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Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.

sadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality.

One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet.

That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.


> it’s inherent to the internet.

Who said the election needs to take place on the internet?

A paper ballot-style election, while not perfect either, works well enough in practice.


It could work depending on how it is set up. Maybe only accounts with n-number of years get 1 single vote, and maybe don't let any random 2-day old account get a vote.

So now accounts are worth even more money or reason to steal.

As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.

In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.

Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.


Necessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"

Yes, the "important" ones need some special attention. If "democracy" where anybody can create arbitrary amount of accounts is however questionable.

The vast majority of sub forums however are more targeted and smaller to begin with.


Squatting is bad no matter how niche the topic

Squatting also invites corruption and selling rights to control what is posted to a sub.

You see this in city-focused subreddits. But the reality is the name is power. New users type in their city and join the original one. The hostile mods suppress mention of the new one. It never manages to get critical mass.

A democratic election requires that the elected be your employee, where you work with him on a regular basis to direct him in his job. That works (ish) in government where people doing the hiring have heavily invested life interests in it succeeding.

Does a subforum offer the same? Once the mod is elected, are you going to sit down with him each day to make sure he is doing the job to your wishes and expectations? I say (ish) in government because it often doesn't even work there, even where people have heavily invested life interests, with a lot (maybe even the vast majority!) of people never getting involved in democracy. A subforum? Who cares?

If there were to be elections, it is unlikely they could be anything other than authoritarianly, with the chosen one becoming the ultimate power.


Stack Overflow does this and it works far better than arbitrary tyrant style moderation.

Crucially, SO's election system needs to be bootstrapped: users aren't eligible to vote until they have a history of participation. The level of participation is fairly trivial, but it provides enough signal to allow a reasonable detection (and elimination) of bot / sock puppet networks without resorting to crude measures like blacklists or "bot tests".

For new sites, this meant that the bulk of moderation was done by employees, followed by employee-appointed temporary moderators. This dramatically reduced abuse, but also reduced the explosion of new sub-communities that sites like Reddit thrived on.


Stack Overflow is dead now.

I don’t think it was ever very good.

It was pretty decent in the mid and late 00s. The community started turning toxic in the very early 10s and by about 2015 was quite poisonous. The saddest part is that the problem was known and spoken about frequently, but the response to that from staff and/or high-level mods was to just double down and dig in.

Probably, but now it's actually dead by all the metrics. People ask LLMs instead because they won't close their questions.

Why? Genuinely curious.

I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.


Internet is way behind on democracy. In general everyone likes democracy until they're in charge, then they realise they're the best person to be in charge and the idiots who vote don't have a clue, and should probably be banned if not beheaded for speaking out of turn.

You'd have to weight votes by some kind of participation metric to solve the problem of very little authentication of the voters


I wonder if the war with Iran could actually fix the RAM shortage. If this continues it really could put a damper on datacenter rollout.

How much of the capital investment that’s fueling the current expansion is already allocated?

No idea. Let's assume not all of it.

Why would you not be able to build a PC around it? That's what you do with PowerPC.

Are M* chips even beating AMD anyway?

On average according to Geekbench, the M5 compared to the 9950X is ~17% faster in single thread performance and ~30% slower in multithread performance.

Individual benchmarks tell the bigger picture. These two are optimized for different use cases, with Apple heavily leaning towards low latency single thread throughput with low sustained power usage.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16833358?baseli...

EDIT: The M4 Max compares much more closely https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16834801?baseli...


That M4 Max is in a laptop. The Mac Studio version is a couple percent faster still:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839304?baseli...

The M3 Ultra sacrifices a bunch of single-thread performance for not that much of a multithreaded gain:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16839654?baseli...


Alright, thanks. Seems like a tradeoff issue.

You're not making sense. There's no reason to strike a deal with the US as the US can't be trusted to uphold their deals as they have demonstrated directly to Iran previously and to their own "allies".

[flagged]


You should be banned for your personal attack which is in violation of site rules.

Dude we are literally talking about a single text box in a window in this case.

Yes and people feel very strongly about this text box. Some people like multiple text boxes, others just like one single text box.

Those people should focus more on not writing such absurdly bloated software instead.

How is it possible that this thing constantly gets so much hype? It's a terminal emulator.

Beats me. Its hype is all out of proportion to its features.

Maybe this is why the creator is touting the use of libghostty, the underlying library.


It helps a bit that it's written in Zig, but its primary differentiating feature in the sea of terminal emulators is that it's created by mitchellh, who is kind of a celebrity in some circles.

He's living the hacker dream. Made a billion bucks, then went right back to writing code. People upvote because they wish they were him.

This is wonderful. Why is it so fast?

Sure, but it's not a factory.

It's a big building with a lot of capital assets inside that are the means of production for a business…

Why not? It's a physical building with lots of equipment that produces products shipped to its customers.

Its products are sequences of electrons, instead of atoms. But so are power plants. And in the context of what happens when they're hit by missiles, a factory, data center, and power plant all behave the same.


Stop it. You're not helping. This kind of thing is really counterproductive. Welcome your comrade with open arm. Give him time to warm up. Don't be an absolutist.

Its not about abolitionism, its about realizing that Trump is not the cause, its a symptom.

The same sentiment that cause Nazi party to rise in power has never been eliminated, its just resurfaced itself years later. USA is not the only one with conservative problem, multiple countries in Europe have signs that right wing populism is on the rise.

And in order to be eliminated, we have to be able to get to extreme levels of social policing. And the only way to get there is through a social reset where people forgo all the comforts in life and are forced to confront the things that are actually important.


> we have to be able to get to extreme levels of social policing

Fuck. That. That is not the world I am fighting for. Go live in North Korea if you want that.

> its a symptom.

We have very different ideas of what Trump is a symptom of.


Lets be clear, you and most people aren't "fighting". Typing comments on the internet, voting, and maybe donating money to PACs is literally the minimum amount of effort anyone can do to show support.

Even for those that are doing political outreach, while the effort being put in is more than the average person, the direction is misplaced - in 2024 it was pretty clear that no matter how much information you give people, they are going to vote a certain way because of extreme polarization.

If people were willing to actually FIGHT for what they believe in through offensive means, physical or cyber, with direct results, I would have a different opinion.

But at this point, its pretty clear where society is headed. I don't want to live in that world either, but shit is going to boil over at one point or another, and delaying the inevitable just means we all get fucked when we are senior citizens instead of within the next decade.


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