• 8 Posts
  • 85 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2025

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  • Cats are remarkably capable predators, and cat owners are remarkably irresponsible.

    Letting your cat be an “outside” cat is bad enough for the environment. Not spaying/neutering said “outside cat” is how we get feral cats everywhere.

    That said, I dont love the vague “eradicate feral cats” language. Would greatly prefer a broad spectrum spay/neuter/tag program to naturally reduce their population.

    Predator-free NZ was always destined to ruffle some feathers though.









  • Technical debt aside of course the development process looks like that - what’s the alternative? Infinite feature growth? No one benefits from that.

    As an example, I’ve got signal on my phone- it started with texting features, added images, calls, video calling, but at some point there’s a limit on the number of useful ways to communicate.

    I don’t need it to be another social network.

    I don’t need it to tell me my horoscope, order a pizza, or organize my photos.

    I don’t need it to track my health, play games, read my work emails, or drive my car.

    It doesn’t need to integrate with VR, or AI, or whatever 2-letter buzz acronym comes up next week.

    It’s a secure messaging platform, I need it to send messages. Sure, there’s always a cat and mouse game of encryption to keep ahead of, but infinite feature growth? It’s not practical or necessary. Things can exist to do one thing reliably and well.




  • You could do PR with the ballot of potential Reps distributed by district. When the election is settled the district Reps are assigned starting with the highest-skewed district. E.g.:

    Overall vote: 60:40 (red:blue)

    D1: 80:20
    D2: 40:60
    D3: 70:30
    D4: 45:55
    D5: 30:70
    

    You can go randomly, round Robin, or winner-first to divvy up the districts, but essentially you would expect D1, D3, and D4 to be assigned their local red Rep (even though red “lost” in the close D4 race) and D2 & D5 to go blue

    With more parties, random or round robin are a little more “fair” for the third party - winner first allocation could result in 3rd party getting the “whatever’s left” district where they didn’t actually get any votes.

    It’s not perfect, but neither is the current system.




  • When WIRED asked Meta what rate-limiting measures it instituted over the last eight years to prevent the technique Kloeze demonstrated, the company responded that it has, in fact, implemented evolving defenses against scrapers, including rate-limiting and machine-learning techniques to ban scrapers. Yet the University of Vienna researchers were able to not only replicate Kloeze’s work, but take it further, actually enumerating all 3.5 billion registered WhatsApp phone numbers—far more than the service had in 2017.

    A generous rate limit of 1 query per second would have taken 111 years to churn through 3.5 billion users (with 100% success rate on guesses). Meta’s rate limit seems to be “the rate at which our servers can query our contact database”.