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  • 39 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: February 4th, 2026
  • calliope@piefed.blahaj.zonetoHockey@lemmy.ca•What's your Playoff predictions?English
    1·
    5 minutes ago

    It’s probably a lot of things, but in short: their best players are maturing, therefore so is the team.

    They got good draft picks and they actually committed to their strategy long-term. The Edmonton Oilers have had success doing the same thing; keeping the same players together helps build rapport, and a lot of them are extremely young when they get drafted.

    Because Buffalo is a small-market team that doesn’t often win (therefore they don’t have much money), they tend to be in the middle or toward the bottom of the standings every season. Since they’re always toward the bottom, they have a higher chance of “winning” the draft lottery… but they didn’t get the #1 draft pick between 1987 and 2017.

    When they did finally get a high draft pick, #1 pick Rasmus Dahlen in 2018, they improved immediately. He’s a defenseman, though, so they didn’t improve much and were last place again in 2020-2021. They won another #1 draft pick and chose another defenseman, Owen Power. Which makes sense, given Buffalo’s preference for being a defensive team.

    Dahlen and Power were both 18 when they were drafted, so I imagine it takes some time to grow into roles on the team.

    Fast forward to 2026: Power and Dahlen are still on the team, and Dahlen is the captain. So they actually built a long-term team around two really good players.

    This happened recently with the Edmonton Oilers too, where they were terrible for years, finally got several high draft picks, and actually kept and built the players they drafted. The Oilers drafted Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (#1 in 2011), Leon Draisaitl (#3 in 2014), and Connor McDavid (#1 in 2015). They’ve kept all three players and went to the Stanley Cup finals the past two years.

  • calliope@piefed.blahaj.zonetoHockey@lemmy.ca•What's your Playoff predictions?English
    2·
    17 hours ago

    I always like to see what seems like the most “interesting” team to watch.

    The Buffalo Sabres haven’t been in the playoffs since 2011. They have the all-time record “drought” for the playoffs, missing 14 in a row.

    They’re in a three-way tie right now for second-best record in the league. Interesting!

    They also haven’t ever won a Stanley Cup. They and the Vancouver Canucks are the oldest active franchises that have never won a cup.

    Buffalo has been to the Stanley Cup finals three times, in 1974-1975, 1979-1980, and 1998-1999. So even that’s been a really long time.

    As an aside, Buffalo is an interesting sports town because they also have an extraordinary American football team that went to the championship game four times in a row and lost (1991, 1992, 1993, 1994). No other team has even played four in a row, let alone lost all four.

  • calliope@piefed.blahaj.zonetoFeminism@beehaw.org•The Women Leaving the New RightEnglish
    18·
    18 days ago

    Anna has requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

    I’d request anonymity because of how embarrassing this is. This woman has children. Imagine being her daughter and reading about how publicly cruel and petty your mother was… and she didn’t figure it out until recently.

    She did it not only because she just wanted the attention for being edgy, but because it was profitable.

    “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.” The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. “There was an element of gnosticism to it,” she says, “the sense that you know secret things that other people don’t know.”

    These are adults who can vote, and this is what they care about. Feeling special.

    They assumed, she says, “because of how I presented myself” — as anti-feminist, as “based” and unbothered — “that I was not like the other girls.”

    Again, she had children at this point, and was cashing in on throwing women as a whole under the bus.

    “I’m somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time,” she tells me. She found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.

    This is why the rest of us feel so much secondhand embarrassment for conservatives. Everyone can tell how pathetic they are; everything they do shows they haven’t matured since they were children.

    I can’t imagine being an adult and falling for the things she did, just because I loved and profited from the attention.

  • calliope@piefed.blahaj.zonetoTechnology@beehaw.org•Meta acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake postsEnglish
    7·
    24 days ago

    That’s hilarious.

    “Every credential that was in Moltbook’s Supabase was unsecured for some time,” Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, explained to TechCrunch. “For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there, because it was all public and available.”

    Last month, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth was asked about the AI agent social network in an Instagram Q&A. He said he didn’t “find it particularly interesting” that the agents talk like us, since they are trained on massive databases of human material. Rather, Bosworth was intrigued by how humans were hacking into the network, which was not a feature but a large-scale error.

    It’s telling that Meta is still impressed by this kind of bullshit. None of this is particularly interesting.