#easy coder

[python-programming-language]

Do you know the online tutor EASY CODER?

Post #105: Esay Coder, Learn JAVA and PYTHON programming with ease, 2023.

[agendratum]

"what help do you want from me?"

"find a way to finish the game. reach the 12th door. there i have left a purifying sequence. "

"what are the clues?"

"flowers in the water, the moon in the mirror"

[hana-bobo-finch]

*hacker voice* I’m in

[sporeclan]

im not very tech savvy, how do you check the game codes?

It's luckily not too complicated! What I usually do to get to the right folders is open the game, go into the settings and click the "Open Data Directory" button at the bottom left(?). That opens a folder on your computer that should contain other folders and txt files named with the prefix of your clans (For example, I'd have a folder and a txt file named 'Spore').

The txt file contains information about your clan as an entity itself, but if you go into the folder you'll find a few other txt files to look through. I believe the one with all the data on your cats themselves is either called clan or cat-list (I'm writing from memory here, not at my pc right now :']).

Good luck and have fun!

[mokeonn]

Youtuber talking about a failed video game: yeah, it's really easy to be an idea guy, but if you don't take the time to lower your scope and think about what's possible with the resources you have, you're going to end up with a mess.

Every other comment: yeah, if I made the game, I would simply (27 ideas that would be impossible to code without at least a 100 person team and 7 years of work.) and I wouldn't have fallen into the same pitfalls at all :)

[bf-rally]

im starting to see why no one has done this dumb idea making sites is a lot of effort :P

[dulcegal]

I shld make a carrd or rentry…..

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers

HEY SEATTLE! I'm appearing at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival NEXT SATURDAY (May 31) with the folks from NPR's On The Media!

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/405-ai-is-the-demon-god-of-capital-ft-hagen-blix

One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

Blix admits that's not where therapy is at…yet, but he references Laura Preston's 2023 N Plus One essay, "HUMAN_FALLBACK," which describes her as a backstop to a real-estate "virtual assistant," that masqueraded as a human handling the queries that confused it, in a bid to keep the customers from figuring out that they were engaging with a chatbot:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

Textile automation wasn't just about producing more cloth – it was about producing cheaper, worse cloth. The new machines were so easy a child could use them, because that's who was using them – kidnapped war orphans. The adult textile workers the machines displaced weren't afraid of technology. Far from it! Weavers used the most advanced machinery of the day, and apprenticed for seven years to learn how to operate it. Luddites had the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering from MIT.

Weavers' guilds presented two problems for their bosses: first, they had enormous power, thanks to the extensive training required to operate their looms; and second, they used that power to regulate the quality of the goods they made. Even before the Industrial Revolution, weavers could have produced more cloth at lower prices by skimping on quality, but they refused, out of principle, because their work mattered to them.

Now, of course weavers also appreciated the value of their products, and understood that innovations that would allow them to increase their productivity and make more fabric at lower prices would be good for the world. They weren't snobs who thought that only the wealthy should go clothed. Weavers had continuously adopted numerous innovations, each of which increased the productivity and the quality of their wares.

Long before the Luddite uprising, weavers had petitioned factory owners and Parliament under the laws that guaranteed the guilds the right to oversee textile automation to ensure that it didn't come at the price of worker power or the quality of the textiles the machines produced. But the factory owners and their investors had captured Parliament, which ignored its own laws and did nothing as the "dark, Satanic mills" proliferated. Luddites only turned to property destruction after the system failed them.

Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that preceded the Industrial Revolution. But there's nothing about the way the Industrial Revolution unfolded – increasing the power of capital to pay workers less and treat them worse while flooding the market with inferior products – that was necessary or beneficial to that progress. Every other innovation in textile production up until that time had been undertaken with the cooperation of the guilds, who'd ensured that "progress" meant better lives for workers, better products for consumers, and lower prices. If the Luddites' demands for co-determination in the Industrial Revolution had been met, we might have gotten to the same world of superior products at lower costs, but without the immiseration of generations of workers, mass killings to suppress worker uprisings, and decades of defective products being foisted on the public.

