[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Open primaries invite strategic voters to sabotage the party they want to lose rather than supporting the candidate they want to win.

Of course you can still do that with closed primaries—you just have to register as the party you want to vote for in the primaries, ignoring your own preferences. Nothing forces you to vote for your registered party in the general election. It's slightly more involved this way since you would need to change your registration more frequently, and commit to it earlier, but that isn't much of a hurdle.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

If someone said to me: we will meet two weekly...

You're essentially assuming the conclusion by grouping it like that. There are three parts to "biweekly", "bi-", "week", and "-ly". "Once per biweek", i.e. once per 14 days (or per fortnight), makes at least as much sense as "two" × "weekly".

I have no idea how anyone thinks that meaning semi-weekly means twice weekly.

Meeting semiweekly (semiweek-ly, if you must hyphenate it) means meeting every semiweek, or every half-week (3.5 days). Which is an odd internal to meet at if taken literally but would result in meeting twice each week. "Semiannually" is a more common example, and I've never seen or heard it used to refer to anything but a 6-month (half-year) interval.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

Cx File Explorer has a similar feature, along with a built-in FTP client. Another option would be to run an SSH server like SimpleSSHD on the device you want to share files from so you can access them via SFTP, which Cx File Explorer also supports. This permits more secure public key-based authentication rather than just a password.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Nothing says that the owner/buyer of a car has to be the one who drives it. You could buy a car and have someone else drive you around. Or just buy one for someone else to use—for example a parent who doesn't drive could buy a car for their child who has a license. Or vice-versa. Either way there is no reason for the buyer to need a license.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

If there's no skill involved, why play blackjack? If you want randomness you should just go buy lottery tickets. They're both biased against you, but at least when you fail to win the lottery you'll know some of your losses went towards education.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Except it's not even that indirect. The government of Texas invented this novel class of private liability, and their courts are the ones enforcing it. That's the same as banning it themselves, and blatantly unconstitutional.

I'm a bit surprised they didn't implement this as a tax. That would be just as bad, but the federal government has a long history of imposing punitive taxes on things they aren't allowed to ban; it would have been harder to fight it that way without forcing an overhaul of the entire tax system… and politicians are so very fond of special-purpose taxes and credits.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

If you can read emails sent to a given address, and send replies from that address, it basically is your email address for all practical purposes no matter who was meant to be using the account. This is not necessarily a good thing and better end-to-end security would be nice but it is what it is. Odds are the app itself would let anyone change the password and log in provided they can read the emails, unless it's using some form of 2FA.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Historically speaking, people have gone to the trouble of manually digitizing hard copy books to distribute freely. There were digital copies of print books available online (if you knew where to look) before e-books were officially available for sale in any form. That includes mass-market novels as well as items of interest to historians. Ergo, your scepticism seems entirely unjustified.

OCR is far from perfect (though editing OCR output is generally faster than retyping), but even without it we have the storage and bandwidth these days to distribute full books as stacks of images if needed, without converting them to text. The same way people distribute scans of comics/manga.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

The average person would just download it. Only one needs the equipment to digitize it. And that equipment isn't as specialized as you seem to think. For printed (mass-produced) books you can just cut the pages from the spine and feed them in batches through an automated document feeder, which comes standard with many consumer-grade scanners. Automated page-turning on an e-reader can be done with a software plugin in some cases, or externally with something like a SwitchBot. Capturing copy-restricted video is frankly much more involved, and that hasn't stopped anyone so far.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

with books there's basically no reasonable way to create an ebook from a hardcopy

On the contrary, tons of books have been digitized from hard copies through a combination of OCR and manual editing. (E.g.: Project Gutenberg.) The same basic process works for both printed books and pages displayed on an e-reader. It's quite tedious but not exactly difficult. Anyone with a smartphone can submit usable scans, though some simple DIY equipment speeds up the process and improves the quality, and OCR is getting better all the time.

In the worst case the book can simply be retyped. People used to copy books by hand after all, using nothing more sophisticated than pen/quill and paper/parchment/papyrus. Unlike in those days the manual effort is only needed once per title, not per copy.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?

There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn't have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.

Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to "reputation servers" which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.

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nybble41

joined 1 year ago