I think people lose sight of the fact that there are quite a few people who move their votes back and forth, particularly in those swing states. He won in 2024 because a lot of people put cost-of-living, immigration, housing, and staying out of foreign wars as their highest priorities, and those were his main talking points. He's utterly failed to deliver on those promises (you could argue he did what he promised on immigration, but even the supporters disliked how he went about it). So, this vote is a rebuke. It's a vote against Trump's execution of the plan, not the plan itself. Importantly, those people still want those things, and prioritize those issues, and it doesn't look like the democrats have a believable plan to deliver on them, and they actually tend to talk around those issues. That means two years from now there's going to be an opportunity for someone else to come out of the woodwork and campaign on the same issues and re-invigorate those swing voters. A Trump 2.0. Most of these voters are working class people who are traditionally supportive of democrats, so I'd love to see the dems get their heads out of their asses and offer this group something real and tangible, particularly on housing affordability, but it seems like they openly despise the working class, and it's hard to shake that off. Fingers crossed.

Will it though? Ken Paxton and Ramaswamy are the most obvious examples, but there were at least several others. The GOP has a habit lately of selecting the candidates with the most possible baggage for some reason. The story of this election isn't that people like Democrats. It is that enough self-inflicted wounds senseless backing candidates that can only win under ideal voter turnout scenarios vs candidates some might cross a partly line for will sink you.

Ohio really is pretty red usually, as is Texas, and even with demographic changes I don't think the issue was really that a centerist RINO candidate was need, but candidates that could keep their foot out of their mouth and did not have history of obvious corruption and narrow legal escapes over the immediate past years were.

The other thing is the Trump admin has really f**ed up with Iran.. They should hit those desal plants and the oil terminals four months ago. It would have broken the regime, people would have shouted 'war crimes' or whatever but it would have been out of the news by now. Iran would be like Syria forgotten but for a few NGOs trying to deliver foods stuffs and drinking water to camps. Fuel prices even without Iran's production on the world market but safe-ish passage enabled would be a lot lower. The GOP could have campaigned on having truly ended and evil regime after 50 years. The other likely as politically useful choice would have been to have not done it at all and worked to liken the defense of Israel to that of Ukraine in the public's mind..

Fundamentally Trump has the right ideas, but his execution and the people he leverages to execute are a clown show, the same was true of course for the Biden administration. The lesson though is public service attracts the least capable but most power hungry among us. Best we can hope for is that Trump really does destroy as much of the administrative infrastructure as possible on his way out so the next guys whatever party they belong to can't use it!

Nobody supports everything their candidate stands for. That's completely unreasonable, and you know it. There are many people who voted democrat who don't stand for all the things their democrat candidate stands for. A good example would be the highly unpopular "defund the police" policies that were all the rage a few years ago. It's quite reasonable to vote for a democrat who pushes the defund the police movement even if you don't agree because on the balance of issues you'd prefer the democrat policies over the republican. Hypothetically if you had two Trumps running, are you culpable for their actions no matter which one you voted for? Are you saying that unless you agree with every single policy that your democrat candidate supports, you should just not vote? That seems absurd, and it would be hard to find anyone who agrees with your argument. Both parties are a coalition of groups, many of whom don't agree on fundamental ideas (e.g. Muslim groups and women's groups) and yet they agree to hold their noses and work together to push a certain set of policies. Traditionally the democrats actually have the much broader and less cohesive coalition, so the idea that someone voting democrat would actually support all the policies of their candidate is highly unlikely. The republicans (before Trump) were mostly a coalition of business interests and Christian groups. The business owners dutifully showed up at church despite not being very religious, and agreed to vote against access to abortion while knowing abortions were always going to be available for their daughters if they had enough money, and Christian groups agreed to promote a very un-Jesus pro-free-market de-regulation agenda in exchange. It was a smaller but tighter coalition, and was actually pretty successful.

How much has your government money grown in that time?

Allegedly this is how many AI companies are scraping the web for training data.

No IP ranges to effectively blacklist.

No, that's incorrect. The guy who just thinks everything costs too much isn't "voting for violence". He sees two parties, only one of which is putting forward policies that address his concerns, and he votes for that one. You majorly over-estimate the amount of effort that the average person puts into politics.

WAT?

It takes more than couple days to test and push software patches. You do want things tested right, you'd hate get a TZ file where someone fat fingered something and systems set to a given zone all default to GMT or something right because they can't parse the row needed?

Also it isn't just computers timezone change impact. Contracts may involve hourly payments etc, and people might need to negotiate changes; not many people maybe but not nobody.

Honestly I don't see any universe where responsible governance would change time standards with less than years notice. Not that it does not happen but there is no reason that is should. What possibly makes it so urgent to change right now if you want to stop doing DST -> STD vs pass the law now have it take effect before the next would be time change after this one?

Thank you for this sensible comment.

There are people who don't know most of the things that you think are important. They have other things they think are important. They get to vote. Unless you want to take away some people's votes or you want to force everyone else to agree with you at gunpoint, then you're going to have to do the hard work of politics, which involves listening, persuasion, and ultimately compromise. It's harder but it's better for everyone than the other outcome, which is just violence.

That's interesting. It works for me. I'm located in Canada and it's a CBC documentary, and also I have a premium account. Maybe one of those details affects it.

