That’s how it’s been for basically decades

In some states, you can’t vote by mail except under specific circumstances, such as being a senior citizen or swearing that you’ll be out of state entirely on election day.

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it

Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It’s been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.

I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.

Aren’t there still massive issues with the Colorado River running dry? Hopefully they’re not too dependant on that water source for their chips

What if it is getting ripped/torn but there’s just more space ‘underneath’ that instantly fills the gaps as they are created? I guess at that point it’s indistinguishable from stretching but it’s interesting to think about

Why not just put up a Moonlight Tower?

That’s really good to know, and not how I thought the system worked previously. I thought instances were responsible for all vote aggregation and simply reported totals to each other at regular intervals, plus submitting comments/edits from users which are more obviously public

Y’know, that’s fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of your instance can see your IP but not the admins of another (assuming you’re not self hosting on your home PC without a VPN), but I’m not 100% sure that’s true because I’ve never looked at the protocol.

If every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.

The more I’m thinking about this, the more I believe it’s a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it’s very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it’s the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.

Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it’s available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it’s possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?

I mean, that’s already true and why the federation model is used in the first place. If another instance can’t be trusted, you can disconnect your own from it (extremely easy if you self-host, if you are a standard member of a larger instance it might require convincing)