Not sure what would remove that image from your mind, but maybe you can recontextualize your experience.

We tend to grow up and think of our parents as somehow not also people, but as some other kind of creature. In some ways this is true, our relationship with them makes them very different from any other people in your life. But our parents are people, and there is a beauty in truly and deeply understanding that.

I was fortunate to grow up with loving and caring parents, my father passed when I was young. My mother cared for us, earned the money, ran the house, is one of the strongest people I know. Raising 4 boys by yourself isn’t easy. Now as an adult, realizing my mom is just a person, just like me, makes me appreciate her all the more. She wasn’t a super hero with magic powers, she was just a person working hard to care for us.

Now back to your situation. Sex is a natural and beautiful part of the human experience. Far too much pain and misery has been visited upon humanity by people scolding that this essential part of our nature is something shameful or wrong.

So let the shock pass, realize that your father is a person like any other and you happened to walk in on a natural, normal expression of love between two consenting adults.

One day you will be in your late 50s, and if you have a caring partner you may also express your love for one another in that way. You won’t find it at all upsetting or shameful, just a way to show love and share intimacy.

Tl;dr - sex is a natural part of our very limited time on earth, this is only as big a deal as you make it.

Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.

I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.

Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.

I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.

I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.

I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.

I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.

1. Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
2. See if this is an XY problem.

I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.

The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.

Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

It should be all those things.

I think the comment you are replying to is not about the unordered list — but your use of em dash.

See the above sentence for an example

Neat, I appreciate your insight. Upvote from me and today I learned.

Yea I tend to think than when someone identifies as a Libertarian they almost certainly don’t mean a civil libertarian, which is how the aclu actually identifies themselves.

We have grown from a roomful of civil libertarians to more than 4 million members, activists, and supporters across the country. The ACLU is now a nationwide organization with a 50-state network of staffed affiliate offices filing cases in both state and federal courts. We appear before the Supreme Court more than any other organization except the Department of Justice.

This is literally the only time the word libertarian appears in their own history https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history

Thank you.

I feel like a crazy person sometimes because I remember when the ACA was rolling along it was reported that it was just the Heritage Foundation, a notoriously right wing think tank, plan.

I looked into it because I thought “certainly this can’t be true, hope and change and all that” I went and looked up their plan. It was a market based approach that used tax incentives and penalties to increase the size of the insurance pool.

That’s the ACA.

And people act like it’s some litmus test of progressive policy success.

This is what I’ll never forgive Obama about. He captured an entire generation of voters energy stumping with progressive speeches about making real change. He had no real desire to do that, constantly governing from the center / center right.

So that whole generation learned a lesson, progressive policies don’t work. Which is amazing considering that we didn’t even try any. We somehow passed a bunch of corporate friendly policies and peoples lives didn’t get meaningfully better and they chalked it up to “progressives don’t have an answer either”

I think this is a contributing factor to the absolute shit show we find ourselves in today. America has deeply broken problems that are entrenched because them existing makes someone very rich. Not the same guy for every problem, but for every problem in America you can rest assured there’s a small group of assholes that need that problem to exist so they can buy a third yacht. People feel that pain and they went “well fuck, the lefts best orator, the guy with a vision and plan and skills couldn’t fix it” then along comes trump being a blowhard jackass saying “I can fix it” and people were like “sure, let’s try it”

Obama could have actually delivered on that change, it wouldn’t have been easy, he would have had to actually use that supermajority for the few weeks it existed to pass legislation. He would have had to bring blue dogs to heel or blow up the filibuster. But if he could have found the gumption to do it, and those policies meaningfully improved peoples lives, he would have cemented multiple decades of democratic dominance.

Instead he passed uninspiring half assed solutions that tinkered around the edges of our societies most difficult problems. Structured them so that all the pain would be felt up front and all the benefits would slowly phase in over time. Tried to find compromise so that the right wouldn’t attack him and even after giving everything away they screeched about death panels.

Liberal policies are an actual thing, a thing that leftists frequently disagree with.

Libertarians are often placed on the right part of the left-right divide. The fact you’ve chosen the label libertarian instead of conservative is animated by the exact same “purity test” that you find so silly.

trump literally doesn’t understand anything.

Take trade imbalances for a minute. As an contrived example, we buy $1m worth of steel from Canada, they buy $100k worth of steel from us.

There’s a $900k trade imbalance, and you can tell how trump talks about it, he thinks that means we just gave $900k to Canada for fun.

He completely ignores the part where we traded $1m for $1m worth of steel. We get the fucking steel, it has value, we know it has value because we were willing to pay for it.

But just listen to him talk about trade, he doesn’t understand that basic component of trade. He thinks a $X trade imbalance means we just give that country $X for nothing. He is the dumbest motherfucking idiot on the planet.

We will all get to be that strange old person who won’t discard an orange peel because we lived through the second Great Depression.

What’s weird is he’s the ceo of replit.

Replit’s product is a website where you can write a snippet of code and run it without having to install anything. An activity that human developers would do to test out something.

