schmuckonwheels

Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen.

It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect.

Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams.

Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem.

Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.

Experts say

Yes the visual clarity of staring into a reflection of my own shirt, and any light within 10m.

There is no worse eye strain that looking at anything that isn't supposed to be on the screen. It's 90% noise.

I've been saying glossy screens are pure cancer for 20 years and every time I was dismissed as a Luddite that should get with the times.

Now they can sell you "nano texture" at a premium after getting you hooked on functionally terrible displays (they look pretty in the store though).

My worst experience with glossy displays was when I had to perform some work outside on a sunny day and I comically could not see a single thing. It looked like a pure black square. I laughed, packed up and left, and told my boss it wasn't happening.

Rest in peace, Sky King.

That's great. Ask and ye shall receive.

What's most surprising is churches notoriously have really sketchy electrical. There had to be some renovation in that regard, right?

It's more about when Google assumed full control of the cloud, the browser, the OS, and everything in between they self-appointed themselves as the unelected standards board of the Internet, and forced everyone else to follow their whims and timelines. Some of which are completely insane.

You must be mistaken.

This site stopped being Startup News just like Facebook became the 'metaverse' overnight.

Google does whatever is convenient and makes them money. Altruism was never part of the equation.

Google thrives on being the Internet's biggest bully.

It turns out when nerds get a billion dollars they like being bullies too.

"To demonstrate how crappy most front door locks are, to boost our company's social media cred we will be leaving drills and a dish of bump keys at the entrance of the neighborhood."

An article about "infrastructure" that opens up with a dramatic description of a datacenter stuffed into an old church, I would expect more than just generic clipart you'd see in the back half of Wired magazine.

I wasn't expecting to read a podcast when clicking.

Disappointed with the lack of pictures.

This is the type of cool shit I come to HN for. Thanks for posting this.

Unfortunately, it may be lost amongst the noise, and what I see being massively upvoted instead:

• Some schizo conspiratorial screed about Epstein that I refuse to click.

• Multiple off-topic political / culture war bullshit links.

Because like most political threads, it will largely consist of people with a crayon-and-coloring-book understanding of geopolitics posting low-effort snipes and trading insults while contributing basically zero to productive discussion.

The most disgusting example of this in recent memory was the Scott Adams death thread, where complimentary comments were being aggressively flagged, and toxic vitriol was being upvoted. It made me finally realize how many joyless, seriously broken people lurk here.

Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.

That's correct.

In the case of Twitter, it was disclosed that many of their systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point of being a security liability, which raises the question: if the systems weren't being maintained, wtf were all those people doing? Taste-testing the free food and cappuccinos?

Is there a substantive connection?

Like all the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.

It's also ironic in the sense it implies the indignant people were so bad at their jobs they designed and built a system so fragile it would collapse without constant intervention from thousands of individuals.

You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?

My money is on expired certificate.

If so, successful test.

I see multiple posts here speculating on cyberattack—as opposed to "we pushed a bad configuration update which messed everything up irreparably"—you know, like it has been every other time before this.

E.g., Cloudflare, Meta (who in doing so also locked themselves out of the building), and didn't some bumbling major Canadian telco knock themselves offline for like a week not too long ago?

I'll save you the click: India is not affected.

The list includes Russia, Iran, lots of RU-aligned nations, and a bunch that probably have security issues.

The only one that stood out as odd was Thailand.

18.7.3 is no longer available as beta? It was as of a few weeks ago. Public or Developer beta?

Absolutely. This reeks.

My iPads on 18.7.3 just yesterday started pushing notifications to upgrade to 26.2 again.

Guess Apple wants to pump up those numbers. If they really cared, if they had an ethical bone in their body, they would release 18.7.3 to the public WHICH THEY ALREADY HAVE STAGED.

This is more like blackmail where they are dangling these security issues over everyone's head as some scare tactic to upgrade, instead of giving everyone access to the iOS 18 security patch which already exists.

Your stance is all software should die as soon as the generation of chip it was developed on stops being sold?

Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore.

Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious.

With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out.

When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.

And what about Carbon?

Gone.

32-bit apps?

Gone.

PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old?

Forget it.

You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps!

Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today.

Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.

It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.

including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF

Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.

Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.

the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music.

Legally mandated backup cameras make your idea DOA.

In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.

Wondering why transmissions are insanely complicated and unreliable now? Manufacturers were forced to eek out an extra couple MPG due to continually tightening environmental regulations. Something has to give.

Screaming into the void about how your device is so great it could be used for attestation, combined with a small but vocal security industry full of grifting chicken littles, virtually guaranteed this would happen.

The real irony here is the use of free software to tear down everything the free software movement stood for.

It did, and some of the things it was more effective at.

I remember BlackBerry OS 4.x (?) had a built-in password manager app and this was in the mid-2000s. By comparison this was added to iOS 18 in 2024.

What it wasn't good at was things like games and toxic consumer rich media bullshit. The industry saw dollar signs with iOS and Android and never wrote apps for the ecosystem.

Remember the days when Instagram was iOS-only?

But here we are, resigned to typing on glass for the rest of our lives because some hippie burnout thought it was a good idea.