Are you kidding? I might actually stop buying new games and make it through my backlog now! This is great!

I’m inclined to say no. Reducing the problem down to its most basic parts: Alice is authorized to talk to Bob, but Bob doesn’t know that. How can Alice prove it?

Bob has to assume that anyone asking to talk to him could be Mallory, who isn’t authorized to talk to him but will always answer “yes” if asked whether she is. So the authorization he gets has to be from a trusted third party; it can’t come from Alice.

Grace is a trusted third party. If Alice doesn’t care about privacy, and is okay with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob and with Bob knowing Alice’s identity, Alice can just tell Bob, “here’s proof that I’m Alice. Show this to Grace and she’ll confirm that I can be here.” This is SSO, essentially.

If Alice doesn’t want Bob to know who she is, but is ok with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob, she can ask Grace to give her a secret code, and give that code to Bob, who can check with Grace to know whether or not that code corresponds to someone who is authorized.

If Alice doesn’t want Grace to know that she’s talking to Bob, though, she runs into a problem. Because there’s no way for Grace to send Bob a message without knowing who Bob is, he can’t ask anonymously, and because there’s no way for Grace to confirm that Alice is authorized without knowing who she is, Grace will always know that Alice has asked for authentication to talk to Bob.

Adding Dave in as a trusted fourth party could solve the problem—Alice asks Dave to check with Grace, and lock his answer in a bag with a unique key that only Dave has. Then Grace could give the bag to Bob, who doesn’t need to know who Grace is to pass the bag to Dave and ask him to unlock it. But Alice would be trusting that Dave won’t keep records on which bag corresponds to which person.

I don’t think that’s a surmountable problem. I’ll have to think about it some more.

Nope, you’re right. I just read the words and assumed it was one of the terrible ones.

This one is just…math.

You’re right. I honestly just assumed it was one of those intentionally engagement-baiting posts when I saw it and didn’t even process the problem itself.

In fairness, this one isn’t nearly as bad as most of the ambiguous problems that get passed around on Facebook with multiple parentheticals and such.

Your word problem is excellent.

Whoa, you went from 0 to 100 on rage super quick. You ok buddy?

it’s

a badly

written

math

problem

Seriously, every time this comes up and everyone makes a huge deal out of it, I keep thinking, “none of the people writing these better be teachers.” You have to be more clear than this.

Edit: ok, not so much this one. I just read the words and assumed the math problem was one of the ambiguous ones. Stand down, soldiers.

Most of the birds on New Zealand are flightless, because they evolved without natural ground-based predators (they only had threats from birds of prey). Cats’ impact on the avian population is actually pretty dramatic.

Meanwhile, a significant percentage of the islands remains undeveloped. The population of the entire country is only five million, on a landmass larger than the British Isles (population 65m+). Human settlement in NZ is actually pretty light-touch, which is why a ton of movies that need lush outdoor sets are shot there.

What would be a more respectful alternative?

As I understand it, most of that group prefer “Aboriginal Australian.”

The worst (most profound) part about this art piece is that it runs on electric servos, not hydraulic cylinders. It doesn’t actually even need the hydraulic fluid, it’s just programmed to “think” that it does.

That’s really clever. And dumb in exactly the way Silicon Valley would actually do something like this.

Given Australia and New Zealand’s proximity to one another on the map, it makes sense to assume that the latter was originally settled by explorers from the former; and, indeed, Aboriginal Australian people can be credibly dated back more than 50,000 years, when they were able to walk to the continent from what is now New Guinea.

But no! There’s no real archaeological sign of Aboriginal Australians (or anyone else) settling on the island that would become New Zealand until the Maori arrived from Polynesia, around 800 years ago.

I didn’t leave out a zero; human habitation on New Zealand has a history of less than a thousand years. In fact, the Maori only beat Europeans to New Zealand (which they called “Aotearoa”) by about 300 years, and archaeological records indicate that they brought invasive species with them, too. They also caused the extinction of at least two bird species before European colonization even began.

Maori are great, great people. But I don’t think that they’ve “proven [themselves] capable of co-existing with the local ecosystem” any more than the European descendants have.

(As a side note, the word “aborigines” in that part of the world carries a potentially problematic connotation. Some Aboriginal Australians see it as a holdover from that country’s colonial era.)

Yeah, we all need people, but none of us need every person.

Honestly, I hadn’t even processed that because it’s such boilerplate fluff, but you’re right. Biden did indeed inherit an economy on the brink, and he deserves some amount of credit for the “soft landing,” but he definitely didn’t do enough to materially help low and middle income folks as he implies in that speech.