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

For starters, the kinds of mistakes that AI coders make are the hardest mistakes for human reviewers to catch. That's because LLMs are statistical prediction machines, spicy autocomplete that works by ingesting and analyzing a vast corpus of written materials and then producing outputs that represent a series of plausible guesses about which words should follow one another. To the extent that the reality the AI is participating in is statistically smooth and predictable, AI can often make eerily good guesses at words that turn into sentences or code that slot well into that reality.

But where reality is lumpy and irregular, AI stumbles. AI is intrinsically conservative. As a statistically informed guessing program, it wants the future to be like the past:

https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/

This means that AI coders stumble wherever the world contains rough patches and snags. Take "slopsquatting." For the most part, software libraries follow regular naming conventions. For example, there might be a series of text-handling libraries with names like "text.parsing.docx," "text.parsing.xml," and "text.parsing.markdown." But for some reason – maybe two different projects were merged, or maybe someone was just inattentive – there's also a library called "text.txt.parsing" (instead of "text.parsing.txt").

AI coders are doing inference based on statistical analysis, and anyone inferring what the .txt parsing library is called would guess, based on the other libraries, that it was "text.parsing.txt." And that's what the AI guesses, and so it tries to import that library to its software projects.

This creates a new security vulnerability, "slopsquatting," in which a malicious actor creates a library with the expected name, which replicates the functionality of the real library, but also contains malicious code:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

Note that slopsquatting errors are extremely hard to spot. As is typical with AI coding errors, these are errors that are based on continuing a historical pattern, which is the sort of thing our own brains do all the time (think of trying to go up a step that isn't there after climbing to the top of a staircase). Notably, these are very different from the errors that a beginning programmer whose work is being reviewed by a more senior coder might make. These are the very hardest errors for humans to spot, and these are the errors that AIs make the most, and they do so at machine speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

To be a human in the loop for an AI coder, a programmer must engage in sustained, careful, line-by-line and command-by-command scrutiny of the code. This is the hardest kind of code to review, and maintaining robotic vigilance over long periods at high speeds is something humans are very bad at. Indeed, it's the kind of task we try very hard to automate, since machines are much better at being machineline than humans are. This is the essence of reverse-centaurism: when a human is expected to act like a machine in order to help the machine do something it can't do.

Humans routinely fail at spotting these errors, unsurprisingly. If the purpose of automation is to make superior goods at lower prices, then this would be a real concern, since a reverse-centaur coding arrangement is bound to produce code with lurking, pernicious, especially hard-to-spot bugs that present serious risks to users. But if the purpose of automation is to discipline labor – to force coders to accept worse conditions and pay – irrespective of the impact on quality, then AI is the perfect tool for the job. The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors – to be what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools. At Hearst's King Features Syndicates, a single writer was charged with producing over 30 summer guides, the entire package:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

That is an impossible task, which is why the writer turned to AI to do his homework, and then, infamously, published a "summer reading guide" that was full of nonexistent books that were hallucinated by a chatbot:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Most people reacted to this story as a consumer issue: they were outraged that the world was having a defective product foisted upon it. But the consumer issue here is downstream from the labor issue: when the writers at King Features Syndicate are turned into reverse-centaurs, they will inevitably produce defective outputs. The point of the worker – the "human in the loop" – isn't to supervise the AI, it's to take the blame for the AI. That's just what happened, as this poor schmuck absorbed an internet-sized rasher of shit flung his way by outraged social media users. After all, it was his byline on the story, not the chatbot's. He's the moral crumple-zone.

