Pup Biru

to really hammer home this “many ways to hide”: the PDF is kinda just like a container… it contains other things like images (the patterns for example)… these patterns are probably vector graphics (made up of lines rather than pixels)… this means you can magnify them basically infinitely… and they can contain transparent lines and all sorts of things. they could easily embed that same text in the SVG image, at tiny scale (less than a pixel at 100% scale), and make it transparent… no PDF editor is going to touch the image data: it simply doesn’t really understand it to that degree - it’s an image; not a PDF after all… so that information will remain even after you’ve removed all visible/reasonable marks

this is just 1 example of practically infinite places it could be - and remember, this text is just lines in an image! it’s not like you can ctrl+f for the text necessarily… you’d have to go through every image manually and inspect every single line, and even then there are no guarantees (perhaps they encoded that information like morse code in bumps in some lines that are only barely visible at 1000% magnification)

looks around

shit looks like the world is fresh out of free republics… could i interest you instead in a flawed democracy?

which they handled about as well as you can: prompt and clear notification without trying to pass the buck

the potential of a data breach is just a fact of life with any SAAS product - bugs happen… and it’s exactly the SAAS part of the product that makes the invites/login/aggregation of servers so smooth

i’m not likely to wrangle installing and maintaining wireguard on my mums cheap smart tv

and if that’s the solution, as i said you get plex local playback so that’s free still anyway

my main issues

• jellyfin has known security vulnerabilities and shouldn’t be run on a public network. that means everyone using your server remotely needs to be on a VPN… and then you may as well use plex because it’s “local” so the remote streaming thing doesn’t apply
• swiftfin (which i need for apple tv) doesn’t support media segments

the thing that everyone always glosses over is that jellyfin should not be run on a public network. it has known security vulnerabilities… that includes VPN remote proxy, so now you have to have external users on your actual VPN, and if that’s the case then plex will work fine because it’s “local”, and has a lot more features

(and my main issue: media segments don’t work on swiftfin)

strict AI regulation will summon the Antichrist

oh that sounds bad!

no AI regulation will lead to misinformation and potentially a collapse of or at least significant degradation to society and here are legitimate theories with numbers to back them up as to why that’s the case

ah! hmm… yup… shit it’s just so hard to choose

then you have to pay for it though

i’ll add a concrete example to this… i’ve described a startup i built in another comment but TLDR:

compliance obligations when protecting kids from sexual predators are difficult to prove: sexual abuse usually comes out 30 years later, so standard record keeping is pretty fraught… companies (like the company monitoring compliance - our startup for example) might not exists any more, paper gets lost, database formats become difficult or impossible to read

writing signed proof of compliance to the blockchain is a way of ensuring that an organisation was doing what they could at the time… how this is achieved is tricky for anyone but the source of record, but with blockchain it’s possible (described in the post)

alternatively, instead of having the military have these capabilities perhaps fund non-military departments to do it

it’s a function of the US military being bloated that they can use some of that bloat to do other things, but it’s far from efficient

“creamy” is a pretty common positive attribute for ice cream

depends if the platform has read receipts

the grift shop

I’ve heard a lot of Australians complain about politics there. Maybe that’s just because people complain about politics everywhere.

i think this is true no matter what: nz and germany are both more proportional systems and similarly people dislike politics

it also seems like Australia has a lot of problems that aren’t getting solved (like housing cost).

absolutely… some problems are incredibly tricky: getting people to vote against their interests (eg with housing, any effort to reduce house prices directly decreases the value of peoples assets - perhaps not investments, but their primary home even)

how to achieve some societal good things is really tricky in any democracy i think

We can still hope the playing field will tilt back to level.

they’ve been doing this for years… it ain’t gonna happen. it’s not a symptom of trump: texas used to be a muuuuch more purple state, but these days it’s only ever thought of as a republican stronghold not because of their vote, but because of gerrymandering… that’s how long it’s been going on. most people can’t even remember a time when it was any different

For most of our history, Congress understood their highest priority was to pass a budget, and they did. Now that is no longer important.

yeah it’s pretty fucked… in australia, this is a sure way to trigger a dissolved parliament and an early election: there are only 3 things that can happen (and the government shutting down isn’t 1 of them)

• the government resigns and the governor general (technically “the crowns representative in australia”, but in actuality they do very little unless there’s a crisis) appoints (probably) the leader of the opposition
• of budget bills fail 3 times the government may request a double dissolution - early, full federal elections
• the governor general unilaterally dismisses the PM, because if they government can’t even maintain supply then they don’t have the power to do anything at all (this has only ever happened once and was australia’s largest ever constitutional crisis, but i do like that it’s a valid fall-back)

yup, so it’s different with RCV and representative: in australia we have this, where we still have a mostly 2 party system that’s representative but we have RCV, so you can preference other parties first, and still have your vote eventually flow to the major party of your choice

in this case, perhaps enough votes are lost that they loose a seat (we’ve had at least 1 green rep in parliament for a few elections in a row)

also we track “primary vote” - the number of people who ranked you #1 - as an important election metric with real consequences… there are limits to private donations for elections, and a significant portion of funding for elections comes from the government itself. any party that gets over 4% of the primary vote is eligible to claim a proportional amount of financing for next election… so you can punish them in a way that really matters without actually putting anything real on the line

that’s different to proportional representation, because it’s a property of the system that there are many minor parties which inherently means parties have to make more deals

playing by the rules only makes sense when the other side does too… a level playing field is more important than some unspoken rules

yes, everyone agrees it should be impossible to gerrymander… but given that it’s not, for an election to be anywhere near “fair” (and to be clear it can’t when you’re gerrymandering) then both sides must do it otherwise it’s the most unfair thing possible

(disclaimer: aussie; this ain’t my country, and our electoral system doesn’t allow this… but for absolute fucks sake yall your vote effects the entire world and we get no say at all, so all we can do is talk some sense into this UNIQUELY crazy bullshit)

i did a big ol post here about this

generally what you’re talking about is proportional representation… systems like this tend to lead to a government comprised of a lot of minor parties, which sounds great!

but it has its down sides (and i’m not saying 2 party is much better, but it’s useful to be aware of the situations it creates): when there are a lot of minor parties with no clear “above 50%” majority, they have to form a coalition government and that can be extremely fragile

you can’t hold parties to election promises, because you just don’t know what they’re going to have to give up to form a coalition, and even if they do end up forming a coalition you really don’t know how stable that coalition is going to be!

i guess in the US there’s gridlock anyway, so what the hell right? may as well at least have gridlock with parties blocking legislation based on things you believe in… buuuuuuut that’s probably a bad example: first past the post is far more to blame in that case than proportional vs representative democracy

(fptp leads to extremism, ranked choice etc leads to moderation because people’s 2nd, 3rd, etc choice matters: you want to be likeable not just to your “base” but to everyone, because everyone’s vote has a chance of flowing through to you even if you’re not their first choice… if people hate you, you’re not going to get those preference votes when candidates get eliminated)

that’s absolutely the main thing yup… in almost every circumstance where people implement blockchain, a trusted entity is involved so there’s no point to the blockchain

almost always there’s a single entity issuing a thing, and then that same entity also consuming that thing

we are absolutely right now in the trough of disillusionment with blockchain (well, among people who actually understand anything at all - as usual let’s not count trump and his base as rational actors), and at some point there will be useful solutions remain

(and side note too, we’re in the peak of inflated expectations with AI… i can not wait for that crash and to be left only with useful things)