Interesting headline - its disconnected from the content of the article. Most of it is about how broken the US electoral system is.

The important point is that an electoral and political system that was designed to protect from the “tyranny of the majority” has instead created a system perpetuating the tyranny of the minority.

Americans are indoctrinated to think theirs in the greatest country on earth from a very young age. But the political system is an absolute mess - the electoral college, the senate (which is totally skewed in favour of small states), the supreme court and politicised legal system, and the embedded 2 party system.

Trump isn’t a threat to democracy. Democracy in the US has been dead for a long while now. It vaguely worked when there was a post war consensus but now it’s completely log jammed. And nobody has a plan to fix it because they can’t.

Oxford University is older than calculus.

As a kid Amiga Workbench was my first desktop environment, and then later Win 3.11 in MS DOS.

I remember my dad toying with Linux but can’t remember which one (he did settle on SuSE though I recall). My first linux distros was Ubuntu.

God damn journalists and their word conspiracy! They’re clearly being propped up by the powerful dictionary lobby and forcing readers through to their products. Fuck you Big Dictionary!

Yeah totally agree. Biden is the least bad as an outsider, but he’s still a shit candidate and the fact the Democrats chose him shows how weak and poorly run they are as a party.

Biden is the least bad option in a 2 man race but fundamentally US democracy is broken and rotten to its core.

The fact polls show it neck and neck at this stage, given trumps legal woes and his attempt to overthrow the last election result, bodes very badly.

Worse, the guy may be demented and delusional; he may actually believe his has the money in cash.

The more I see him talk the more I think he has dementia; worse than biden by far. I’m amazed he gets a free pass on it.

I hope he doesn’t get elected and kicks the bucket.

Didn’t Reddit signpost that they’d signed a deal with Google over AI? Is Google driving visitors to Reddit in exchange and to their benefit?

No. I was on Facebook when I was in my early 20s but I found it hollow and vapid; everyone being fake, showing off and pretending for their feeds. I also didn’t like how much data Facebook/meta was harvesting so I deleted my account. I haven’t missed it and it’s been over 15years.

The only social media I use is Lemmy (previously reddit), and that is anonymous and separate from my life - way better than the fake shit on Facebook.

Instagram, Tiktok etc - it’s all fake and narcissistic, influencers are just shills, and the companies themselves are just stealing your data and advertising at you the entire time.

Fuck social media, it’s the surge of our age.

Honestly it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

I don’t get why this post is down voted. Are people making the mistake of down voting based on whether they agree with the article rather than whether it is good/bad quality?

I think it’s a reasonable quality article and it could prompt good discussion. Shame it’s being downvoted.

Not really. That windows is targeted more is not to do with it being closed source or necessarily less secure; it is ubiquitous and so from a hacker/malware point of view it’s the best chance of getting a financial reward from their efforts.

However it being closed source makes it harder to identify and patch the holes. We only come across those holes either because a good actor has taken the time to find them (which is hard work) or a bad actor has started exploiting the flaws and been caught - which is terrible as the horse has already bolted, and often stumbled across after damage has been done

Open source does not magically fix that problem, it just puts the good and bad actors on a more level open playing field. Software can be secure with open code as security is about good design rather than obscuration. But open source code can also be very insecure due to bad design, and those flaws are open to anyone to see and exploit. And it requires people taking the time and effort to actually review and fix the code. There is less incentive to do that in some ways as it is currently less targeted.

However there are a lot more benefits to open source beyond that, including transparency, audit, and collaboration. It’s those benefits together that make open source compelling.

Security is also more than being hacked. There are lots of examples of closed source software doing things to benefit it’s makers rather than its users - scraping user data for example and sending it home to be exploited. It’s harder to hide in open source software, but someone also has to take the time to look.

Absolutely, this is a good explanation.

And to add, so many pieces of software share code through shared libraries or systems. Open source means if there is a flaw in one library that is found and fixed, all the software that uses it downstream can benefit.

Closed source, good actors might not even know their software is using flawed older libraries as it’s hidden from view.

Plus open source allows audit of code to ensure the software is what it says it is. There are plenty of examples of commercial closed software that does things deliberately that do not benefit it’s user, but do benefit the company that makes the software.

Self discipline is a skill in itself and it is something you can learn.

At it’s most basic you restrict things you want and make them a reward for doing a task.

It can be hard to restrict things as you say. When I used to study, I used to go to a “3rd place” to do it. That is somewhere that is not home or work - I used to go to a library. In that environments you don’t have TV, or food, and hopefully you won’t be masturbating.

Mobiles can be very difficult though - if you can’t stop yourself using your phone to watch YouTube then either leave it at home (I know, shocking idea in this day and age!) Or install parental locking/anti distraction software that locks your phone down for certain periods. This can help you learn self discipline with your phone.

Similarly if you study with a laptop, then look at anti distraction tools to keep you focused on your work rather than surfing or on YouTube.

The reward side is very important. You need to be consistent and follow through on your promises to yourself. Don’t use unrealistic rewards - like “if I study for 6 hours today I’ll have dinner tonight”. You’re going to have dinner anyway, and you don’t want to go down the road of punishing yourself. Make it a favourite meal, or promise to watch next episode in a favourite TV show.

The idea is that you will be still enjoying those things because you will study and work. But be prepared to deny yourself those things if you fail to reach your goals in the beginning.

Self discipline is hard, not least because you can cheat yourself too easily. But it’s worth putting in the effort, and the forced physical separation from the distractions and rewards at home makes it easier.

Dead is not the same as gone. We are a stream of consciousness moving through time. The past isn’t “dead” it is just behind us, just as the future is not “birth”.

If you imagine yourself as a river of water, there is still a river behind you and In-front of you, but all you are aware of is now.

Whether or not we can go back or forward in that stream of consciousness - who knows. We don’t know what we perceive when we do actually die.

If you can’t get past this focus on the concept then at least stop thinking of it as “death”. That’s anthropomorphising what is happening (trying to attribute a human experience to it) but it’s adding the baggage of all those negative or anxious feelings we feel about death. Our consciousness moving forward through time is its own thing, it is not death.

A business sim that models a country and you can run any business you want, and see if you can build a successful business. I’m talking a sim that models every other business, every city, every street even. The whole economy. Way beyond what’s realistic for sim games at present.

You can do most of this in Cities Skylines - certainly pedestrian view. Not so much driving a car or a plane but there were mods that did some of that I think.

Cities 2 also has a pedestrian view and there is a photo mode which allows some flying but not a freeform driving/flying mode as you describe.