> You won't find many historical examples of fascists being booted out by the people.
Every fascist regime that has ever existed has been ousted by war, revolution, or the vote. There are no fascist regimes left, unless you expand the definition of the term to mean “any authoritarian regime,” in which case there are plenty of historical examples of popular revolt.
> The only successful revolutions are piloted by a small elite with further interests that may not coincide with the people.
Authoritarian regimes very rarely get reverted if they aren't external powers ruling a separate group. Can you give some examples where it happened? I don't know of any that lasted very long.
Signal is centralized, hosted on AWS, and through a mixture of legal procedures codified by US law and their bundled gag orders (PR/TT order, SCA warrant, FISA 702, and usage of NSLs) that can be extended for significant lengths of time and, occasionally, in de facto perpetuity, all metadata (who is talking to who, when, from where) can be monitored in real-time without Signal ever being informed. Combined with existing legal procedures for telecoms and VOIP providers for real-time + retrospective location tracking by phone number/associated IMEI/IP address by way of tower connectivity (this framework is required by law [specifically, CALEA] to be implemented by default for all users, not after the fact nor on-request), that's enough data to escalate to standard law enforcement procedures if an incriminating link is found, whereby the phone's internal message history can be dumped either through private (ex.: Cellebrite) or functionally coercive legal means (refusing to decrypt data can get you jail time if you are the subject of an investigation, and deletion of data such as via duress pins etc can get you a destruction of evidence charge), at which point all of your messages can be dumped.
And this all ignores the fact that firmware for basebands and cryptoprocessors (and most other hardware components in all devices) is closed-source, proprietary code, and that Signal piggybacks off of device encryption for at-rest message data instead of reimplementing it in userland. (This feature used to exist and was removed, but can be re-added through the Molly fork.)
I've also known protesters who have also had Signal geoblocked at the site of a protest the moment it was slated to start, forcing members of said protest to fall back to unencrypted methods at crucial times. Being centralized and using US-based cloud infra does a lot to compromise anonymity and security, even if message content isn't immediately readable.
Luckily, Signal is not vulnerable to push notification interception, but if you want a great real-world example of how gag-ordered dragnet metadata surveillance visible to both domestic and foreign governments (by way of international intelligence agreements) can look for massive corporations rendered helpless by this legal framework, that's a great case study to look into. https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
Throwing out the accusation of apps being "backdoored" just obscures the real, de facto "backdoors" that are US law.
Well, no, more accurately, when it comes to it, it's in the eyes of a judge (or a jury in some cases). You can have all kinds of arguments about validity of arrests, of prosecutions, etc., but it's still fundamentally a system where you'll be charged with an offence and then either convicted or not.
I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).
Not exactly a judge or jury. IIRC a common law assault can go on with only the subjective experience of threat. Hard to prove, but the bar is not objective. See:
True, although even those crimes (take common law assault) will still be heard in front of a magistrate - there's a process, there are processes for appealing, and it's not just some random police officer with the ability to jail you without process.
I agree that the UK has far too many laws that are more subjective than they ideally should be, but they do at least attach some level of observable and knowable process.
That would require the police to believe that an offence is likely to have been committed. While I am more than ready to criticise the police for many, many things, I'm not sure they're likely to just take that at face value... (As you've specified first contact, etc., that seems likely - of course there could be situations where such a communication would be an offence, such as in the context of a restraining/exclusion order, etc., but not in this case).
In the scenario which you've outlined, where you say "hello" to me, having never spoken to me before? No, I don't think that's an offence, but more to the point, whether I did or not, the police are unlikely to. We don't operate in a system where the police simply take the word of anyone who reports a feeling, the police have a duty to assess whether a crime has likely occurred.
Indeed, that is precisely the case for some folks - with social anxiety. Or autism. Or a number of other mental states.
Maybe they're tired to their bones and barely have energy to even have one meal a day? Maybe they lost a loved one and never quite recovered since then?
It costs nothing to be polite and assume best intentions from the other side.
In this particular case, there's someone whose most precious moments are their breaks during the day, and rather than saying "good on them for finding a way to do the thing they are most passionate about" the response is "gee they should have used that extremely limited free time to.... have the most shallow of conversations"?
Pleasantries are fine, but that was never going to be a long term solution for him. He needed a space that was always available to him, where he is always welcome. For better or worse, that's not the site office. (Even if it worked on that job, you don't stay in one place as a contractor)
And as a comment on an article written by, and about, a man who works a manual labor job because he can't support himself as a writer despite having published novels.
The vast majority of authors, even most those who were quite prolific, have never been able to support themselves on that income alone, throughout the modern history of novels. This isn't new with LLMs.
The EU is a parliamentary democracy. Von Der Leyen was proposed by the democratically elected heads of the member states. She was approved by the democratically elected parliament.
The chancellor in Germany is also not directly elected by majority vote but by parliament.
Its a reasonable criticism that the EU structures make democratic legitimisation very indirect, but that is at least partly a result of the EU being a club of sovereign democracies. The central tension was extremely evident during the Greek debt crisis, you have a change in government in Greece, but due to EU level constraints they can't enact a change in policy. More independent power ininstitutions less dependent on the member state, means the sovereign democratic national governments can't act on their local democratic mandates.
FWIW EU members are sovereign. If they disobey EU laws they can have benefits withheld but they won't be militarily invaded for ignoring EU law the way a US state would (unless they do something military themselves like invading another country).
Except the are a couple degrees of separation between the democracy part and in the running the EU institutions.
The EU parliament is also a very superficial imitation of a real parliament in a democratic state. It has very limited say in forming the “government” or decision making.