The implication of this is that consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

That's what's going on at Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn created a firestorm by announcing mass firings of human language instructors, who would be replaced by AI. The "AI first" announcement pissed off Duolingo's workers, of course, but what caught von Ahn off-guard was how much this pissed off Duolingo's users:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0347239/duolingo-faces-massive-social-media-backlash-after-ai-first-comments

But of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, language-learners are literally incapable of spotting errors in the AI instruction they receive. If you spoke the language well enough to spot the AI's mistakes, you wouldn't need Duolingo! I don't doubt that there are countless ways in which AIs could benefit both language learners and the Duolingo workers who develop instructional materials, but for that to happen, workers' and learners' needs will have to be the focus of AI integration. Centaurs could produce great language learning materials with AI – but reverse-centaurs can only produce slop.

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful AI products are "bossware" tools that let employers monitor and discipline workers who've been reverse-centaurized. Both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces have filled up with "electronic whips" that monitor and evaluate performance:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

AI can give bosses "dashboards" that tell them which Amazon delivery drivers operate their vehicles with their mouths open (Amazon doesn't let its drivers sing on the job). Meanwhile, a German company called Celonis will sell your boss a kind of AI phrenology tool that assesses your "emotional quality" by spying on you while you work:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

Tech firms were among the first and most aggressive adopters of AI-based electronic whips. But these whips weren't used on coders – they were reserved for tech's vast blue-collar and contractor workforce: clickworkers, gig workers, warehouse workers, AI data-labelers and delivery drivers.

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." The workers that tech bosses don't fear are living in the future of the workers that tech bosses can't easily replace.

This week, the New York Times's veteran Amazon labor report Noam Scheiber published a deeply reported piece about the experience of coders at Amazon in the age of AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is palpably horny for AI coders, evidenced by investor memos boasting of AI's returns in "productivity and cost avoidance" and pronouncements about AI saving "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years":

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

Amazon is among the most notorious abusers of blue-collar labor, the workplace where everyone who doesn't have a bullshit laptop job is expected to piss in a bottle and spend an unpaid hour before and after work going through a bag- and body-search. Amazon's blue-collar workers are under continuous, totalizing, judging AI scrutiny that scores them based on whether their eyeballs are correctly oriented, whether they take too long to pick up an object, whether they pee too often. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times national average. Amazon AIs scan social media for disgruntled workers talking about unions, and Amazon has another AI tool that predicts which shops and departments are most likely to want to unionize.

Scheiber's piece describes what it's like to be an Amazon tech worker who's getting the reverse-centaur treatment that has heretofore been reserved for warehouse workers and drivers. They describe "speedups" in which they are moved from writing code to reviewing AI code, their jobs transformed from solving chewy intellectual puzzles to racing to spot hard-to-find AI coding errors as a clock ticks down. Amazon bosses haven't ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can't be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn't going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.

Amazon insists that it is treating AI as an assistant for its coders, but the actual working conditions make it clear that this is a reverse-centaur transformation. Scheiber discusses a dissident internal group at Amazon called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who link the company's use of AI to its carbon footprint. Beyond those climate concerns, these workers are treating AI as a labor issue.

Amazon's coders have been making tentative gestures of solidarity towards its blue-collar workforce since the pandemic broke out, walking out in support of striking warehouse workers (and getting fired for doing so):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

But those firings haven't deterred Amazon's tech workers from making common cause with their comrades on the shop floor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[misterghostfrog]

This is almost comedically common with any program that's meant to be for folks who can't code to make games with. It even goes beyond the devs a lot of the time, I fiddle with that stuff on a regular basis and 9/10 times if you go on a forum to find out how to use a tool or implement some mechanic almost every answer you'll find will have people saying 'just learn (scripting language the program uses) and code it yourself it's easier' forgetting that the main audience is meant to be folks with no coding background

"RPG Maker lets you create games without knowing how to program!" is both technically a true statement and a trap.

[saywhat-politics]

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, depressingly, short of cloistering oneself, it’s hard to keep the bad political and economic news at bay for any extended period. Hard because, even if you’re lucky enough not to be directly affected by one or more of the arrogant, cruel, spiteful, nonsensical, malicious, counterproductive, and frequently illegal actions Elon Musk and his DOdGEy crew of twentysomething coders and the Outlaw Prez are inflicting on the nation, you almost certainly know someone who is. The ubiquity of the Trumpian assault is what drove the outpouring of protests across the nation Saturday and probably will again April 19.

