Well I’m not exactly happy about him so not the greatest example of who I would vote for.

To the extent that people are in his cult, he was a national celebrity heralded as the leader of multinational business concerns. That distinction should have carried huge burden of those concerns being crap, but the apprentice made him out to be smart supreme businessman.

As compelling as AOC might be. Her track record even in theory is a single congressional district.

I feel it’s premature to assume JD would be the GOP candidate. No one particularly likes him, even as some people like trump for whatever reason.

Yeah, I knew someone who voted that way, he voted for Trump and we see how that worked out…

I think the argument would be that the voter strategy changes and they vote their preference more confidently instead of going all prisoner’s dilemma and trying to vote the person that other people will vote for that is most acceptable. So a large volume of people vote for their second choice and never express their true preference in a FPTP system.

However, I do think he would have carried a FPTP system as well, the other candidates were all pretty terrible, and everyone 100% knew the Republican candidate was never going to matter so they didn’t even have to sweat the ‘who can pull the center’ thinking.

NYC had ranked choice in the primaries, but honestly I don’t think it mattered this time because as far as I could tell, Mamdani was the only vaguely credible candidate from the onset. The field was otherwise pretty broken by the Eric Adams mess and Cuomo trying to stage a political comeback despite being at his best times merely an ‘acceptable’ politician and then suffering scandal.

A practice run, to refine their strategy to declare "election I don’t agree with* into insurrection. If it can work, get ready for it to get rolled out like crazy in 2026.

Though passkeys are now commonly shared across devices. That was one of the changes they made. For example, chrome will gladly do all the passkey management in the Google password manager. Under Linux at least there’s isn’t even a whiff of trying to integrate with a hardware security device. First pass they demanded either a USB device or Bluetooth connection to a phone doing it credibly, or windows hello under windows, but now they decided to open it up.

Technically the truth, but an argument can be made that 2FA was mostly more secure by virtue of how bad password security is, and selling a switch to passkey as a convenience is a big security win.

Also with passkey, you’ll be commonly be forced to do some sort of device unlock making it generally the “thing you have” require either “thing you are” or “thing you know” so it becomes effectively 2fa.

If a service were going to passkeys for sake of law enforcement or works be so much easier for them to just comply with bypassing auth to access the user data altogether. Passkey implementations originally only supported very credible offline mechanisms and only relaxed those requirements when it became clear the vast majority of people couldn’t handle replacing their devices with passkeys.

For screen lock for the common person it was either that or nothing at all. So demanding a PIN only worked because most of the time the user didn’t have to deal with it owing to touching a fingerprint or face unlock.

People hate passwords and mitigate that aggravation by giving random Internet forum the same password as their bank account. I wouldn’t want to take user passwords because I know I have a much higher risk of a compromise somehow leading to compromise of actually important accounts elsewhere.

That’s how you get a promotion.

I wish I was kidding.

Still all over the place and still claiming it’s all just ‘owning the libs’.

Just yesterday I heard a republican congressman saying “He’s just trolling the democrats”.

Except how bad was it for Microsoft?

They didn’t lose share. For the people that rightfully saw Metro as a painful dumb direction in Windows design language, they just stuck with Windows 7. Microsoft didn’t have upside they wanted, but they didn’t have the downside.

They tried to pump life into their mobile platform by throwing their desktop platform under the bus. Because they have zero competitive pressure, they attempt to do that with essentially zero downsides. Just like now they can make their OS little more than an advertising platform for the Microsoft Store and Microsoft services without real repurcussion.

Remember even in his first term the GOP lost the midterms.

His first term was bad, but not nearly as bad. We didn’t have military occupation of our own cities. We didn’t have masked men abducting people off the streets into unmarked vans. We didn’t have a trade war with practically every other country. We didn’t have massive inflation after a prior year of massive inflation. We didn’t have suspension of food security. We didn’t have farmers being undermined by all this while a huge bailout is done to a foreign country. We weren’t mobilizing our military for an apparent invasion.

So the Democrats might have a chance. Removal from office may not be on the table, but at least some check on executive power might be exercised. We may be stuck with a PJ2025 executive branch for at least the next couple of years after that, but at least maybe there can be some mitigation. It’s at least worth a try.

Depressingly I wouldn’t characterize the last decade of elections as being as much a Republican or Democratic loss as much as pretty much every single election being a loss for whomever the perceived incumbent of the time.

I think I’d rather have fruits and vegetables than impossible beef. To me it tastes worse than beef or vegetables just being their natural selves.

I read that maybe beyond meat does it better, but haven’t bothered to try it.

Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.

Keep in mind she wasn’t in the inside of politics until the Biden term. It could be that she was a true believer in the talking points that everything wrong was the Democrats fault and that maga would “drain the swamp” if they just had a chance. His first term the kept claiming deep state and dem inference. Now she can’t help but to see how it is and his second term is so much more openly corrupt.

The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.

Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…

But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.

Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.

the highest turnout of registered voters and young voters in American history.

This is one of the problems with how we’ve pushed the messages like “rock the vote”, that you should vote, no matter what, or you’re being a bad citizen.

If you can’t be bothered to actually try to be informed, then you shouldn’t feel pressure to vote. Sure, you should be allowed to vote no matter what, but no one should be pressuring you to vote even with lack of interest.

We should be emphasizing you should get to know the candidates up and down the ballot, not just getting your mark on a ballot.

Risky joke, woosh is very likely.

Why Putin seems to be so good at doing that is anyone’s guess.

It’s probably not all that hard. We’ve seen him waffle back and forth on this one so it seems like just about anybody with the patience and will to be a sycophant can butter him up and convince him of anything.