I'm afraid that could lead to political instability. Maybe not, but I imagine if 59% of people vote "X" but 60% were needed, people could revolt or at least drastic and unpredictable changes in voting in the next elections could happen - "how can this political regime ignore the voice of the majority?!".
You'd need most of the people to understand why 60 or 66.(6)% of people are needed to decide something and really believe in this threshold. And Y% of the populace is different psychologically than Y% of elected officials (in cases where a supermajority of officials are needed to pass Z in a forum like parliament/house/senate).
I think direct democracy is bad for a couple of reasons (some are probably rephrased versions of another reason):
* not everyone can be an expert on everything;
* people can't know what they're not sufficiently knowledgeable about;
* people would like to vote (if it was quick and easy) for anything they have even the slightest opinion on;
* people could be manipulated much easier than an expert or than an educated representative influenced by experts would;
* people value their voice and opinion and themselves too much;
* only a minority of people would vote on lots of things, skewing the results; a majority would vote on just a few issues;
* education fucking sucks everywhere - people don't have enough information about different topics, they don't know how to get said info, how to analyze it or how to filter trash or spam;
* people passionate enough about something will vote on it much more than people not passionate enough about it - with the caveat that someone can be passionate "for X" but not that passionate "against X" - which can lead to the phrasing of the question deciding who will vote;
* it would be easier to bribe someone to vote on something they don't care about (or don't realize they care about) - you wouldn't vote for a new supreme leader but might vote for a specific change in laws about metallurgical unions (gave it as an example as I know nothing about the topic so I "don't care" about it).
If people were educated, had critical thinking, knew how to spot manipulation, weren't greedy and were able to think about abstract things, direct democracy might work. But people aren't, don't, don't, aren't and aren't.
Might be unrelated to the specific GUI discussion but I absolutely hate how there is no threaded discussion on Bluesky or Mastodon (or Twitter which they desperately try to mimic for some reason). You have to use "@username" which does nothing useful when clicked.
You can barely select text on a post. If you click on it, you lost your place and go inside the post?
Why aren't comment GUIs like those of HN, lobsters or the old reddit-style not more popular?
I think I understand why YouTube, Facebook and Twitter intentionally cripple usability by only allowing 1 level of replies and (ab)using the @username way to discuss things - to cater to stupider people with less attention span, to keep discussions lighter and broader and to show more of the top level comments. But all of these would've been accomplished if there were more "show more" buttons, like new reddit does it. It's still dumb as hell but at least it keeps the discussion threaded/nested.
Off topic, but I just realized when I collapse something on HN, it sends a request to HN telling it it's collapsed. Useful for when reloading a page, but I would love a setting that makes the collapse client-only with no requests (and maybe no persistence on reloading).
Anyway, I never used any social media, including Twitter, save for the occasional link I found that I use Nitter or XCancel for. I was really hoping to finally participate in the new fediverse but when I saw the UI decisions, I don't see a point. Twitter clones and alternatives can still be Twitter-like without the dumbing down of the threading/nesting of the comment sections.
Edit: Forgot to mention both Bluesky and Mastodon load much slower than HN or Lobsters or reddit with or without Tor.
> My nutritionist tells me that recovering this quickly would have probably been just about impossible for a vegetarian or vegan, without having an iron infusion done.
"probably been just about impossible" doesn't mean "impossible", it more likely means changing your eating habits to a point where you'd have to be really conscious and careful of what you eat iron-wise unlike someone without Celiacs (vegan or not) or someone who likes and can afford beef and can eat as much of it as they want.
There are lentils, beans, tofu, dark leafy greens and other sources of iron. There are iron-fortified foods. IIRC there are other considerations that might prevent careless or food-addicted people from getting enough iron like vitamin C to help with the iron absorption or not eating foods that decrease it.
There are plenty of vegans with Celiacs who manage their iron adequately. But even if you're one of those cases where iron needs to be supplemented, even IV - why not? If you disregard all the arguments against beef or animal products in general it's easy to make the argument that beef would be the best solution.
This reads like appeal to authority (the nutritionist) but a lot of nutritionists take the easy road ("just eat beef") or aren't good at all (haven't kept up with research). That's true of the majority of doctors and the majority of programmers (something people here will be able to relate to in case they haven't realized how useless most doctors are). I've been in and out of hospitals for several relatives for years and have heard doctors tell me outright falsehoods that show they have a only basic understanding of something. That makes sense since those doctors must know about so much more than the patient (thousands of diseases, lots of scientific knowledge about biology) but with a depth-first search into a topic you can spot how most of them have either stopped reading new studies or have lost their motivation to explore all option or have just stopped caring for providing the best kind of care. I hope people here don't have to go through what I have. That was a bit of a tangent, but I already wrote it so I'll keep it as a mini-rant.
> Beef is kind of an important thing in our diets, that's all. Now that I'm back to a more normal level I'll go back to eating less of it, but I am now very conscious how important red meat is in a rounded diet.
That's not really true. I'm sure you could ask vegans or vegetarians or Hindus or anyone who doesn't eat beef but has Celiacs and you'd get a whole bunch of options for managing it. Sure, you'll find ignorant people who think eating fruits all the time is enough but that's the same kind of carelessness that leads to non-vegans eating the standard Western diet all the time or doing other basic mistakes.