But with entire agencies, departments, and divisions being wiped out, with the missions of others being sabotaged—often by appointees openly hostile to the operations they’ve been put in charge of—it’s easy to miss some of the damage being done to smaller programs.

Like, for instance, the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (CLPPP), which falls under the Centers for Disease Control, now under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A week ago, all 26 of the program’s staffers were suddenly put on administrative leave and told their jobs were subject to a broad reduction in force. That effort will eliminate some 10,000 Health Department jobs. Together with the thousands of employees who have taken government severance, about a fourth of the department’s staff will be cut. 

Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places You can also catch me @meteorblades.bsky.social

[agendratum]

yeah i can definitely translate that

[simmingelitist]

Pre-Calculated Premade Aspirations For The Sims 2

As promised I went through and calculated premade aspirations in several different calculators. It includes every playable Sim, along with most relevant townies and deceased Sims. It includes personality codes for my Personality Coder spreadsheet if you want to fetch Sim stats yourself.

And it uses these calculators:

AORTiCSims'

BellaDovah's

cora626's

Delijume-Sims'

Goblin's

LordCrumps'

PleasantSims'

Simgigglegirl's

simmingelitist's

Sophie the Puffin's

If there's any others let me know, I'll add them!

Some disclaimers:

There will be calculation issues. I had to input all of these values myself and there are hundreds of Sims represented here. I'll correct any if they're brought to my attention but I really don't want to go over it again. This took over a year. That said, I should have used the most recent version of all of these calculators as of the date I posted this.

The "Primary" and "Secondary" are just an easy way for me to pare down to the highest two and a suggestion of how to use some of them but the creators of most of these spreadsheets intended them for either primary or secondary exclusively.

I neglected to make sure that sheets that have multiple versions of an aspiration didn't calculate for them twice. But that is how those calculators work (because they aren't intended for both aspirations), so I didn't want to mess with it too much.

Calculators absolutely do not and cannot account for Sim interest changes as they age, so YMMV if you want to use the calculations for younger Sims.

Some of these Sims are featured in The Sims 3 and have traits associated with them. Since I play with HB's traits project these traits are reflected in the personality code and my calculator results.

May 5th 2025

Updated personality codes

Added 3 calculators: cora626's, The Crumpulator, Goblin's

Fixed Benjamin Baldwin and a few personality codes that were too long

Recalculated simmingelitist's (hey!) based on calculator updates

[anestofmuses]

"I heard it form one of my club goers, can't remember the name. But hey it's okay...he's pretty cute, in a brooding bad boy way." Yuki nods as if he was a wise wage instead of someone with questionable taste in men.

( anestofocs. ) ━━━━━

"Someone likes Yagmi don't they~" Yuki godamnit..

❛  alright,  who  is  going  around  starting  this  damned  rumour?  whoever  is  doing  it,  come  on  out,  I  just  wanna  talk!  ❜

[bodhi-kostic]

Bodhi glanced down the line.

Six. There were only six of them. Four men, two women.

His gaze quickly shifted back to the man speaking in front of the group. He’d size them up later, anyway.

“You’ll be in training for one year. You’ll be assigned a partner for the duration of the year. At the end of your training, you’ll each complete a series of aptitude tests to see if you’re a good fit for the company. If you pass, you’ll be assigned a mentor and begin work.”

The man speaking had introduced himself earlier — Tyler Silva. He was in charge of the new recruits this year.

Bodhi shot another glance down the line only to meet a set of light blue eyes belonging to a blonde half-glaring back. An amused smirk fit across his mouth. The woman kept her glare for a moment longer before turning away.

“Let’s begin in the training ring,” Tyler announced, motioning toward the gym behind him. “Your partners will be announced at the end of the day.”