I agree, but I also have to point out that depending on what priorities you have while voting, there aren't always any good options. Let's say you identify as a "worker" (unskilled) and you don't get too involved in the social politics and your biggest concern is that everything costs more and you don't feel like you'll ever afford a house. That's your biggest priority - a good paying job and cost of living. Historically, that's a pretty common priority issue. It's pretty easy to sell you on the idea that two reasons for this problem are that all the good paying jobs were shipped overseas during the globalization push (which is true) and that whatever basic labor jobs are left, that immigration tends to push down wages for those jobs (which is true to a first approximation, anyway). Traditionally this person would vote Democrat, the party that's supposed to stick up for the little guy, like him. But it's pretty easy to convince this guy that the ("neo-Liberal") Democrats are pro-immigration, and of course the Republicans have traditionally been pro-immigration. And on globalization, both parties are pro-free-trade. Mostly this just pisses him off and he sits home on voting day, not feeling like either one represents his interest. Now when the Republicans surprise-elect a guy who starts talking about tariffs and building a wall, and at the same time the Democrats are spending a lot of time talking about things that aren't his priority, I don't think it's surprising when that guy goes and votes Republican. You and I see Trump for the danger he is to the systems of the country, but that guy isn't even aware of what those systems are or how they work, and if he is aware, he thinks those systems are rigged against him. We're all coming at this with our own lived experience, and from that guy's point of view, Trump looks like the only candidate representing his priority interests after literally decades of feeling those interests were ignored. It's not enough that Trump is bad for ideological reasons. The Democrats need to offer this group something tangible that they really want. They want to own a house, and be able to afford to have BBQs and see ballgames and save up for a boat they can take down to the lake. And they know their grandparents lived that dream.

> Western Humanism came from the Catholic Church and ultimately Protestantism

Mostly agree though a synthesis of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Hermeticism seems to have been needed to form the American system. Ideas migrated from Scotland to America then back to Europe.

Double Determinism is incompatible with Jury Systems, for instance - that developed under Catholicism in England.

None of these New Atheists would ever go a day without the concepts of Natural Rights, Presumption of Innocence, Blackstone's Formulation, Universal Suffrage, etc. They'd rebel against the Divine Right of Kings, Prima Nocta, etc.

They would never be happy in Maoist China despite claiming to have no religious beliefs. Game Theory for the Collective is another cultural option but Westerners often can't even see the Christian waters they swim in.

Or, hey, maybe some of them secretly wish they were in Pol Pot's position in our society. Hopefully they all have 20/20 vision.

yeah I have done a bit of that on my little personal projects, that I have "vibe coded".

It is fun because you get to look at code, like it is the 90s again, and everything there is relevant and important. As much as people fear AI is going to generate a lot of incomprehensible mud-ball programs, it is actually pretty good and generating concise things, that are easy to read.

HOWEVER...

Those personal projects don't resemble the requirements of contemporary software. Even internal enterprise software these days often needs support for stuff like internationalization, accessibility support, adaptive UI that is useful and efficent for the comptroller with the 43" monitor and for the CEO who insists he only needs a 6" mobile phone for all the things.

The libraries are big because they do all that stuff, and if skip them you don't get that stuff. 80% of the time you don't need that stuff. That said, for your little S-corp, or even smaller LLC you might not need that stuff right now but very suddenly you might find that you do. When you do you'll be rewriting or at least rebasing a lot of code back onto those big library stacks; where as if you'd used them in the fist place it would probably be just add some start up parameters to flip on 'high contrast mode' in the display tool kit for the color blind person you just hired. Alternative you could try to just add the functionality you now need, but of course then you are just putting the complexity right back and getting to run a new untested system, with lot of fun corner cases and gotchas for you to discover all by yourself because you did not know enough about the subject to tell the AI Agent what it all it really needed to do.

It is fashionable to hate on all the complexity, but to often people forget about the simplicity it affords. You can today get an incredible amount of functionality out of handful of lines of "application" code. If I use a browser as my UI, a single gives me an edit control where a user can write click and get spelling suggestions, the get ranged selection support, I can style it with a few more lines of re-usable css, screen readers know what to do with it, and more; try that with your win32 CreateWindowEx() edit control....

Complexity means bugs, because bugs are ultimately a function of interactions that were not considered fully, the more stuff interacting either the more buggy it will be or the more effort will be need to control for it. The complexity though exists because people demanded it, society decided software had to be usable even if you don't speak English, and we decided things like it should portable even if you change computer architecture, and .... achieving all that without the library ecosystem really would be impractical.

Sure - it does for the OS what puppet does for configuration.

I was at a Wendy's during a big data center outage and all the kiosks were down.

For some reason their down state is to drop to Windows Explorer. I found it interesting that they were managing their international fleet of probably tens if thousands of terminals using puppet to ensure deployment consistency.

The filesystem didn't appear to be readonly to the kiosk user, though I didn't test that. (have some sympathy for IT guys)

This new project could attest to the OS level integrity of those systems on a Redhat derived system. That way you know nobody slipped in a keylogger during a datacenter outage.

I'll take another look when they support the Debian OS family - Redhat makes some very unfortunate decisions these days. Debian Security does a better job for my requirements.

People with large scale problems don't seem to have much PDS and can evaluate systems without ad hominum fallacies. It's good for making a list of emotional commenters though.

model weights already more or less "contain" several partial OS kernels,

No, they don't. They were trained on that data, but they are not that data. You can't extract it from weights, and I highly doubt you'd be able to reproduce it from weights, even on an exceedingly large model.

At best, it's a work inspired by the original, not even a derivative. There's no "substantial or material" replication.