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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Actually, an RCV system may help the democrats, at least in the short term.

    For the last couple of decades, the “spoiler” candidates generally take from the democrats more than the republicans. Last big spoiler third party that screwed the right was Perot that I remember. With RCV, then the ‘fringe’ votes can still be cast and democrats can work toward being the second choice of those hardliners. At least in the short term, it alleviates the need to actually compete for votes with candidates that are going to lose anyway.

    Longer term, it may cause a viable third party or more to get some steam (attracting practical candidates that no longer see the need to be a D or R to get votes, the parties generally getting left alone by outside forces that find them not worth weaponizing), but I don’t think the politicians are too concerned on that long a time frame.



  • On the ranked choice voting, she wouldn’t give you that anyways. Here’s a clue, Alaska has RCV already. The president doesn’t get to pick how the states run their elections. The place to push for RCV is at the state level.

    On healthcare, you’d need congress. There’s not even a whiff of that being a possibility, even less than Stein presidency. That’s a general issue with her platform that there’s very little “how” in how she could actually do anything, and much that isn’t even theory under the authority of the federal government, let alone the office of the president.




  • A bit more of a direct comparison would be IRC to, say, Matrix. Last year I see an article announcing Matrix user count and it was more than all the internet users combined in 1997. This is a near-nothing number in modern internet scale, not even 4% of Facebook userbase, but I’d say that Matrix is about as close as I can conceive of “IRC-like” mindset applied with more modern principles in play. Yes you have billions in more popular social networking and communication networks, but there remains many millions of people’s worth of “internet” that resembles the 90s in some structural ways, which is how many people we had on the internet total in the 90s.

    One huge difference is of course that no longer does a wider populace see those folks as potential pathfinders for others to join, but their own little weird niche not playing the same way as everyone else, with no advantage that they can understand in play.



  • Yeah, and the ol’ “slashdot effect” is hardly a concern anymore because things have gotten so much more capable as slashdot didn’t grow.

    I’m sitting at a laptop with 8-way 2.3 ghz, 32GB of RAM, a way faster NVME storage than any datacenter array would deliver in that era with a gigabit internet connection from my house. Way outclassing any hosting demands from the 90s for the most severe “slashdotting” that slashdot ever could inflict back then.

    To deal with ‘modern internet scale’, you have to resort to more resources, but to keep up with the ‘like 90s subset’, little old rasberry pis can even keep pace.


  • To a large degree, the same internet that used to be, still is.

    Keep in mind that in the era they are nostalgic for, the internet involved roughly 4% of the world’s population. As big in the public conciousness was, it was a relatively small thing.

    For example, most people see Lemmy as pretty small and much slower content coming at you than reddit. However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be. I can still connect to play BBS Door games and there’s barely anyone there, but there were barely any people there back then either. The “old” internet is still there, it’s just small compared to the vast majority of the internet that came about later.

    Some things are gone, but replaced. For example Geocities now has neocities, which is niche by today’s standards, but wouldn’t be shocked if neocities technically is bigger than geocities ever was in absolute terms.

    Some things are gone and won’t come back. The late 2000s saw a really nice and stable all-you-can-watch streaming experience from Netflix, and their success brought about maddening licensing deals where material randomly appears, moves, and disappears and where a lot of material demands more to “rent” than buying an actual Blu Ray disc of it would cost (have gone back to buying discs as of late because it’s cheaper than streaming).





  • I think it would have been a smart choice. The rationale behind muting was trying to force both parties to having a nice, civil discussion, to force decorum upon the proceedings that formerly was just a given, but generally not respected by Trump, by his nature.

    However one part of the first debate was that the muting might have saved Trump from his own worst impulses. To be sure, Biden made his own problems that were far far worse, but part of Trump looking relatively reasonable in his conduct that night was being forced only to speak in turn.

    Slam dunk is if you let him put his unhinged nature and unreasonable behavior on full display, while also managing to manage him so that you are still heard.

    I would not be surprised if a career in the courtroom dealing with all manner of hard to deal with people is the best prep anyone could ask for to deal with a personality like Trump.


  • Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.

    Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.

    I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.


  • Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.

    By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.

    The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.