You wrote, “A complete lack of specific action suggested.” so I provided some specific action. I don’t like being an asshole, but people tend to act like assholes if they think the people they’re talking to are also assholes. I’ll be more polite if you’re willing to do the same.

In any case, what I wrote is, “Do whatever you want, vote however you want, but real change won’t come until you throw out that stinking piece of trash constitution” and somehow, you assumed that it means, “don’t even try not even in the primaries.” I have no idea how you made that mental connection. You asked how to fix it, and I told you how to get it done. You wanted a direct example, and I posted several of them. I even found a guy that’s already started the process, just go and read the wiki link I posted on Lessig. What more do you want?

There are dozens of ways it could be fixed. Here, I’ll do the thinking for you.

First of all, if you read your own constitution, you would see that there are multiple ways to amend the constitution:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.[3]

source

There are two ideas right off the bat: either start writing amendments and getting them passed through Congress, or have the state legislatures demand a convention be arranged. You don’t even need your federal Congress to get involved if you use the second approach. Did you already know that? (And since you think voting is so effective, you can invoke this holy power against the politicians that don’t support it.)

See, here’s a guy that already tried to start the process, maybe you can jump on board!

In 2010, Lessig began to organize for a national Article V convention.[81] He co-founded Fix Congress First! with Joe Trippi.[82] In a speech in 2011, Lessig revealed that he was disappointed with Barack Obama’s performance in office, criticizing it as a “betrayal”, and he criticized the president for using “the (Hillary) Clinton playbook”.[83] Lessig has called for state governments to call for a national Article V convention,[84] including by supporting Wolf-PAC, a national organization attempting to call an Article V convention to address the problem.[85]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig?useskin=vector#Article_V_convention

Or maybe you need to find a not-so-legal approach. Your constitution was written because the previous one (Articles of the Confederation) were not so effective. How is your current situation today different from the one then? They figured out a way to get it done, and they were under far less duress then than you are now so… why can’t you? You start writing the new one, then ratify it the same way the same way the old one was.

And in case you weren’t aware, this happens all the time! Look at France. France is on their Fifth republic, the most recent being established in 1958, according to Wikipedia. And they’re not the only ones. There are new constitutions being proposed and voted on all over the world all the time, in the Middle East, in Africa, etc. Read the news and you’ll find out more about it. I recommend Deutsche Welle, they have excellent coverage of global affairs.

There you go. Hope you enjoyed a small lesson about civics in your own country from a foreigner. There are plenty of ideas to get you started, and now that you’re more in the know, don’t complain if voting by the rules doesn’t bring about the change you’re looking for. Good luck!

And another edit to add: yes, it’s hard work, but you have to start talking about real solutions at the very least. You can see very clearly and easily from where we are today that working within the system as it’s currently designed isn’t working and it probably never will. It’s up to you to pick whatever path you think is best, but I think it’s obvious that voting in your shitty electoral process just isn’t going to work.

I’ll probably get downvoted to hell for saying this, but whatever, it needs to be said. It’s just unbearable listening to how all of you defend voting for people you hate and doing nothing about it.

Here’s the truth: if you have one party that’s neo-fascist, and another party that does nothing, then in reality, your country is a one-party neo-fascist state.

What you need to do about it is fixed the root cause. Throw your constitution in the trash and write a new one that guarantees proportional representation. Sure, PR isn’t perfect, but it’s better than a single party state.

No, voting in primaries isn’t going to fix the problem. Maybe you get a small handful of 10 politicians around the country that make you feel good about yourselves, but there are still thousands more standing in their way preventing any real progress. What have Bernie Sanders or AOC really achieved? Nothing, because there’s 500 other people in Congress. What has Mamdani done for more than the tiny fraction of Americans living in NYC? Nothing, because a mayor in NYC is can’t do shit for the 90% of people who live in other parts of the country.

Do whatever you want, vote however you want, but real change won’t come until you throw out that stinking piece of trash constitution you have and write one that makes the USA a real democracy. Shout it out as loud as you can, because until then, nothing meaningful is ever going to change.

P.S. It’s not that people aren’t aware of the shitty system, it’s the fact that absolutely nobody is talking about the real problem, and there’s no movement whatsoever to fix it. Even Canadians are pushing desperately for PR and getting nowhere, but the USA is even more silent about it, and it’s fucking infuriating.

Eventually, all these tech companies scale up to a size where they don’t have to give a shit about people anymore. They only care if you’re a celebrity or somehow manage to create a big PR show that they have to respond to. But at this point, regular people are just like blades of grass that will eventually get mowed down somehow and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Now it’s dead and time to move on.

