Mniot, mniot@programming.dev

Inside the US, there’s a pretty substantial amount of pro-Russia propaganda. For years the NRA was a dominant force in politics and it was completely compromised by Russia. The current US president is a Russian asset. Etc etc.

Israel is by far the larger threat to us elections

I’m not sure about “by far”, but it doesn’t really matter. Two things can be true at the same time. Israel and Russia are both significant threats to the US, both have obtained substantial control over US politicians, and both are threats to their neighbors.

And also there’s overlap because Israel and Russia are partially aligned. (See for example how reluctant Israel has been to offer any support to Ukraine.)

Yeah, Israel’s playing on easy mode. Meanwhile Russia’s got sanctions, their invasion target has enough of an army to fight back, and they still manage to get candidates elected in the US.

I’d assume that somewhere later it explains what “N/A” and “*” mean here, but you can see that “Under 55” picks Sanders while “50-64” picks Clinton. So my guess is that “N/A” means that the size of that group is too small for them to have confidence in it. When they combine the two columns together, there’s enough (that’s why there’s data show in “Under 55").

Like (I’m just making up numbers), maybe they determine that they need 100 respondents to have any statistical power. And they got 70 in the 18-34 group and 87 in the 35-49 group, but 103 in the 50-64 and 450 in the 65+.

You can see a hint of this in the sampling error, also: the larger number on 50-64 means that was the smallest of the groups shown. Meanwhile “55 and Older” is clearly a larger group than “Under 55”.

Probably, “*” means “no responses”. They don’t want to say “0%” because they know it’s not true that there are literally zero younger voters who had no opinion, but none of the people they surveyed answered that way. That’s another hint that the group is small.

They polled them. I can make out under your line that “Under ?5” (presumably “55") is 53-45 in favor of Sanders. But the smaller age breakdowns were too small.

Is this a deliberate avoidance of polling younger voters in order to boost Clinton? Or did they try polling evenly but their methodology is outdated and skewed older? Or are they getting an accurate sample of voters and the boomers are just vastly outnumbering everyone else? I don’t think the answer is clear.

But I feel like drawing your circle in a way that obscures the “Under ?5” demographic which did favor Sanders and then saying that they didn’t poll the demographic that favors Sanders comes off as shady. Like the pollsters, it’s not clear whether it’s deliberately misleading or a simple accident.

I’ve always liked playing under-powered or useless or cursed characters. But you have to make sure the whole group is into it. Just because I want to play the germophobic sword-fighter who can’t be in melee range doesn’t mean anyone else wants to be part of that story…

Polls like this look are based on name-recognition. Harris is the first (and only) name a lot of people will come up with when asked “who should be the Democratic candidate?”

She doesn’t seem interested (she hasn’t been working on keeping her name in the news like Newsom has), so she’ll fall off the polls as other people climb.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to show here? That younger voters preferred Sanders? That’s on there, but your red circle is mostly covering it.

It works against the general population, if this particular one doesn’t, don’t get too busy strutting, there is almost certainly something else that does work on you.

That is very well put! I feel like I’ve talked to so many people who see one ad that doesn’t land and say, “ads don’t work on me.”

java naturally produces verbose stack traces

I always think of Java as the absolute gold standard of stack traces. Sure, in any given debugging session I don’t care about most of the stack. But across all sessions, I’ve used all parts of the trace and I wouldn’t want anything elided.

JS is my least-favorite because it provides a stack-trace so I get tricked into thinking it’ll be useful. But since it doesn’t cross callbacks it provides no depth.

Set your expectations: networking is complex and the configuration you’re hoping for is particularly complex. It sounds to me like you’re looking for a split-horizon configuration where local traffic stays local but internet traffic is routed over VPN. But also you want that configuration only for specific apps.

It’s not the *arr programs that are tricky, it’s that any service you try to configure this way will be some of the hardest sysadmin work.

