mettamage (u/mettamage)

mettamage commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

enaaem · 11 hours ago

Hungarian population have been declining for decades [1]. Hungary has already lost 5% of their population since 2010. For comparison their neighbour the Czech Republic has been growing [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Czech_Repu...

mettamage · 8 hours ago

Wow... I guess that plausibly explains why I see an n = 2 without looking for it.

mettamage commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

haunter · 14 hours ago

Next one to look out for: 2026 Hungary. Fidesz is basically a russian backdoor in the EU and they will do everything to stay in power.

https://telex.hu/english/2025/12/11/most-hungarians-fear-rus...

They are also doing everything to bypass the no-political-ads-on-facebook ban https://telex.hu/english/2025/10/29/despite-the-ban-fidesz-c...

mettamage · 13 hours ago

I've met Hungarian people in the Netherlands and they're doing everything they can to become Dutch. One Hungarian even speaks fluent with no accent, and that is quite a feat.

I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.

mettamage commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

alecco · 14 hours ago

Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.

Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.

Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.

It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.

mettamage · 13 hours ago

I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.

The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.

Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.

I simply want a sane democratic voting process.

And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.

From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.

mettamage commented on Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith twilio.com/en-us/blog/dev... · Posted by u/birdculture

andrewmutz · 13 hours ago

Needing to upgrade a library everywhere isn’t necessarily a sign of inappropriate coupling.

For example, a library with a security vulnerability would need to be upgraded everywhere regardless of how well you’ve designed your system.

In that example the monolith is much easier to work with.

mettamage · 13 hours ago

Example: log4j. That was an update fiasco everywhere.

mettamage commented on Useful patterns for building HTML tools simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

mettamage · 16 hours ago

> HTML tools may not have access to server-side databases for storage but it turns out you can store a lot of state directly in the URL.

I use indexedDB for it and will use sqlite if I start to get more serious data needs.

mettamage commented on Useful patterns for building HTML tools simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

mettamage · 16 hours ago

> Avoid React, or anything with a build step. The problem with React is that JSX requires a build step, which makes everything massively less convenient. I prompt “no react” and skip that whole rabbit hole entirely.

I haven’t found too many issues with loading React and Babel from a CDN. I find React easier to read than straight HTML/JS. I find it more annoying to code in but seeing what state is needed in what components is a pleasant reading experience for me with single file tools.

mettamage commented on Qwen3-Omni-Flash-2025-12-01：a next-generation native multimodal large model qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-omn... · Posted by u/pretext

mettamage · 4 days ago

I wonder if with that music analysis mode, you can also make your own synths

mettamage commented on 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness jorsys.org/archive/decemb... · Posted by u/sjoblomj

SpaceManNabs · 5 days ago

I consider WCIII TFT the apex but that is because i really like the hero mechanic and it spawned so many amazing custom games, including the moba genre. I know AoS was first but dota really made it.

mettamage · 5 days ago

Can't comment on this other than that I came in at WCIII RoC and played TFT. Before that, I played a lot of Command & Conquer. I loved those games, so for me WCIII is the apex. I didn't like StarCraft. But it's admittedly the apex for me without having ever played WCII. I've rarely seen it as well.

mettamage commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

amelius · 6 days ago

To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.

mettamage · 6 days ago

The problem is that circumventing the government gets into criminal territory pretty quick, even if enough people view the activity as legitimate.

I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.

Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.