otherwise loving parents who aren’t seriously warped themselves, that would be right up there with “big bright red flashing electric billboard by the freeway calling me a humongous asshole by name” as far as signs that I need to make a change go.

well, again, I don’t know the situation – when he approached you, has he ever offered any indication these views he’s held are changing? Or is he still actively praising the orange turd? Because if you’ve set a clear boundary that you don’t want that type of person in your life, it’s not a good idea to go back on it. I wouldn’t want that type of person in my life. I don’t. I’m very grateful I’ve not had to cut off any family because of it, yet.

Love them, support them if they desperately need your help, but there is not a single person in my life I know or have known whom I would willingly welcome into my world who pursued an engineering degree who actively espouses harmful ideologies, those that make rich men richer and sets poor people fighting each other over culture wars, or actual wars sending kids off to die in far corners of the world. And when you take those ideologies to their extremes, you get gas chambers and world wars.

If they don’t know the harm they cause (and that they’re assisting in by supporting), then make it a teachable moment. Show them the consequences of supporting fascism – show them Don’t Be a Sucker, show them photos from concentration camps or testimony from the Nuremberg trials, show them how right-wing authoritarianism is harmful to everyone. Show them the parallels between the historical atrocities that right-wing populism has been used to justify, and how they connect to the actions of the men now in power. If they know about the harm and don’t care, I’m not sure how I could actively welcome someone like that into my life.

I’m probably not telling you anything new with my rambling, I’m just spitballing. You’ve probably thought a lot more about this than I have and tried plenty, I don’t know the situation; but I empathize with your predicament greatly. Nobody wants to cut family out of their lives, we all want to see our kin be the best they can be.

Certainly, but if ~18 years of parenting wasn’t enough guidance, what more can be done? At a certain point, they have to make the decision themselves to change, and if they won’t there is little sense in trying to force it or provide further guidance. Further, this doesn’t exactly sound like a small difference of opinion if they’re calling their own kid “fascist”, from the way it sounds it’s probably a lot more than just wearing a red hat, this son might well have become a straight up unpleasant person to hang around and engage with; and I don’t think one should be obliged to entertain fascists regardless of how you know them, they should be shunned, at best.

I was today years old when I learned that the Children of Atom have a real-life counterpart. Not quite worshipping the radiation, yet, but they might yet get there.

if I may ask, what are you hoping to achieve by trying to regain contact with someone whose fundamental values differ so greatly from your own? They may be your son, and you can still love them from afar and the person they used to be, but I think you shouldn’t compromise on your principles and break bread with him unless he himself wants to be someone worth associating with.

It’s probably much easier for me to say than it is for you to do, but I would strongly suggest actually not approaching them at this get-together, and instead seeing if they approach you first. If they don’t and just pretend you aren’t there, I wouldn’t say they’re someone you should be overly concerned about connecting with.

Sure, but then it’s a lot easier to notice it’s broken. It also makes a lot of noise, shooting a gun; a spray can is near silent.

no, I spent probably 10+ years of my life trying and failing to retain anyone’s interest, and all I got for my effort was jerked around emotionally and used for entertainment by a handful of different people. I didn’t even manage to get laid for the trouble, I’m still holding my v-card. I’ve finally come to accept in the past year or two that not everyone gets to do everything they want, and just quitting is less painful. I’m not getting lead on and fucked with, I’m not getting my hopes up for stupid shit – I’m not happy about it, but I can sit and be unhappy just fine all on my own, I don’t need some asswipe playing games with my head to do so. Whatever an honest, actual relationship looks like or would be, it can’t possibly be worth the level of bullshit I’ve already endured to try and make one happen, let alone any further bullshit I’d be put through by continuing to entertain the idea. No thank you. I just thought I’d share the main reason I’ve resented my height for most of my adult life, though there are also more practical considerations as I’ve mentioned.

nothing worth sticking around to see.

Wars over clean water and food. Wildfires, drought. Even if the US recovers from Trump we’ll almost certainly still be living in an extractive capitalist hellscape run by sociopaths, along with the rest of the world. By this time I suspect something similar to Cyberpunk’s Blackwall will be necessary, as if one is not the cause of an apocalypse I can fully believe rogue AIs would become a nuisance/hazard on the open internet by that time. And we’ll also probably start seeing things like Neuralink and other BCIs coming onto the market for general purchase to provide a whole new avenue of technofascist horrors – how about running ads in your field of view? In your dreams? Or how about mind reading, anyone? Or even just simple malware. Fun! Fun fun fun.

I’m aiming to die of a massive heart attack in my fifties, so hopefully I will be dead before the 2060s.

Some of the other 0days this guy released are already being actively exploited in the wild, but no reports of big losses as a result of them yet. Having said that, the entire point of BitLocker was that it was full disk encryption that you didn’t have to think too much about; and now I bet every corporate IT department out there is looking at it with suspicion. If this guy can keep delivering on “things that keep sysadmins awake at night”, like “oh god every hard drive we’ve had stolen in the last few years can be fully decrypted now”, eventually a lot of them will decide it is less harrowing and less work to move their entire stack away from Microsoft than it is to live with them.

They’d better not be overselling this bomb they’re gonna drop in July. I’m already moved over to Linux fully now, to quote photonicinduction: I want flames. I don’t just want to see it all over the tech news, I’m hoping he screws with them hard enough the story makes it to actual TV news channels.

to add to the other excellent theories here: Most if not all flagship AI right now is extremely sycophantic. Not only is it a magic black box that gives correct-sounding answers and never needs to sleep, eat or unionize; it also makes you, the user, feel ✨ s p e c i a l ✨. and wouldn’t you know it, CEOs fucking love being made to feel like they’re the smartest man in the room, even when (sometimes especially when) they are in fact the biggest moron to suck oxygen in a five mile radius. LLMs are genuinely phenomenal at making your unhinged, disconnected-from-reality half-baked ideas not only sound good, but then they also convince you you’re the next Einstein for thinking of them.

Yeah, gee, I wonder why CEOs love AI so much.