The advice I commonly hear is “buy a glock.” Seems to work out for folks I know.

If you have a range USA near you then you can rent some guns there to try out - its included with a membership. If you’re not familiar with handguns though then they do require you come with someone for the first time. This was how I recently picked up my first , I basically just tried everything and only paid for ammo and targets (went with someone who had a membership).

If you want more things to help narrow down, look for “striker fired” (as opposed to “hammer fired”) , 9mm, just to keep it simple.

One thing that will help you get comfortable with whatever you purchase more quickly is dry firing very regularly. It’ll help ingrain safety practices, stance, grip, and trigger pull. Everything but the BOOM and with the added benefit of being a heck of a lot cheaper than going to the range very frequently while you’re learning.

Wth that sounds awesome. Guess I’m starting Columbo tomorrow.

NGL I thought it was just different lighting making the makeup color pop a little more, but now that you mention it the lip filler is just right there.

Good points! The org I’m currently in has a semi formal onboarding session for new members and a semi formal period of provisional status where new members are expected to do some common educational pieces and engage with the org largely from an educational angle, but after that they’re kinda turned loose as a rank and file without much of a transition. It’s been very effective to get people aligned on tools and common marxist fundamentals, we tend to just struggle in translating that into consistent praxis beyond engaging in mutual aid or flashy affairs. We revise the process somewhat frequently, but haven’t found “the thing” that locks new members into being consistent.

These are both great suggestions. ‘Gamification’ has a lot of negative connotation these days, but you’re absolutely right that those things can be very helpful for engagement. Even things like kudos and shoutouts in general meetings or announcing when someone achieved an internal milestone can be very useful - we do both of those things, but not necessarily regularly.

I ended up picking the bi label because im attracted to all (and null) genders but the attraction is different between them. I guess that’s “omni”, but I’m old and like the bi label more. The flag is also excellent.

Like you said, the distinction is mostly arbitrary and will differ between any 2 people. Whatever fits your vibe at the time, no reason you cant reidentify later.

We’re expected to use it at work and ive been using Claude a lot lately. Tbh LLM coding assistants have come a very long way since the early days of copilot. Frankly, ive worked with several other (more senior even) engineers that claude could code circles around. Not many, I could count them on my fingers, but its more competitive than some other folks have let on.

The other repliers are correct that these tools can easily spit out buggy code that sneaks its way into the codebase due to lack of oversight, test coverage, and general guard rails. This is pretty easy to spot with various services you likely use or have used (amazon has had several outages recently for example). In my own workplace we have seem significantly more code being merged and a correlated increase in bug density (which is multiplicative with the increase in code being merged). There are definitely problems with relying on LLMs too much.

People are still learning what these tools are good at. Right now that seems to be boiler plate generation, following very common or explicitly defined conventions, and unit test generation. That’s not a lot, but its absolutely not nothing. People seem to think their program/app/service is a special snow flake with special requirements only understandable by greybeards. That is not at all the case, most programming in industry is gluing together existing tools and solutions in various arrangements, then putting a little proprietary sprinkle on top. This has been the state of software development for decades at this point.

Like most other social issues, the underlying problem is capitalism. Like the advent of all other industrial automation, the mere existence of LLMs causes capitalists to demand an increase of production from the existing work force. Of course quality control is going to be a problem.

I dislike LLMs because of their impact on the environment and that theyre being shoved into every product. I also do enjoy programming, so LLMs were something I really avoided until the office started demanding it. I’m trying to lean into it now though. I dont care for the product my company sells (the tech is fine and even interesting, just not a product or field that seems worthy of spending so much energy on), I don’t like how many hours I work, and I’d rather be spending time organizing and with my family. So , ive been offloading a lot of work to get deliverables out the door to Claude, then pivoting over to organizing work while it churns. I’m lucky in that the product I work on can’t hurt anyone if a bug gets deployed. I can just log on the next day and fix it, nbd. Obv that’s not the case for all software, but it is the case for most of it. Frankly, I strongly encourage other workers that have jobs that LLMs can do large swaths of to do the same. Talk to coworkers, do some work for whatever org you’re a member of (you are a member or an org, right?), and let Claude churn out shit in the background.

This is my transition goal

Very little happens in Lenexa so they gotta stick the pigs on whatever they can obv

In the US Undergraduate commonly refers to a bachelors in my experience. Usually folks specifically say associates degree if that’s what they are referring to

There was a brief live action Dresden files on the Sci Fi channel iirc

Didn’t know he’s been in Red Nation as well, but the Rev Left interview was super interesting. Really looking forward to reading this one

Thanks for elaborating and the tone indicator. I had to look up what sealioning even is - I certainly wasn’t trying to tone police you, I was just asking you to clarify your tone since I couldn’t infer it from your original post and it clearly mattered.

I have no way of knowing how you feel or what your intentions were when you replied and really thought I was going out of my way to politely ask for clarification while pushing back with some critique. I stand by what I said that you should be more direct but in hindsight I should have phrased it differently - suggesting you were lib or socdem rather than more directly saying that your original post (if it was in earnest, which you have clarified it wasnt to some extent) smacked of a form of liberalism was not a very useful shorthand, and I apologize for that.

No harm was meant in my original reply to you, i was really earnestly asking for clarification. Thanks for spending the time clarifying comrade.

No need to put yourself or your efforts down! This is a piece of agitation and education, and its always good to hear a comrade not leaving their politics at the door because its socially problematic or inconvenient. In some of my own relationships I’ve struggled with towing the revolutionary line (its a work in progress as always), but I do always try to push back on liberal and fascist narratives + educate and agitate when folks I know bring them up. Are you involved in any orgs?

FWIW most of my agitation time is spent with a local org where we use a variety of tactics to attempt to educate, agitate, and organize, and that feels (in a purely vibes based way) much more effective since we can reach a much larger audience and community members we’ve never met before. We do struggle with organizing actions to try getting folks on the ground and organized not feeling effective at times (or being somewhat liberal in nature, even if the rhetoric is revolutionary), and I would love to hear from other orgs on how they have successfully turned well meaning libs into thoughtful communists consistently.

Thank you comrade! Really appreciate the thoughtful response and links.

Can’t really tell what the intended tone of this is. Kinda reads like you’re calling me a lib for using the word “involved.” If this is meant as a joke, all good, I appreciate that we are all dealing with shit atm.

If this is meant as actual critique I would urge you to be more direct, as your post stands now this reads like a reddit comment or a very liberal critique from a disingenuous socdem.

Certainly in agreement with that, and hopefully many users of the bear site and other adjacent instances are involved with, or getting involved with, their local orgs. It’s also crystal clear that USAmerican leftists do not currently know how to pull the masses towards the direction of liberation. I guess I’m personally looking for tactics and strats that folks on the ground are using and how they are working or aren’t working so people outside of those hyper local contexts can re-apply effective tools in their own cities.

Tru

Thanks!

Plz explain, what are we looking at here?