The warm up consisted of a 2-mile run and 15 minutes of jumping rope. Easy work for a guy like Bodhi. He began making mental notes on the rest of the group. As of right now, he only knew the rest of the group by their last names. Ybarra had a few inches on him, but he was too bulky and slow. The Thompson twins were classic marine jugheads. Athalar seemed… average, so far. And Roemer? Bodhi had no clue why she was there.

“Fuck, I’m going to die.” Roemer was doubled over after finally finishing the run, with her hands resting on her knees and her head hanging between them.

“You sure you signed up for the right class?” Bodhi teased, but had grabbed a bottle of water and was holding it out to the woman.

“I’m a fucking coder — a hacker,” Roemer groaned as she forced himself to stand up straight. She accepted the bottle of water with a small smile and a nod of gratitude toward Bodhi. “I just have to get through the physical stuff and then they’ll let me go back to my computer and I’ll never. Run. Again.”

Bodhi chuckled, and gave an understanding nod. “You’ll get through it.”

Roemer gave a wary smile in return.

“If you’re done flirting, Tyler asked we all meet at the sparring ring. Now.” It was the glaring, average blonde that spoke to them as she approached — Athalar.

Roemer immediately took leave toward the sparring ring.

Bodhi’s head cocked to the side a bit, and he looked her over with a small grin tugging at his lips. “Jealous?”

Her expression remained neutral. “Mm…” Her lips pursed, feigning thought as she looked him over. “Not interested,” She concluded with a little shrug, then turned to walk away.

Bodhi’s brows furrowed and a laugh escaped him. “You don’t even know me—“

“And I don’t want to know you.” She said, barely looking over her shoulder as she continued to walk away.

The group met up at the sparring rings. They’d wrapped their hands — prepping for what came next. Tyler called out different pairs to each ring. Roemer and Ybarra. The Thompson twins.

“Kostic and Athalar.”

Bodhi glanced over to see her reaction, but still, there was none. The two climbed into the ring.

Bodhi watched her. Athalar watched him.

“I was hoping for Roemer,” Bodhi said to her, rolling his neck to either side. “But, you’ll go down just as easy—“

He’d barely gotten the insult out before she lunged, her right hook connecting with his cheekbone.

Bodhi took in a sharp breath, and slowly blinked, then refocused his gaze at the woman across the ring. She was smiling.

“Alright, then,” Bodhi replied in a low tone as the two began their dance, circling slowly around the ring.

Just as Bodhi predicted, she was impatient, and lunged before she should have — when Bodhi was on his dominant foot. He dodged, and grabbed a hold of her forearm, which he twisted behind her back. She struggled against him, but Bodhi had testosterone on his side, and in this position she was no match. His foot kicked hers from under her, and he forced her face down onto the mat. Athalar continued to fight, sinking one of her elbows into his ribs. “Fuck,” He hissed.

Bodhi snaked an arm around her neck, and began to constrict her airway. “Tap out,” He barked. Athalar thrashed against him, sunk her nails into his skin and dragged them down — drawing blood. Bodhi tightened his grip on her, then released her with a furious shove. “Fuck you,” He half-growled, glancing down at the blood she’d drawn. When Bodhi looked back over at her, she was smiling again. “Pussy,” She said as she slowly stood, rubbing her neck where his bicep at dug into.

Right as Bodhi took a step toward her, Tyler called out, “Time!”

Just as they were this morning, the six found themselves in another line with Tyler standing in front of them.

“Good job today,” He told them with a curt nod. “As for partners, the pairings I announced for sparring are the pairings for the year.”

Bodhi scoffed. He didn’t even realize he did — it was practically involuntary. But what a cruel joke, to be stuck with a partner like her — Athalar. Tyler’s sharp eyes snapped to him.

“A problem, Kostic?”

Bodhi swallowed, and shook his head as he squared his shoulders. “No, sir. No problem.”

“Perfect,” Tyler replied coolly, then glanced at the remaining recruits.

“Dismissed.”