Still, he wasn’t telling voters that the problems were over. He was telling other rich people (Congress), and for them the economy was (and still is) pretty good. If you were to ask him, I wonder if he wouldn’t say that that’s the difference.

I still think the worst failure of Biden’s presidency was not prosecuting Trump, though.

When did they say “the economy is good?” I remember Harris talking during her campaign about how they did a lot of work and made a lot of progress, but there was still a long way to go. True, they didn’t make a huge deal out of it like Mamdani did, but I can’t find any evidence of them saying “nah man, everything is ok.”

The Democrats act lazy, but in reality, they want the same thing that the GOP wants: Their donors to be happy. They only pretend to fight, until they can get the votes to keep their seats.

Let’s be clear: every employee is responsible for doing what their employer wants. Elected representatives made it into office through a convoluted hiring process, and so the people who got them into office are their employers. I’m not oblivious to that at all. When I say “the Democrats are lazy,” it’s reductive in the same way that “the people elect the president” is reductive. Actually, the people vote for electors and the electoral college elects the president. And so no, the Democrats aren’t actually lazy; a less-reductive way to say it would be “the people that the Democrats see as their employers aren’t telling them to fix the affordability crisis.”

That may seem cynical, but the reason that this is notable is that, up until fairly recently in historical terms, the Democrats and Republicans alike treated their constituents as their employers, in at least some capacity. In some cases they weren’t their only employers, maybe some particularly corrupt ones in safe districts didn’t need to worry about the voters’ opinions at all, but for most of them the “other employers” (that is, the donors) also wanted them to keep the voters happy because they wanted us to keep buying their stuff, and a happy population is a consumptive population.

Now, though, almost none of the elected officials in Congress consider their constituents to be their employers.

The Republicans consider Trump to be the one signing their paycheck; even though their money is still coming from their donors, Trump has (or at least had) such an outsized impact on their electoral chances, and therefore their lobbyist money, that he commanded essentially all of their obedience.

And the Democrats have decided that just not being MAGA is good enough for their constituents to keep electing them (and in fairness, if they were up against the opposition they had in 1998, it would’ve been), so they don’t actually need to work that hard at following through as long as they just stay not-MAGA; so they’ve decided to put more effort into making their donors happy, and since their donors also supported Trump, their marching orders are just to not kick up too much of a fuss.

In the meantime, all of the donors have decided they’re okay with all of us being too poor to buy their stuff now for some reason (my personal theory is that it’s a really stupid game of chicken or some twisted prisoner’s dilemma thing), so that part of the historical backpressure is gone too.

The way that ends up working itself out is the Republicans saying whatever Trump says, even if it’s a lie, because he’s their employer; and the Democrats being lazy, because their employers say to be.

So no, I don’t think that Democrats are actually lying. They’ve just decided that they don’t work for us anymore. Which means we need to fire them (primary each and every one of them who isn’t doing what we want) to show them that, actually, they do; because if we hire the other guys, we already know who they’re going to be working for.

Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said.

The ones I hate the most are the ones that meticulously teach you “press A to jump!” (Cool thanks, yeah, I’ve been playing video games since Super Mario Bros, I’m pretty good on the basics) but then you get out of the tutorial and play for an hour or two and realize that you’ve never once had to jump, but that complicated combo that they didn’t even allude to in the tutorial is for some reason the core game mechanic.

A couple people have told me that they are just feeling burnt out/depressed/etc

That’s legit. A lot of people are. And when they are, they pull back, which leads to them getting even more depressed. It’s a pretty terrible cycle.

And it really is happening everywhere. There have been a lot of jokes (and rightly so) about the “male loneliness epidemic,” but while it isn’t male-exclusive and it isn’t sexual, there is indeed a loneliness epidemic. Some of it happens because online/social media/parasocial relationships feel like they fill that gap without actually doing so. But it becomes an epidemic because the diminished socialization with one person causes them to socialize less with their own friends, and it spreads like a contagion from there.

I’ve basically just stopped reaching out to anyone at this point.

I’ve talked about this with other people a lot, too, as I’ve gone through my 30s (I turned 40 this year): it really honestly always feels like “I’m the only one reaching out.” Like, it tends to feel that way to everyone I talk to, even the people to whom I feel like I’m the only one reaching out myself.

