> Probably Whatsapp is next, if it isn't quietly already.

And I will be pushing to remove WhatsApp if that’s the case.

Democracy won’t be restored until we increase the number of political parties in this country and fix how our officials are elected. I wish I had the answer on how to solve this, but alas… I’ll defer to people who are smarter than me.

No hope even with that, as long as Citizens United is still alive and kicking.

> Democracy won’t be restored until we increase the number of political parties in this country

Parliamentary systems with many parties run into a different kind of dysfunction. Belgium didn't have a government for like two years relatively recently because they couldn't form a big enough coalition. In a democracy, there is no magic bullet that does not involve the quality of the demos.

What is your idea of democracy that needs to be restored in this country?

More power to voters; make their votes count. Encourage run-off voting, etc. We don’t need to turn the US into a parliamentary government. Those are different matters. Things like ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, multi-member districts, electoral college reforms. We don’t necessarily need a large number of parties…

At this point, the political parties are incentivized to suppress votes and/or redistrict things to make voting favorable for their party. Negative partisanship becomes a too-effective political strategy. There are other issues such as focusing on swing state politics (rather than representing their constitutents) and primary capture of ideologically committed voters (reinforcing and/or encouraging extremism).

I agree, there is no magic bullet... but a two-party system has a tendency to devolve into a winner-takes-all mentality. It also increases polarity in every country where a two-party system has ever existed (primarily US, UK, Canada).

What happens when the two party no longer represents the majority of Americans and American interests?

Canada doesn't have a two party system.

neither does the US, but effectively? it’s not as polarised as the US

It is not effectively a 2-party system at all. 6 of the last 8 federal elections have resulted in minority governments.

You're selling yourself short here given that your response is the most intelligent of its 8 siblings.

You mean techno-fascism? Since this benefits Meta, Microsoft, Google, et. al. Cheaper oil, gas, electricity infrastructure means bigger profit margin. It’s not so much they want pollution or to go all in on oil infrastructure specifically, but less oversight and regulation so they can build more and faster for cheaper.

i would have preferred your real writing over the ai-ified slop

well, the author has no issues using an LLM to write the article.

And that’s the thing… it’s good at writing down my ideas in way that I can’t as a non native English speaker.

But it needed the judgement, the experienced and suffered input to know what to help me write

Did you have trouble using tmux to organize your terminal sessions?

Hi, thank you for asking. Honestly, I didn't know about tmux when I started this project. I was only familiar with Ghostty and cmux, and I really wanted a translucent terminal with Liquid Glass. Plus, building my own means I can customize it however I want going forward. So I just went for it.

Also, tmux is really a different approach. Sometimes people just want to manage it on their workstation instead of on the server side.

i would prefer to see widespread hosting become cheap and easy to use… as simple as signing up for an account

then allow people to blog/post in a standardized format using rss. any other site can then subscribe to that site.

>I would prefer to see widespread hosting become cheap and easy to use… as simple as signing up for an account

It is and has been for years. You can literally just sign up for a shared hosting account on hundreds, possibly thousands of services and put whatever you want online (within legal limits of course.) You can even still use SFTP if you want.

People just don't do it anymore, but it's never been less expensive or more accessible.

i think one of the biggest reason is discoverability… so a solution on this front would need to help solve that to a certain extent beyond just “heres the ftp, here you go”

One solution would be to maintain an account on a platform like Mastodon and link to your blog from there. For some reason this has its own acronym (https://indieweb.org/POSSE). This is what I do, along with using my blog as a backup for my Mastodon account (because it's a very small account and I have to delete content every couple of weeks) and using Mastodon for comments.

Unfortunately I don't think there's anything to be done about discovery on the mainstream web, everything was ruined by SEO before even SEO got ruined by AI. Not being discoverable there is probably better than not.

'Muh freedom' to take a de-wormer for viral diseases, upheld by the Florida Senate!

But God is telling you to do it ("parents have a God given right and responsibility"), so it must be kosher.

Sorry, wrong God. Halal.

No, still wrong God. The Christian God, so it was blessed by the Pope.

No, wrong branch of religion. Uhh... well our God as interpreted by our religion said it was OK anyway. Not your God, who doesn't even exist.

Reminds me of that bit that Ricky Gervais did

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5ZOwNK6n9U

Well, I think the answer lies in the article itself:

> at 40 he started his own business as a computer sales consultant in Canberra. After 12 years, he sold the company and got the library job