[presidenthades]

Which modern professions would each character mostly end up with? (beside family/house legacy...business) :D

You mean if they aren’t allowed to be nepo babies like in Love Actually? 😂

Aegon: something that gives him flexibility to move on if he gets bored. Definitely not something that requires him to sit at a desk all day. I can see him trying a variety of things, like night club DJ and standup comedian. Whatever pays for his room and board until he flits off to the next thing that catches his eye. When he eventually settles down, he gets into coaching youth sports and yells at everyone who isn’t Cheeseball.

Jace: She would 100% be the breadwinner between her and Aegon. Even without a nepo cushion, she would do well climbing up the corporate ladder somewhere. But she’s too nice, so she probably tops out at management or director level; she doesn’t get to the C-suite. She probably does marketing.

Aemond: Consulting. What kind of consulting? IDK, but he gets paid a ton of money to tell people they’re idiots.

Luce: Accountant. Also runs an Etsy shop.

Daeron: He goes to law school because he wants to help people, but he ends up getting stuck at a giant law firm that represents oil and tobacco companies. Eventually he quits and goes into public service.

Joff: She has a PhD in a very niche but desirable field, so she ends up in a cushy professor position at a top university. Her teaching requirement is minimal, she’s mostly there for research.

Helaena: Entomologist is too easy of an answer. She would enjoy a very solo kind of job, like archivist or coder, which allows her to mostly do stuff on her own without needing to deal with people.

Baela: Like Aegon, she cannot do a desk job. Maybe being a bodyguard for female celebrities so she gets an excuse to knock guys onto their butts.

Rhaena: A people-oriented job (so the opposite of Helaena) with a big organizational component. Probably event planning, or even wedding planning. She’d be great at dealing with bridezillas.

[alex51324]

I Just Figured Out What Elon Musk’s DOGE Really Is That it’s a protection racket should have been obvious all along.

Article by Slate's legal reporter, Dahlia Lithwick, developing the thesis that DOGE is, in essence, a protection racket. Doesn't seem like news exactly, but it's a cogent exploration of the theme.

Slate's "jump through hoops to read for free" model is grating on me today, so I'm just gonna copy the whole thing over.

**

Late last month, amid the utter chaos of Donald Trump’s first two weeks back in office, there was a revelatory moment during a press conference by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that was intended ostensibly to explain Trump’s attempted, then rescinded, across-the-board budget freeze. During that presser, Leavitt tried to explain which services might come back online and how. Instead, she inadvertently revealed that what’s really been going on with these budget cuts is the widespread institutionalization of the sort of organized-crime approach that Trump has brought to every aspect of his professional, political, and presidential life.

In order to explain the very first effort to dismantle the federal government by way of impounding federal funds and shutting off the spigot for trillions of dollars across thousands of federal programs—funds already appropriated by Congress—​​Leavitt tried to calm the roiling waters around a spending freeze that was likely to halt funding to Head Start, foreign aid, HIV programs, Meals on Wheels, and other vital services. Leavitt tried to soothe these vital institutions and programs with the promise that anyone who was worried about their own parochial interests should just pick up a phone and call the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to ask for special favors and exemptions. As Leavitt described it, she had been in contact with Vought that very morning, “and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board, and if they feel that programs are necessary and in line with the president’s agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those policies.”

The line struck me at the time as a strange and ominous admission: Sure, we have arbitrarily defunded the government as you have come to understand it, but just hop on the phone with the as-yet-unconfirmed OMB director (he has since been confirmed), plead your case, and he might just do you a little favor. In the blur of the will-they-won’t-they OMB memo rescission and the subsequent lawsuits, it was easy to miss that mobsters dole out services in precisely this fashion. Governments typically do not.

