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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It’s certainly capable, and has a more structured pipeline structure saving you in theory from awkwardness of grep/awk sorts of ‘processing’ that may be out of whack. It also has a command model where whether you are calling cmdlets or .Net functions, it’s lighter weight than a typical bash interaciton that has to fork/exec every little thing (and the ability to invoke .Net functions means a lot of capabilities that are normally not directly available to something like bash).

    However, from a user experience, it’s got a few things that can be a problem:

    • It’s a bit too ‘programmer-y’, and particularly maybe a bit too perl-y. Some of the same criticisms of how perl can be a bit of a mess carry over to powershell.
    • It’s ecosystem is mostly just whatever Microsoft gives to you. The *nix side of the house has had a diverse ecosystem, but Microsoft is largely on their own. Good hooks into most Microsoft products, but not a whole not of third party enablement.
    • Other shells have better and/or richer UX, like fish

  • The point is that you can’t “pipe GUI output to other command”, the GUI would actually have to serialize things in a useful way and send to that fifo. Similarly you can’t send stuff to it’s stdin and expect it to do anything sane.

    Further, since you can’t seek() in a fifo, a lot of likely GUI applications involving files would break on trying to deal with a fifo. Also the typical GUI app on read doesn’t assume a ‘tail -f’ like approach to arbitrary file inputs.





  • 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.





  • 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.



  • 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.





  • 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.