So true. Employers hate labour so much, it can only be because they’re shit people.

There’s no single individual that made it happen, but no doubt that Linus and RMS were the two biggest. Bear in mind that there were lots of additional contributors to the kernel and GNU as well.

I also think Red Hat was also one of the biggest contributors to Linux’s success. So many of the most important technologies that we use today came out of RH. I don’t have a lot of love for them today, but their contributions in the '90s and '00s was immense.

I actually think that a large part of the reason why PCs are much better open platforms than mobiles is because there is no Red Hat of the mobile ecosystem. Google started it out with AOSP, but then closed it up when they monopolized the market. Makes you wonder if RH would have done the same if they had the same kind of success.

And they say AI doesn’t cause brainrot… “Sorry you can’t get AI to work for you. Keep trying!” sounds like the kind of thing you would expect from someone who only outputs the highest quality of work, doesn’t it?

I’m not saying all AI users are like this, and there are many smart developers that do use it effectively (like Torvalds), but there is definitely a loud group of AI cheerleaders that extremely careless and overconfident, while lacking any sense of self-criticism or oversight of what they say or do.

And by the way, you definitely can build simple web-apps in a day without AI. I was doing that in 2015 by just following the Django tutorial. It took me longer than a day because I tried to read the documentation and understand it. But if I put the same amount of effort that these low-effort AI users do, I could have easily just copy-pasted shit from the finished tutorial and been done in an hour with the same level of understanding (or lack thereof) that AI users have.

That’s the difference between good and bad engineers - you have the tools in front of you, but can you make yourself a better engineer while you use them?

Speaking of which, you know what these AI tools do? They just go to github and copy off some project that already does what you want it to do. Anyone could do that before AI existed. Sure, it’s definitely impressive that they can understand what you want to do and find the right result (usually), but you could do that ever since search engines were invented. AI is just the “I’m feeling lucky” button from Google from back when people had enough sense to be a little critical of the results they were looking at before they clicked it.

Article is light on details. I’m curious how they define what is “algorithm”-generated content and what isn’t.

Ad personalization is hard to verify because it’s all happening on the backend. What you see in a feed is much more visible, so maybe that will make it harder to work around. I haven’t read much about how the legislation works and how it defines algorithms, but if it’s something like, “only show me people I’ve subscribed to”, then it would be pretty easy to verify whether they are showing that or not.

But in general, I agree. Big tech companies always find a way to work around this legislation. Enforcement is the issue, not the laws themselves.

The problem is, Android is not your OS, it’s Google’s OS. They decide how it works, not you, damn peasant!

(Ditto for Ios and Apple, probably)

Mullvad recommended Quad9 when they announced the shutdown. They said it’s because they think Quad9 is doing a better job of it than they can, so it’s a pretty serious recommendation.

Worth a read, it’s not too long: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/shutting-down-our-public-encrypted-dns-servers-and-sponsoring-quad9-instead

s/gift/bribe/

Holy shit, can’t believe someone actually added this pattern to the coffeestains package!!

Remember when Microsoft was forced to give a “select your web browser” prompt when setting up a Windows computer?

Quaint times, those were…

Fair, he was due to retire.

But at the very least, there’s a good chance that Apple will start trying to shoehorn integrate AI in a lot of places. How much and where remains to be seen. Especially as a new CEO, there will be a lot of pressure to respond to all the criticism they’ve been receiving about their approach to AI.

That’s probably about to change with their new CEO too:

“It’s becoming clear that AI is not a fad, is not something that will go away in the next two or three years,” said Jeronimo. “It’s something that will dictate the future of most tech companies and indeed all companies.”

He reckons AI could be “the most consequential technology” for Apple because it could either help it maintain its lofty position or create a set of daunting challenges.

https://www.dw.com/en/can-new-apple-ceo-john-ternus-fix-the-tech-giants-ai-woes/a-78575898

It’s pretty likely that AI was the reason why Apple is changing CEOs in the first place, because they have been getting criticized for not being as hopelessly stupid about it as other tech companies are.

It’s solid because it’s so simple. And the documentation is great too - the handbook has everything you need!

Sounds like the distro is kinda of a clown show (see this comment: https://reddthat.com/comment/28643289), but it is really nice to see derivative distros coming off of Void. To me, it’s a sign that Void is gaining more relevance in the community which is great because I really think it’s the best distro out there these days.

They are sociopaths, so they thrive on making others insecure

And stop paying for Windows while we’re busy getting rid of it!