"He was vowing to replace Canada’s electoral system, which tended to give parties power disproportionate to their level of support"
PR advocates believe that each party should have a number of MPs proportionate to the votes that party has received; but the relationship between power and proportion of MPs is inherently nonlinear.
@mpjgregoire Interesting point, but I think you're missing the fact that parties are not simply interchangeable. E.g. if party A is centrist, party B is far-right and party C is far-left, it's unlikely that B and C will cooperate to defeat A. Ok, it's not just left/right, but parties will tend to cooperate with others whose policies are similar. Also voters will tend to shift between like-minded parties, so in general, popular policies are likely to be implemented. #proportionalrepresentation
@mpjgregoire Ok, in that scenario it would be more logical for the Liberals and Conservatives to cooperate, but of course politics is not always rational. There's no perfect system, but PR still looks much better than FPTP on balance.
What platforms were used in the 80s up to about 1993 or 1994 for Internet servers? It can be #FTP, #Gopher, #telnet, #USENET, the #OldWeb, or anything else that was on the Internet in that era.
My research indicates Solaris was very popular for web servers until Linux took over, and so I suspect it (and SunOS before it) was very popular for the Internet in general, but I'd like to hear from anyone with this sort of experience.
@sinza I was sysadmin in a UK university CS dept back then. We didn't get any kind of internet connection until about 1992-3. The first generally-available web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was only launched in 1993 and took a few more years to become widespread - https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web . So I would say that period was not so much "oldweb" as pre-web. Even usenet, which existed before the internet, was still very slow and limited. #retrocomputing
ok, after all that #redis kerfuffle let's have some fun:
Who built a Redis-like cache/data store/database (maybe protocol compatible?) for fun or shit-posting?
May that be in bash, awk, storing data in DNS, ...
Share your silly project!
Can you recommend any general learning resources on coroutines?
I'm looking for tutorials, books, or other non-video sources that are largely language independent (or introduce a few primitives clearly) and, most importantly, explain how to program with couroutines and for which problems or situations they're typically used. I'm looking to learn the concepts, not features of specific languages.
I'm not interested in other control or concurrency primitives.
If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 2.5 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes inside feel nothing but gravity.
Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime — with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.
It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should see mergers of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)
It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation": the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves were created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So they're older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.
It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2035.
so, idea I have been working on the last few days: #synchronet#bbs on my old #raspberrypi, small #usenet server including web gateway, all geared towards #ttrpg stuff.
lets see what else a pi can run at the same time.
kind of a fool's errand, but it should keep me busy for the next two weeks.
I'm old enough to have begun using #unix before #linux, and in the first years, I used *nix (well, SunOS, Solaris, and Digital OSF/1, to say more precisely) for so long. I'm what nowadays is considered a Veteran Unix Admin or #vua. I'm still curious enough to stay updated about current tech, but I wonder how many people out there in the #fediverse are still passionate about tech novelties but even cultivate legacy knowledge such as #C, #Perl, #Tcl, #autoconf and #automake, #m4 and above all why?
Sure SBF was a fraudster. But wasn’t that inherent in crypto in the first place? I think so.
“The tens of billions of dollars of these coins were worth, according to Alameda’s assets sheet, suddenly transformed into zero dollars for a reason: The tokens had no real value to start with….
“You decide what a crypto token with a Shiba Inu’s face on it or an image of a cartoon ape is worth based on, well, what you figure everyone else thinks it is worth.”
@JamesGleick “You decide what a crypto token ... is worth based on, well, what you figure everyone else thinks it is worth.”
That's not so different from ordinary money though - to a large extent it has value because people are confident that other people will continue to accept it as payment for real goods and services. Now ordinary money also comes with government backing, but there are places and times where that is not worth much, so people look for alternatives. #crypto#economics
@JamesGleick True, but bear in mind the alternative is not always USD. A colleague of mine who became a cryptocurrency enthusiast comes from Cyprus, where the government a while back decided to fix their deficit by just grabbing a slice of everyone’s bank deposits!
@glynmoody "EU Tries To Slip In New Powers To Intercept Encrypted Web Traffic" - How does this affect the UK? Is it possible that Brexit could at last provide a genuine benefit by allowing us to avoid this surveillance? Or will gov.uk come up with something even worse? #certificates#encryption#brexit
🎤 In her new BBC Radio 4 podcast Young Again, Kirsty Young takes her guests back to meet their younger selves and asks the question: if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?
Her first guest is model Linda Evangelista. It's a disarming and moving discussion.