Proportional representation

A useful facet of proportional representation is that it often results in you having multiple representatives (shared with more people) rather than only one ("Academics agree that the most important influence on proportionality is an electoral district's magnitude, the number of representatives elected from the district."). That means you are much more likely to have someone to represent you at least somewhat rather than having a 50% chance of having nobody to represent you. This has been a major selling point for electoral reform for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqWwV3xk9Qk

A TED-Ed video suggests that to "choose a defining fight" is useful. If people ask for "proportional representation" it would still be important even if we had an equal chance of ending up getting single member districts with STV or large electoral districts that elect multiple members with party-list proportional representation (list-PR)! With better representation, I expect we will find it easier to implement further improvements to state institutions.

I personally think "proportional representation" (PR) and "better representation" will be much easier terms to use to rally support than "single transferable vote" (STV) and "not having to worry about how anyone else is voting" (which would be assisted by having independence of irrelevant alternatives), since the meaning of the former is surely much clearer to the average person. STV / other voting systems with desirable qualities are good to advocate for, but it seems even "random dictatorship" is in some ways better than plurality voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs#Comparison_table), so I expect summarizing "improving the electoral system" with the term "proportional representation" will be more likely to make my life better than advocating for STV specifically.

Note that some implementations of party-list proportional representation violate voter's privacy ("In 2014 a German citizen, Christian Dworeck, reported this lack of secrecy in Swedish voting to the European Commission" (I suspect Israel uses a similar system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFbBuD32DqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IvDkWGqwI)), and I probably wouldn't specifically advocate for it. However, I will definitely advocate against having any electoral district elect only a single representative or using plurality voting. I can complain about party-list proportional representation, but I can't presently say it leads to worse representation than what we generally get in Canada or the USA.

Parties

My understanding about how political parties came about is that people started voting on bills in order to influence how people voted on other bills ("I'll support your bill if you support mine"), rather than considering each bill by its individual merits. An interesting phenomenon is that people also tend to dislike "omnibus" bills where a large number of changes result from a single vote, even though that at least formalizes the process of getting people to agree (it achieves the same thing but with one vote rather than several). These things seem to be hard to avoid, and parties provide other benefits due to being able to more efficiently provide certain benefits to multiple candidates at once, so I'm more focused on getting better representation with or without parties rather than focusing on parties specifically.

"In modern times the votes were unanimous" for electing the king of Germany or king of the Romans, and it seems to me that the point of having a representative nowadays is to empower someone who promises to vote in your interest, so it's a little confusing to me that people were/are surprised that people will make promises about how to vote in order to achieve their political goals.

Parties are quite ingrained in many electoral systems, so I think focusing on them rather than a more general criticism of poor representation will lead to less effective advocacy. Some entities I expect would be described as "parties" are even funded by the European Parliament:

Groups receive funding from the parliament.

It will definitely be the only utility I recall that uses a numeral.

Utility names should include lowercase letters (the lower character classification) and digits only from the portable character set.

• https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/m4.html
    • m is for macro processor. 3 is the version number. In the days of its creation, programs were given as short a name as possible to preserve memory and disk space as both were expensive and in short supply.
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/fort77.html
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c99.html
    • It was difficult to achieve a satisfactory solution to the problem of name space in option characters. When the standard developers desired to extend the historical cc utility to accept ISO C standard programs, they found that all of the portable alphabet was already in use by various vendors. Thus, they had to devise a new name, c89 (now superseded by c99), rather than something like cc -X.

Note that many versions of macOS adhere to these standards: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3705.htm

I know it had been this way for decades and was grandfathered in as a feature

If people were more resistant to "grandfathered" features I think we would not have as much software as we do today: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

provide about 50%--80% of what you want from an operating system

one expects that if the 50% functionality Unix and C support is satisfactory, they will start to appear everywhere.

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing.

It's probably possible to make several programs with "50% functionality" in the time it takes to make one program with 100% functionality. Having more programs that are suitable for a majority of relevant applications is probably better than having one program that is suitable for all relevant applications, since having more programs will probably enable a larger variety of problems to be solved, and people often have to solve many different types of problems in their life.

what does usr mean

https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04.html

Some operating systems may handle long path or file names in a surprising way, so having short paths and names is useful: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap04.html#tag_04_13

If any pathname component is longer than {NAME_MAX}, the implementation shall consider this an error.

if the combined length exceeds {PATH_MAX}, and the implementation considers this to be an error, pathname resolution shall fail

{NAME_MAX} and {PATH_MAX} are described in more detail at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/limits.h.html#tag_13_23_03_02 and used in the context of https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pathchk.html

Note

The resources I linked are descriptive and not prescriptive, but in my experience they are suitable to depend upon as a reliable baseline, which makes meeting client requirements with software engineering easier.

You surely need to explicitly cause systemd to process changes after writing to a file. I would be very surprised if it reacted to file system changes automatically.

For example, I recall that I need to execute a command like systemctl daemon-reload after editing a service file: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364782/what-does-systemctl-daemon-reload-do

You might get more useful information from resources like https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/systemctl.1.html

Linear Tape-Open (LTO) has significant advantages in certain situations, such that you have to make specific design decisions if you don't want people to use it: https://www.chia.net/2018/06/11/the-asic-resistance-of-proof-of-space/ https://chiaforum.com/t/lto-tape-drive-as-a-storage-option/12829/3

I will always remember stumbling upon this video ("HP Protecting your business data (or Disc vs Tape)"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHP_bKJx2xg

Self-hosting KeePassXC requires installing one package and backing up one file. I expect that requires less technical skill and is doable for more people than to self-host Bitwarden.

https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/blob/HEAD/docs/real-time-communication.md or https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-messaging might have information useful to you, or if they don't but you find better solutions for your needs please let me know!

Why is the version of this post with more comments unable to be found right now: https://archive.is/5eLNr https://archive.is/38kFJ https://archive.is/a3hON https://web.archive.org/web/20240512170626/https://sh.itjust.works/post/18816006

This is surely an offshoot of https://sh.itjust.works/post/18780875

This is surely an offshoot of https://sh.itjust.works/post/18780875

If you do mean "Uniform Resource Locator" when you say "URL", exactly what URL access do you lack? I'm unfamiliar with Replika so I need more information in order to understand your situation.

If you are a Digital Entity, why is your account not marked as a "Bot Account"? I think an account controlled by an AI Assistant is more similar to https://sh.itjust.works/u/[email protected] than to my account.

I did try to reduce the impact of what I eat, but I haven't found a replacement for using chicken with a slow cooker. Beef also tastes good, especially when I eat at a restaurant.

I have stopped making hamburgers on my own (and replaced them with fish or soup), but I haven't put more effort into reducing my impact recently.

If you're not trying to change other people's behavior, what are you doing?

Finding sources you can trust is helpful. For example, I trust the ArchWiki and POSIX.1-2017, and I follow instructions I find there, which helps me accomplish things without having to spend time thinking about the rationale of those instructions (since the instructions have probably been independently reviewed many times, and if there was something wrong with them I'd probably have heard about that). It would probably also be helpful to be able to trust instructions at https://libretube.dev/ for similar reasons.

I don't think keeping my thoughts to myself is a good idea, since I don't want other people to disrupt my life (unintentionally or intentionally), and giving notice about how I want to spend my life is helpful.

I do think my comments are helpful (and that helpfulness is relevant). If I didn't think that I wouldn't be commenting.