The purpose of a system is what it does. There's lots of literature on what the best, or at least better, voting systems (hello preference voting) and decision making approaches are. Getting them implemented is another story.
I don't have a view on the main thrust of the comment, but "the purpose of a system is what it does" is very obviously wrong (as detailed in the linked blog post) and that is what I was responding to.
I believe we say "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to also poke at the fact that there are mechanisms and design decisions (tradeoffs) at play that lead to certain results, and that if we want to change outcomes, we need to change the system.
Votes matter more in some systems than others. Preference voting allows for smaller parties to more easily gain seats while first-past-the-post supports two-party systems. In the UK and AU, the prime minister must hold a seat, and so can be removed from parliament through (a subset of) citizen votes removing them from their seat, even if the majority party stays in power. In the US, the President (who can issue executive orders) is elected by an electoral college--none of whom are directly elected by citizen votes. Maybe it's not a big conspiracy, but these systems are doing what they are known to do, and will do so unless they are changed.
Of course there are systems in place to change these systems, which are also quite hard to utilise. And strangely (or not), no one is rushing to improve voter power and representation. So there's some interesting questions there around what changes can be made that would best improve representation, and what could be blocking those changes from being made.
My "favorite", and likely related, part of Apple News is that if I have blocked a source because it is unreliable, heavily biased, etc., and a story from that source appears in the main timeline, Apple News shows a greyed out version of the story--headline and image visible--with "You have blocked this publication" (or similar). You can still clearly see the story, so it's not blocked at all.
I assume this comes down to some sort of distribution agreement, but, as bad as the ads are, this single behavior is the reason I stopped using Apple News and continue searching for a successor.
Apple stocks app has a similar obnoxious pattern. It’s a genius UX. Why is this stock up/down today? Conveniently a bunch of articles are displayed that explain it. But there’s no way to block news sources that are paywalled. But there was a workaround in which you could individually block each news source. But then Apple gave themselves a way out. If “Apple editors” choose to highlight an article then you’ll be forced to see it regardless of your preferences. Coincidentally they do love to highlight paywalled articles.
I attempted to find a stocks app replacement but nothing else has such a slick interface and wasn’t also crammed full of ads.
I actually tried Ground News for a while because, you know, why not? I appreciate what they're trying to do, but the signal to noise ratio was so, so unfavorable between the UI clutter, the curious lack of certain categories, and the oddly slow update rate.
I also tried Ground News multiple times now, because I think it's a great idea but as you said, the UX is just so atrocious and completely unusable. I'm completely overwhelmed whenever I visit that the only choice I have is to close the tab and go read news somewhere else.
Interesting post. I appreciate their candor and self-criticism, but, as a customer, I'm consistently surprised by how robust Tailscale ends up being, and how rarely I've experienced an issue that actually broke my tailnet. The sort of downtime that might keep me from accessing the admin tool or something else like that is rare enough, but my nodes have almost (?) never failed to talk to each other. Pretty great.
Caveat: I have a very small tailnet (<100 nodes). Anyone running with thousands of nodes may have a very different experience where inconvenience might be existential.
The reason for that is that all nodes talk p2p to each other. There is no central communication server like with many other vpn solutions. So even if Tailscale would go down for days you won't have any downtime between your nodes.
I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)
I've gotten more value out of it than just about any ongoing subscription I have. It's clean, fast, deeply customizable (i.e., excluding "answers" websites or any other domain you never want to see again), and, for what it is, inexpensive. Honestly if Google (or Bing) worked like Kagi does, I'd trade some of the privacy for the utility.
So we can justify, say, deposing the king of Saudi Arabia? Or Zelenskyy on the pretext that he hasn’t held a timely election? Or the president of Taiwan on the basis of illegitimacy of the election? Regardless of Maduro’s sins, this is a massively destabilizing action and I expect we will see unpleasant downstream effects even if, in a vacuum, the action was justifiable and legal.
It's of course very difficult to justify, but in your example, Zelenskyy has the approval of the Ukrainians for now, while Maduro only had the approval of the military and a low percent of civilians.
The approval of the people is irrelevant if Putin cites Zelenskyy’s democratic illegitimacy as a reason to remove him (which, arguably, they have) or Trump as a reason to withhold support.
Didn't this Honey fraud thing break like a year ago (or longer)? This is the second story I've seen about it in the last couple of days and I guess I'm surprised it's even still around.
Thank you. I was confused about why this was suddenly bubbling up again. And ... paints Honey in a pretty bad light? LOL, they already looked like a fraudster scam to begin with! (But, again, thank you.)
Another tool to add to my arsenal of responses to people who claim either "no filter used" or "SOOC photo". Both of those may be true for some values of "no filter" or "straight out of camera" but they're not remotely describing the reality that any digital image is heavily manipulated before it leaves the camera. And that's ok! Our eyes are filters. Our brain is a filter. Photographic film and processing techniques are filters. The use of "no filter" and "SOOC" to imply capturing something unedited and therefore authentic is the artificial thing.
Tailscale is one of the simplest, most useful things I use. I only use the personal plan, but I keep toying with signing up for paid because it’s a damn good product.
I gave up my OpenAI subscription a few days ago in favor of Claude. My quality of life (and quality of results) has gone up substantially. Several of our tools at work have GPT-5x as their backend model, and it is incredible how frustrating they are to use, how predictable their AI-isms are, and how inconsistent their output is. OpenAI is going to have to do a lot more than an incremental update to convince me they haven't completely lost the thread.
/s … maybe
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