The same is true for almost everything. Almost nothing is "an important thing in our diets". People live without nuts or fruits or vegetables or legumes or meat or eggs or dairy (not all at once, of course, although I wouldn't be surprised if someone managed to avoid all these) and are able to manage pretty much any disease other groups of people can manage.
> calories are only part of the picture when it comes to food
True, people should care about the macros and micros. But with the internet it's trivial to do so both wrt learning what does what and how much is needed, and to track how much one eats from each.
So you put up a fight because people put something on their own land that doesn't look pretty without a HOA agreement in place? Or am I missing something?
If I were living there and wanted to do an upgrade like solar panels but then some neighbor complained that my house is an "eye sore" and was supposedly decreasing their property value, I'd be really frustrated.
Can anyone provide historical data for "job busts" or other types of declines in tech employment, massive layoffs or hire freezes? I seem to read about something like this every few years. Would like some data to see if this trend is stronger than the previous ones or not.
Here's some historical data for employment in category NAICS 5415: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUMN5415W200000000. Which, NAICS 5415 definitely isn't a complete picture of tech employment, but it should give rough correlation I would hope.
The big ones: dot-com bust (2001-2003) saw ~560k tech jobs lost per BLS, took until roughly 2007 to recover. 2008 financial crisis hit tech less hard but still significant layoffs. Then 2022-2023 saw ~260k+ layoffs tracked by layoffs.fyi, mostly at companies that had massively overhired during the ZIRP/COVID era. The current cycle feels like a continuation of that 2022-2023 correction more than a new event - hiring never really bounced back the way it did after previous downturns.
> This is a perfect illustration of what cracks me up about the hyperbolic reactions to Mythos. Yes, increased automation of cutting-edge vulnerability discovery will shake things up a bit. No, it's nowhere near the top of what should be keeping you awake at night if you're working in infosec.
Mythos will most likely not be the main thing that changes the infosec world, but AI in general will. Maybe in a few years or even decades, but I doubt it will just be another tool to have in our tool belt or another type of threat to consider.
> We've built our existing tech stacks and corporate governance structures for a different era. If you want to credit one specific development for making things dramatically worse, it's cryptocurrencies, not AI. [...]
One could argue it just accelerated everything. Without crypto it would still be possible to hack things and take the money out. It would require more manpower but it would be doable. Cash, wire transfers - nothing is perfectly secure. How are you going to prosecute someone in a foreign country like Russia or NK or even most Asian or African countries the West doesn't have strong relationships with? Even if you could, what's to stop the threat actors from bribing some poor person to take the fault if and when they're caught? If I'm a struggling farmer in Whateverstan, I'll happily take $50000 to give to my family in order to move millions to you.
And that acceleration of crime has positive aspects, too. Now a lot more people care about security. More care is given to making our infra and software in general more secure. Of course it's still insecure as shit, but I think it would be even more insecure if we didn't have cryptocurrency and the issues it brought with it.
Cryptocurrency has a few positives, too. Being able to drugs online (small, current positive) or to know that if shit hits the fan politically, we at least have the technological foundation to escape oppressive, corrupt and dysfunctional governments financially (big, potential positive), even for a while, until we get out shit together financially. It hasn't happened yet, but since even a lot of laypeople know about cryptocurrency, it's possible it could help some people somewhere in the future.
It's similar with privacy - if no one abused the data we gave them, we wouldn't have as many laws about data privacy and we wouldn't have as many people who care about their privacy. You can argue that we're at the point of no return because there are trackers and cameras everywhere, both public and private. That's similar, but a bit different since it's an already established infrastructure. It's harder to fight against something like that but if we do, we could still change it. Perhaps another acceleration in that direction is what we need - mass invasion of privacy so we can collectively wake up and dismantle the current status quo.
IMO the thing that AI will change is the type of target. It's reasonable to assume that if you launch a website for a small business nowadays - sure, you'll get phishing attempts, port scans, attempts to submit SQL injections into your signup forms, etc.
But you won't get the equivalent of a sophisticated actor's spear-phishing efforts, highly customized supply chain attacks on likely vendor data, the individualized attention to not just blindly propagate when a developer downloads a hacked NPM package or otherwise gets a local virus... but to log into the company's SaaS systems overnight, pivot to senior colleagues, do crazy things like update PRs to simultaneously fix bugs while subtly adding injection surface areas, log into configuration systems whose changes aren't tracked in Git, identify how one might sign up as a vendor and trigger automatic payments to themselves with a Slack DM as cross-channel confirmation, etc.
The only thing holding this back from hitting every company is risk vs. reward. And when the likelihood of success, multiplied by the payout, exceeds the token cost - which might not happen with Mythos, but might happen with open source coding models distilled from it, running on crypto mining servers during times that minting is unprofitable, or by state actors for whom mere chaos is the goal - that threshold is rapidly approaching.
We the citizens, specifically the tech-inclined people who would be able to set up wallets for the different vendors. I have bought fast food from a small non-chain store with Bitcoin once, for what it's worth.
Sure, if the chili peppers or the beans are not packaged, you could buy as little as you want. Sometimes you might get funny looks, sometimes they'll give you the bean for free as it's not worth the hassle to sell an individual bean.
But what about prepackaged beans, like 500 gram pack? You can't open the package and expect to pay for part of it. Sometimes the beans are packaged by the grocery store with their branding. That's the same as not letting you buy an individual bean.
As a suggestion, I saw you have RSS:
https://honeypot.net/feed.xml
I didn't see it mentioned in the main page or About or Archive. Maybe add it to a more visible place?
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