Hell yeah! When you click over from “this game is impossible wth” to kicking Rodney’s ass so much that you’d expect him to just give up…

Nice work cracking a tough game!

Basic screenshot capability is a fundamental feature of a graphical desktop OS. Whether you bundle a tool (like many Linux distros) or include your own (like MacOS and Windows) doesn’t really matter, but users shouldn’t have to go find a tool.

It’s great that Greenshot and others to exist for people who want more features or a more specialized tool. But screenshots, image viewer with crop/rotate, text editor, web browser… These are things that all need to be part of the standard installation and need to work without signing up for services or other bullshit.

And a lot of desktop distros know how to suggest installation so if I type ip addr it might say do you want to "apt install iproute2"? or dnf or whatever I need to make it work regardless of distro.

But if I’m trying to use a GUI it’s harder to figure out how to make a GUI tool appear. What’s it’s package name on this distro? Should I be using Flatpak and if so where’s that? Etc. And this lack of assistance isn’t (just) bad design because I don’t know how you’d design a GUI where I can go “I want the NetworkInspector tool” and it just does the right thing.

3rd Voice is a webcomic in a sort of post-apocalypse setting and the main character Spondule rides a bike. There’s a lot of action and the bike works well in the story–faster than running, but still able to take pretty tight turns.

Maybe the difficulty you’re having is that you want to judge all action as good (it results in a perfect world) or bad (it does not result in a perfect world) and so inaction becomes the only safe course.

The Patriot Act wasn’t created by a single individual. Not only did it require hundreds of powerful politicians working together, but many hundreds of administrative workers, tens of thousands of government employees to apply it, and millions of American voters who approved of it.

Some of the authoritarians behind the Patriot Act were, I’m sure, disappointed at how gentle it is and how few rights it strips away. But they still worked hard every day to enact it and I think you agree that it’s played a role in making America more authoritarian and more willing to accept greater loss of rights.

Do you think it’s possible to make change in the other direction in the same way? Through imperfect, compromised, incremental changes? If not, why do you suppose this only works in one direction?

Maybe you should have been doing something other than waiting patiently for twenty years. I don’t know why people expect something to happen when they do nothing.

If what you’re seeing doesn’t make sense, maybe the problem is in your interpretation?

It sounds like you see R promising “bad thing” and D promising “less-bad thing, but we will move right next time” and so you want to just give up because both options are bad.

But I think this involves viewing the parties as monolithic entities that you have no control over (as seen in “the Democratic Part Elite kept out Bernie") when they’re actually just composed of people. An important factor is that the American people on average are much more conservative/authoritarian/pro-corporation than typical Europeans. Somewhat by history, somewhat by US-sourced indoctrination, somewhat by foreign-sourced indoctrination.

When I see real-life progressives, they’re always taking the most-progressive available action of the moment. In the moment of a US presidential election in a swing state, that most-progressive action may be voting for the slightly-less-bad candidate. But voting for a candidate doesn’t tie them to that candidate’s policies and they can spend the majority of their time and effort focused on progress.

When I see online progressives(?), they’re primarily concerned with giving up: tearing down other progressives’ efforts because they’re not progressive enough but not offering an alternative. The result of this, intended or not, is a populous who doesn’t offer resistance to authoritarianism and probably welcomes it in the end.

Get your own domain name. You can have Apple or Gmail or Proton host it, but if you ever decide to leave them all your emails still work.

Can the people advocating for AI art provide any examples of anything human-generated that is artistically interesting? I suspect not and that’s a big part of why they’re impressed with AI art.

Like, they’d probably say “The Mona Lisa” because it’s well known to be Great Art, and then their AI can draw them in the style of the Mona Lisa, ergo it has generated Great Art.

One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware. AWS allows you to pay more but have a predictable constant cost.

But I think that you’re right that it’s lack of vision. Everyone’s following the VC-backed company path, where it doesn’t make sense to save money for next year because we’ll be selling some entirely new company then.