Intralexical @ Intralexical @lemmy.world

Posts

0

Comments

125

Joined

2 yr. ago

Nix is great. But I don't think I'd want to use it for a desktop OS base.

(Disk space/cycle life potential, binary cache misses, broken packages, and complete incompatibility with everything else. User error, TBH, but also stuff that's not really a problem with other systems. Well worth it as a package manager, though.)

And a good thing, too. If it could go in, you'd unlock God's cheat code for free energy— Which sounds like a good thing, until you realize that it means any old vandal can just create infinite energy in a finite space and collapse the universe into a singularity.

"The sane world" is, to be fair, a pretty exclusive club.

Maps with pretty colours and lists:
\ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_number_of_parties#Effective_number_of_parties_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Cross-reference with the maps and lists for proportional representation:
\ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#List_of_countries_using_proportional_representation

Many of the European states, which tend to use proportional representation, are doing quite well.

According to an aside on Wikipedia, technically most countries never used FPTP in the first place, rather than having "moved on" from it. "Its use extended to British colonies […] mostly in the English-speaking world". Of those, however, some have indeed "abandoned it in favour of other electoral systems".

Proportional representation has been tried and tested since at least "its first national use in Denmark in 1855".¹

A major black mark on its history might arguably be the fact that it contributed to the instability of the Weimar Republic by creating too many parties competing for power— Though, that was only a problem because of the generally disastrous state of inter-war Germany (reparations, debts, loss of industrial zones, restrictions on their military, Treaty of Versailles, fall of the Empire, etc.).

In general, proportional representation has worked out pretty well for the countries that use it, though. It doesn't magically fix everything, but the US's two parties currently clearly aren't working.

¹ (Side note: Danish civil history is really cool! Used to be Vikings, lost their imperial ambitions and mellowed out, democratized willingly, saved nearly all their Jewish people and even sorted preserved their democracy through WWII, then went fully Nordic model, and now have neat randomly sampled citizen's assemblies that are probably how democracy really should be done.)

² (The US had been hovering barely above the threshold between "Full Democracy" and "Flawed Democracy" for years, based on the EIU's ranking criteria. It finally crossed the threshold in 2016, and has been falling alarmingly quickly ever since.)

Ah, but you're missing an important distinction. He committed treasonous acts with plausible deniability! And he'll always be able to come up with new lies and new ways to abuse you faster than you'll be able to disprove his lies or protect yourself, so you may as well restore the monarchy already and put him on top.

EDIT: On a serious note, the comment you replied to is absolutely correct in the point they were making. If Trump is barred from the Oval Office, and the evidence and the way the evidence are presented are anything less than rock solid, then future presidents will absolutely weaponize it as precedent to lock out their political opponents (as happens in every other broken democracy).

No!

…I really wish I had a magnetic microscope.

bwrap is so much better without Flatpak.

To start you off: $ bwrap --dev-bind / / --tmpfs ~ bash

This basically gives you a shell in a clean virtual home directory (but no meaningful security improvement yet). You can test new builds of software as if you have only the default settings. If you need to access files, move them to /tmp/.

To see the clean virtual home directory, replace --tmpfs ~ with --bind "$(mktemp -d)" ~. You can browse it where mktemp puts it (usually /tmp/*).

To start to lock down security, replace the --dev-bind with --ro-bind, and add various --new-session, --uid/--gid, and --unshare-all/--unshare-* flags. You can run untrusted and semi-trusted/less-trusted applications with less security risk this way (as long as you're aware of pitfalls, such as the /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 socket and other possible avenues of escape).

To block network access, use --unshare-net or --unshare-all. To virtualize /dev and /proc, use --dev /dev and --proc /proc.

Some programs might need --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri for graphics driver access, or similar constructs.

EDIT: …I actually created a way to create completely portable application executables for Linux by using bwrap (or proot, as a fallback) to virtualize a Nix root from inside an AppImage, earlier this year. bwrap offers a lot of granularity in modifying and containing the virtual environment, to the degree that you can basically emulate an entire guest OS/distro on top of the host distro, without even needing root privileges— And without even needing bwrap itself to be installed, since it can work using entirely standard Linux kernel features.

Ugh. This "global town square" nonsense needs to die.

Twitter's business was selling ads. They don't give a flying festerooni about fostering a healthy public discourse. Nearly every part of the technical and UX design was actively hostile to "the people" being able to express themselves in a meaningful way— The entire premise was a character limit that while fun also made it literally impossible to provide meaningful context or nuance to anything, and whether you were just scrolling or trying to reply to people, you never got to see anybody else's honest opinions either but instead you were fed a carefully algorithmically curated drip of out-of-context ragebait and feelgood fuzzies designed only to keep you stimulated enough to keep on scrolling so they could report a higher number to investors in their next quarterly report and sell you to more ads.