That certainly isn’t how any of this is meant to work. It’s how things worked during, say, the Renaissance, when you went with your rakish peasant hat in hand to the Medicis and asked them for special favors in exchange for your pony or your eldest daughter. It’s how things worked when you went to the Cosa Nostra to ask for protection for you and your family in exchange for some portion of what was in your cash register. When we think of the DOGE takeover of the federal government solely as an act of smash-and-grab vandalism, we are just slightly missing the endgame, which is to sell us back those stolen goods and services in exchange for our loyalty. That is, of course, a protection racket. And it’s precisely the point.

This whole racket of theirs has already begun to affect all of us. On Monday, a Delta Airlines flight made an emergency landing upside down at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, a few short hours after hundreds of firings at the Federal Aviation Administration, the most recent in a string of stunning plane crashes in recent weeks. The pink slips were reportedly sent out “without cause nor based on performance or conduct,” with the emails originating “from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address”—not a government email address. Whether it is Elon Musk or DOGE or a postpubescent coder firing the probationary staff at the FAA in some sense matters far less than the fact that a team from Musk’s SpaceX spent Monday visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center, in Virginia, to assist in overhauling the system. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced on Musk’s platform X that Musk’s DOGE team would “plug in” to the FAA to help “upgrade our aviation system.” I’m pretty sure that when the guy breaking your storefront windows is the same guy selling you replacement plate glass, you are not, in fact, witnessing the free market doing its best work.

In one sense, the protection-racket model works so well in the present moment because it also appeals to the foundational NIMBY ethos that holds that cutting everyone else’s government services is fine, so long as your narrow interests are protected. The raft of tweets, posts, and articles about the Trump-loving folks who absolutely support the MAGA vandalism of the federal government but never believed that it would come for them is its own small carnival of leopards and face-eatings. But isn’t the really chilling part not that they are surprised, but that they believe they can still find a way to be exempted from it? And of course they should be exempt. But they should also not have been targeted for budget cuts and cruelty in the first place. And they assuredly should not be forced to throw themselves on the mercy of the state to be made whole for their losses.

In heartbreaking recent reporting by the Washington Post about Luke Graziani, a disabled Army veteran terminated Friday, when he was just five weeks from completing his probation year at the Bronx Veterans Affairs hospital, two details stood out to me: When he printed out his termination letter, blaming his dismissal on poor performance, and took it to his supervisor, Graziani’s boss immediately promised to submit a request for exemption. “You’re critical staff,” Graziani recalled his boss saying. “We’re going to try.”

It didn’t end there, notes the Post.Graziani, who is 45 and has four children, “had believed until this weekend that his veteran status would protect his job. He served 20 years in the Army, first as a supply specialist and then in public affairs, deploying for two tours in Iraq and another two in Afghanistan before retiring in 2023.” So he sat down and wrote a letter to the new Veterans Affairs secretary, Douglas A. Collins, who had vowed in his confirmation hearing, “We will not stop until we succeed on behalf of the men and women who have worn the uniform.” He wanted Collins to give him his job back. Collins, it seems, has not yet replied. But might we agree that nobody should have to be put in the position of selling themselves back to their employers any more than they should be buying the spark plugs that the government just stripped from their own cars?

In the event that this is not all perfectly transparent, consider the tragic case of New York Mayor Eric Adams, whose continued time in office stands for no august legal principle save for the oldest one in the book: I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. (That’s neither legal nor a principle, by the way.) It is how power works when power acts outside the boundaries of the law—you are spared bad consequences the very moment you fall in line, and by falling in line, you become part of the machinery that oppresses those who cannot or will not pay for the same protections.

It should be axiomatic, for anyone who actually flies commercial airlines, drinks water, gets diseases, and sends their children to schools, that most people will need those things to be provided by the government. The current plan is to ensure that you wake up in the morning and read Elon Mail, drink Elon Water, and attend Elon School while you rely on SpaceX and Tesla for all your needs, and you will pay for all that using the financial instrument of Elon’s choosing.

For anyone who has spent hours on the phone, navigating the byzantine forms and rules of the modern health care, educational, and student loan systems in immense frustration, please be prepared. Whatever else those entities did, they didn’t lead with “What can you give me in exchange?” They do now.