So if his prediction comes true, his product will lose all value.

Yea the part I’m talking about is when instead of just passing a bill to fix the problem they spent time negotiating with the GOP.

Instead of striking while the iron was hot, you know, passing a bill when they had a super majority. They waited until they lost their super majority, then decided that the filibuster was so sacrosanct that they had to pass a watered down bill that entrenches the power of the insurance companies.

Let not forget that at the time when the Dems were fucking around negotiating with the gop they had said publicly that their primary goal was to obstruct the Obama presidency. That’s also what literally happened.

This is the constant Democratic Party refrain. We sure wish we could have done {insert good thing} but when the iron was hot, by golly, we just couldn’t find our hammer.

Then the iron got cold so we had to, shucks, pass a version of the bill that was much more attractive to our donors and screw over the voters.

Golly gee willickers, what rotten luck.

Meanwhile the GOP with the slimmest majority and 3 turncoat Dems. “Time to rewrite the tax code, no need to type it up frank just scribble it in the margin, we will figure out how many billions to give the wealthy once it’s passed”

If I were your partner, although it might not feel like it in the moment, the sooner the better.

If you aren’t going to commit to them, that’s your choice to make, but free them up to find someone that will. Every ounce of love and time and attention they pay you from the moment you make the decision to leave until you find the gumption to do it is a waste for them. The most respectful thing you can do is not waste the precious and finite moments of their life.

Let them know what you’ve decided. Have the courage to tell them plainly and honestly that you are leaving and that you won’t be the person to love them. Let them get over you so they can find the person that will love them.

And don’t you dare double back unless you mean to stay. If you stay do it because it’s what you want not because you feel bad. That partner is a human being, one that deserves the truth and to be loved. If you can’t do that, or don’t want to do that, that’s your choice.

This is the least we owe our partners, to be honest with them, to love them or let them find love elsewhere.

I know you are getting a lot of downvotes. Choosing to leave someone you love is not a popular opinion. I could not do it and I think most couldn’t. In time I suspect you will find one of two things to be true.

• You will find someone you truly love and you will recognize that this relationship had affection and care but was different.
• You will find that what was out there wasn’t worth what you gave up, that this was love, and you will wish you had it back

This is life though, the hard decisions, and only you get to make them. I hope you make a good one, and above all, if you want to be a decent human being, treat your partner well. If that means standing by their side in love, great. If that means being honest with them so that they can be happy, also fine. Just don’t lie to them, don’t be needlessly mean in ending it, have the courage of your convictions and tell them the plain simple truth. Don’t make up a reason that feels better, don’t blame them for the relationship falling apart, don’t trick them into hating you.

You owe them that at least.

Explain your situation then.

Sounds to me like you love your partner and they love you. You’d like to leave to go have other life experiences.

It’s pretty easy, which do you value more, the love you have for your partner or these life experiences you could have?

I don’t know you, but my guess is that if you are thinking about it enough to want to find an answer, then you already have your answer. You value the life experiences more, you care about your partner, and you don’t want to hurt them.

I’ve been married to my wife for over a decade now, I love her with all my heart, I can’t think of any kind of life experience that would make me want to leave her. I imagine that love is not a binary on or off type thing that there are degrees and kinds of love. It’s very well possible that you love your partner but not enough to want to stay together forever.

This is really a question that only you can answer. Which do you want to do, it’s your one life, you get to choose. But don’t stay with your partner because you are afraid of hurting them because if that’s why you stay, you will become bitter and resentful and the idea of “what could of been” will always be this perfect thing that they kept from you.

Stay because you want to stay or leave because you’d rather leave.

In general you can’t be responsible for someone else’s emotions.

If you were having a casual relationship and the other person has big feelings you don’t reciprocate, that sucks but it’s not your fault.

If, however, you reciprocate those feelings, or pretended to and led them on, then you do bear some responsibility.

The actual salient question though is if you love this person that loves you. If not, you aren’t doing them any favors stringing them along. That person deserves to be loved like anyone else and you will be causing them more harm than good if you pretend you love them just to save them some heartbreak.

The correct course of action is to be honest about how you feel and also recognize how your partner feels. Whether or not you intended them to fall in love with you, recognize that that is significant and your loss in their life will be painful. There’s no two ways about that, so be kind and compassionate to your partner.

But do not fool yourself into thinking that what’s right is to just keep them around because you don’t want to break their hearts. If they love you, they want to be loved back, and if you can’t do that that’s fine.

Pretending you love them so you won’t hurt them will cause the greatest pain of all.

The “very first thing”?!

This is why you don’t get invited to parties

American ruling class, “Oh would you look at that, we just found a 24.99999% price hike that we definitely have to do because economy. Still cheaper though than the Canadian and Mexican imports.”

It’s just the rest of America that is going to get fucked.

I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.

It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.

I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.

Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.

When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).

I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.

1. Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
2. Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.

Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.

So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”

Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”

Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.

It seems like the colored area on the side of the joycon fits pretty snuggly into the recess. I’m not sure if you could put it in at any other angle than the one that would marry them up