The entire place was always an artificial environment designed to prey on and monetize your attention span; Unless you were replying to somebody you knew, it was never a place for any kind of authentic interaction, much less some kind of grandiose "global town square" that "gave power to the people".

Twitter may have given certain individuals the tools at some points to trigger positive change. The insulin example was probably the best-case-possible outcome from Musk's fumbling of the verification system, but it was an accident. And in the meantime, when Twitter does get used deliberately, it has spawned a terrorist group that has murdered and enslaved thousands of people, turbocharged the decline of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world towards either autocratization or polarized paralysis, and fueled many, many actual full-blown civil wars. (This is what happens when your revolution isn't built on solid foundations.) Plus, you know, all the harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, political interference, privacy concerns, mental health effects, and actual bots used by malicious actors (which reputable sources tend to estimate at tens of millions in number).

Twitter's a corporation. They never cared about being a "town square", only about being seen as such by users so they could line their own pockets. And Elon Musk is just an idiot. He's not some scheming genius (though he clearly tries to be); he's the same as any rich idiot discovering the hard way that no amount of ego will make up indefinitely for lack of competence.

It's just the way they are, no silly conspiracies or battle between good and evil required. Twitter's amoral, rather than immoral, and Musk is immoral, but it's in a flailing self-destructive way rather than a conniving Machiavellian way. They're acting out their nature, and we get caught up in it.

How many actual terrorist groups were we going to let this corporation create in their pursuit for profit before finally admitting that maybe the entire idea was bad from the start? Currently, the immoral idiot is destroying both his own credibility and also the amoral corporation for us all, and really, this is probably almost the best possible outcome.

It was the circus, not "our global town square".

I agree, but I don’t see the point in this context?

I think they meant Musk thought managing development of the Twitter software would be easier than it was, given his prior… Involvement with Tesla and SpaceX.

I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software.

Twitter helped create ISIL, and also POTUS45. When actual autocracies see people even trying to organize on Twitter, they simply ban the whole site anyway. And it also played a major role in the Arab Spring, which while originally talking about high ideals like democracy, liberalisation, and human rights, is these days mostly notable for having ruined several countries for a generation.

In fact, that seems to be the trend: Twitter is very good at making its users feel like they're organizing and making changes in the world, when in reality all that is being accomplished is/was inflating their own stock price and throwing outrage around with neither factual context nor a long-term plan to turn it into meaningful positive change. People were able to effect social change before Twitter, but they didn't do it because they saw somebody's sarky hot take for five seconds right before getting their dopamine hit with the "Like" button and then scrolling past it; they did it because they got sick of the way things were. The public-facing data should be kept around for historians and the rest of the curious, but Twitter was always primarily a predatory ad marketplace that gained relevance by being useful for propaganda, and we'll all be better off with it gone.

EDIT: Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him. But he's done it as a petulant, self-destructive manchild, not as some scheme to stifle public discussion— Twitter was already stifling public discussion, just because of what it is.

If it went viral, it might be in the Wayback Machine. ᴰᵒⁿᵃᵗᵉ ᵗᵒ ᵗʰᵉ ᵂᵃʸᵇᵃᶜᵏ ᴹᵃᶜʰᶦⁿᵉ ᵃⁿᵈ ᴵⁿᵗᵉʳⁿᵉᵗ ᴬʳᶜʰᶦᵛᵉᵎ

Donate to the Internet Archive, y'all.

To zoom out even more: It's just one more incident showing how fragile investor-sustained digital information systems are.

Every website that came before the current crop of mega-scale privacy-invading behemoths also failed, and took down all their user data and history with them. Why would anyone expect Twitter to be any different?

Eh. This is on us. URL shorteners and Twitter in particular have always been scarily brittle and opaque,. With nobody actively maintaining the data, why would you think that it would be around forever?

I only say this because the sentiment that “there is no other way out of this but civil war” is not anywhere close to true, in my mind, and only serves to stop coherent discussion.

It is also not at all the appropriate response to hearing about an innocent person being killed. No sympathy or concern or even tact for the victim nor her community nor loved ones— Instead, fantasizing about even more of the same thing happening so you can mentally LARP as a hero. Even if you're right, this is not the place to scream your violence-fantasy slogans.

Interesting that as communities become more radical and more specialized— Not that that's always a bad thing; It's probably a natural part of the memetic processes by which communities evolve— But it's interesting that they also seem to become less and less empathetic at the same time.

Forgot the name for this one. It is when you assume the conclusion to get the conclusion. I know it’s a basic logical fallacy.

Tautology. Circular reasoning, if you will.

…Right. So, based entirely on faith, with nothing to substantiate it, and with a healthy dose of some weird Messianic complex.

Also, as another commenter pointed out, we actually have surprisingly robust data affirming that yes, indeed, the spectral albedo of grass does show peaks in the 530-550nm range correlating to M-type cone photoreceptor cells­— I.E., Is green. Civil war isn't the sort of thing you're going to be able to pass off as self-evident.