> result of the EU being a club of sovereign democracies
So either revert to it just being a trade union or implement fully democratic federal institutions. The in between isn’t really working that well.
In parliamentary democracies the parliament is elected directly and is generally sovereign (optionally constrained by a constitution or some set of basic laws and powers delegated to regional governments and such).
In no way does that describe the EU. It has no equivalent body. Its imitation “parliament” is extremely weak and barely has a say in who forms the closest EU has to a “government”.
So this is typical of criticism of the EU democratic structure: It's just factually wrong. The EU Parliament can dismiss the commission. From Wikipedia:
"The Parliament also has the power to censure the Commission by a two-thirds majority which will force the resignation of the entire Commission from office. As with approval, this power has never been explicitly used, but when faced with such a vote, the Santer Commission then resigned of their own accord."
The fact that the whole democratic setup is highly complex is in itself a problem. But the concrete deficits people mention are never true or don't apply to other democracies either...
In practice the EU Parliament has been a lot more trouble for the executive than is typical in national bodies. The one valid point is that the parliament does not have the right to initiate legislation itself. That is unusual, but in practice many people who are actually close to political processes seem to say this is mostly symbolic, as national bodies can't really draft effective legislation without cooperation from the executive either... Stil definitely something I would love to see addressed.
For all the disdain I have for her, Von Der Layen is the candidate put forward by the PPE, the majoritarian party in the EU parliament. So, yes, people were indeed allowed to vote.
The parliament would have picked Weber, but nobody cared since its just there to rubber stamp predetermined decisions.
He was the leader of the party which won the plurality in the elections and had its support. EU had a real chance to move towards becoming a real parliamentary democracy if it went that way.
That was the election before the current one. She was the one out forward by the PPE this time and even then she was the second candidate put forward by the PPE after Weber was vetoed by France the previous time.
That’s the new Spitzenkandidate system. The council is supposed to pick the candidate put forward by the main political force in the parliament.
The EU is a real democracy anyway. All the members of the council are themselves democratically elected. It has a weird three parts political system but everyone in it is elected or appointed by people elected.
I use graphene not for security but because it doesn't come with any Google surveillance stuff.
Let's be realistic if some 3 letters agency really want some data about me, there's not much I can do to counter that unless I'm ready to go to extreme lengths.
>Let's be realistic if some 3 letters agency really want some data about me, there's not much I can do to counter that unless I'm ready to go to extreme lengths.
I once thought like you. You do not need to go to extreme lengths to make things difficult and that is what is important. The fact is that the 3 letter agencies are increasingly fucking with normal people in a race to the bottom. Do not be defeatist - that only hurts everyone. The more people protecting themselves the safer everyone is from these people. If people just give up on privacy it puts a spotlight on normal people protecting themselves. The current state of which is so bad I have trouble putting it into words.
I think their comment is rightly pointing out that if a TLA or other state intelligence actor takes an interest in you specifically, they can do quite a bit of classic spycraft that is considerably more expensive i.e. direct surveillance. No alternative handset OS will protect you from an agent who bugs your house, or someone firing a polonium pellet into your leg from a modified umbrella.
Realistic is that some data is impractical to protect and too late to protect if your parents chose a somewhat normal life for you but that is hardly all data.
Even Mr Assange in his embassy could have added fitness trackers to add metrics that were hard and spotty to estimate from video surveillance.
I know this is kind of the contrarian opinion and I'm not trying to be "that guy", but if you want a web app that works in 30 years you would probably be best off building a server-side rendered application. You need a server, HTTP, HTML, and CSS for any web application, but you don't always need a lot of client side javascript.
The fewer things you have in your stack, the fewer things can change under your feet.
If you MUST use a framework, then yes i would go with ember because they have a prooved commitment to following the web standards rather than creating their own custom standards that they throw away the next year.
Having said that, 30 years are very VERY long time in web development. Maybe pure js isn't a bad call, but it depends on how large it is going to be. Someone else mentioned considering sever rendering, not a bad cinsideration either.
Meh. I don't get the love Lua gets on HN.
At least version 5.1, I didn't try the others.
No first class support for OOP, you got to use tables instead.
No "continue" keyword to go to the next iteration of a loop. So you have to use some ugly elseif.
No try catch!
It's a dynamic language so everything goes. A function will return nil or a number or whatever you wish.
A function can also returns any number of variables, so obviously some moron will abuse it: looking at you Blizzard intern (you must have been an intern right?) that thought returning 20 variables on the combat event log was a good idea. Ever heard of tables???
The LSP can't do miracles when there are almost no rules so auto-completion is more miss than hit, which is quite shocking in 2024.
The IA is helpful sometimes but create subtle bugs some other times. A simple uncaught typo will create a hard to find bug (yesterday copilot auto-completed myObject.Id instead of myObject.id, there went 20 minutes of my life trying to find why some code that was running solidly for weeks was now failing silently).
So all in all, Lua is fine to write small imperative scripts of a few hundred loc.
Anything bigger and more complex you should run away IMHO.
I never realized C# was such a well designed language until I tried Lua.
For some people not being locked into one form of OOP or any OOP at all is a huge advantage.
> No "continue" keyword to go to the next iteration of a loop. So you have to use some ugly elseif.
Yeah, that sucks. Thankfully Luau fixes that and basically all annoyances I have with Lua. https://luau.org/syntax
> I never realized C# was such a well designed language until I tried Lua.
Lua and C# have fundamentally different design goals. C# sucks for embedding, you have to include a huge runtime. Godot still hasn't figured out how to support C# on web builds. Lua values minimalism and flexibility. That obviously means it lacks some quality of life features of bigger general purpose languages.
The only successful revolutions are piloted by a small elite with further interests that may not coincide with the people.
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