I think that’s partially for the same reason that teachers say they’re the ones doing all the work to grade students’ homework: teachers have to grade 30 assignments per class, whereas from the students’ perspective it’s “only one assignment, how hard can it be?” Meanwhile, the students themselves have multiple assignments from multiple classes to handle. In the context of this conversation, realize that while the individual touchpoints with a specific person feels like “just one friendship,” they’re trying to maintain several relationships, too. So you get the divided attention of all of your friends, because they’re dividing their attention across of all of their friends, just like you are. So you all feel like you’re shouting into the void, and you all pull back.

But it’s also partially because, in any friend group, the “squeaky wheel gets the grease.” You don’t tend to see a whole lot of outpouring of affection and care over people except when they’re in a dire situation. So if you seem outwardly fine, you might not get much in the way of proactive outreach.

Both of those factors get amplified significantly in the presence of (1) ADHD (I can literally just forget about contacting my friends for weeks) and (2) introversion (if you’re friends with a lot of introverts, they may find that just having your number in their phone feels like a strong friendship and feel no real need to reach out).

This imbalance shows up in a lot of peoples’ friendships. Sometimes it just means that one person is the “planner” of the group and just has to bring everyone else together. That’s an asymmetric friendship in a way, but if that person’s ok with it, then it’s fine. It doesn’t mean that they’re any less loved. That takes communication, and sometimes you just need to start up that conversation.

But it can also mean that you need to find new friends because you no longer fit with your old ones. And that’s also ok! As you grow up and discover what you need, you realize what you’re looking for.

Outside of my work, literally the only people I talk to are my parents, sister, and my girlfriend.

I would recommend joining a club or society or something. Not like a guild, but something that forces a little bit of conversation as a factor of its existence. RPG groups are great for this. If you have a background with a religious group and you’re still on good terms with it, maybe show up to some services. Service groups also can be great for this. You can even tag along with your sister or your girlfriend to one of her groups. Just try to find a way to get that socialization on the calendar so that it happens regularly and you can count on it.

Another option, though this is situational, can be to start a group thread. There’s less weight and difficulty around replying in a group thread, and it can be a place to just send memes or thoughts or pictures of a cool leaf you saw. Be honest and upfront that you want to socialize with people more, and that can end up being helpful. The reason this is situational is that it can help a distantly connected friend group feel more immediate, but it can’t really create a friend group that doesn’t already exist.

I used to have at least 10 people who I could call on a moments notice and all of those people are gone.

If those were people you only talked to at a moment’s notice, that might be the problem. It’s the scheduled, regular interaction that you both need in order to maintain the friendship.

Adult friendships are hard. And it’s a pretty safe bet that the answer to almost any friendship question you have that starts with “am I the only one who…” is almost certainly “no.”

They were lied to, yes. And I see the correlation you’re making. I don’t think you’re super off-base, but I also don’t think you’re quite right.

The thing is, Trump in particular and the GOP in general are both lying about the problem. They’re saying that the problem with people’s bank accounts being empty is that the “illegals” are “taking stuff” (jobs, aid, low-cost housing) that “real americans deserve.” They then proceed to follow up on the attack against what they (maliciously) claimed the problem was.

On the other hand, Democrats are by-and-large truthful (or simply silent) about the causes of the affordability crisis. They then are stymied by a terrorist majority-GOP congress (or minority GOP wielding the filibuster) into inaction, or make token bipartisan progress without addressing the root of the issue. Then, as re-election rolls around, they spin the tiny gains they’ve made as bigger than they actually are.

We saw this in the Harris campaign. Her plans were almost entirely about encouraging and supporting small businesses–which is, indeed, a valid way to push down prices, and likely to pass muster with Republicans! But it’s not nearly enough, and voters recognized that (and, in fairness, they were also lied to about the fact that she had a plan at all by the conservative media).

In short, I think that while the GOP lies, the Democrats are just lazy. They think it’s still 1998, and they can just figure it all out over drinks if given the chance.

I’m not sure if that really makes it better. But I do think it’s different.

Well, we knew at the time that was just a lie to get out of being fixed to buy the company.

Yes. It was shortsighted and naive of them, but while there are some people who voted for mass deportations because they hate immigrants, far more people voted for mass deportations because he told them that they are the reason for the affordability crisis.

No. They’re part of our country, and the only reason that they’re “dead weight” is that the GOP lied to and propagandized their citizens for long enough to extract essentially all the capital out of the land and the people. Now they don’t have enough to keep going on their own, and they’re only as good to the Republicans as their electoral votes.

We have to keep them—that was part of the deal from the beginning, and it’s the right thing to do—but we have to fight back against the propaganda so that the citizens can see what they could be without the GOP.