> By the close of polling on Sunday, its e-voting system had collected 2,048 votes
I have a hard time believing that it collected exactly 2,048 votes by coincidence
Readit Newsqq66 commented on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure theregister.com/2026/03/1... · Posted by u/jjgreen
Facebook doesn't care about Facebook.com anymore. The value of their business is almost entirely in Instagram, with some future potential in WhatsApp.
qq66 commented on Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32 codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/... · Posted by u/nikbackm
> Comparing the comprehensive Win32 API reference against the incidentally documented Native APIs, its clear which one Microsoft would prefer you use. The native API is treated as an implementation detail, whilst core parts of Windows' backwards compatibility strategy are implemented in Windows subsystem.
> A general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Zig clearly doesn't actually care that much about building robust and reusable software if they're going to forgo Microsoft's decades-long backwards compatibility functionality for the dubious gains of using bare-metal APIs.
> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be.
And this is exactly why Microsoft can get away with a buggy mess of a user hostile operating system.
They only have an incentive to make a good OS if people are willing to leave when it’s a bad one.
I was a "Windows guy" from Windows 2.0 to Windows 10. Now I'm a "Mac guy."
These operating systems aren't my family members -- I'll ditch them if I believe that switching is worth getting over the learning curve of a new environment.
qq66 commented on The largest zip tie is nearly 4 feet long and $75 thedrive.com/news/youll-h... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
I used 250lb zip ties to hold down my convertible top in the open position, as an alternative to paying $2000 to replace the motors. When I'd need to put up the top I'd cut the zip ties and when I'd want to put it down I'd put on a new set.
With California weather and an indoor parking spot I only ended up using about one pack (10? 12?) a year.
qq66 commented on Parking lots as economic drains progressandpoverty.substa... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
You might not go there, but the people who live in the homes you build where the parking garage used to be will go there.
Sure, removing parking essentially requires the neighborhood to become more self-sustaining. This works in really dense cities like New York and San Francisco but it requires enough desirability to fill the housing with people who have enough disposable income to replace the far bigger "catchment area" that the parking used to serve.
Which in turn affects the kind of economies that the new development can support. A car dealership? Needs parking and a large catchment area. Burrito shop? Probably not getting much destination traffic and can support itself on locals.
qq66 commented on Parking lots as economic drains progressandpoverty.substa... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Maybe surface parking lots aren't the answer, but I do know that if there are places that I can't easily park at, I just don't go there unless absolutely necessary.
Nice to think, "the people will take trains!" but sometimes it doesn't work that way.
I've seen so many outright falsehoods in Google AI overviews that I've stopped reading them. They're either not willing to incur the cost or latency it would take to make them useful.
I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice.
In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnover so the owners asked me to be a waiter for a little while. The first couple months I found the small talk and the need to always be "on" absolutely exhausting, but overtime I found my routine and it became less exhausting. I definitely loved being a delivery driver far more, but eventually I did hit a point where I didn't feel completely drained after every shift of waiting tables.
I can't help but think coding with LLMs will follow a similar pattern. I don't think I'll ever like it more than writing the code myself, but I have to believe at some point I'll have done it enough that it doesn't feel completely draining.
With the rise of open source, there started to be more black-box compositing, you grabbed some big libraries like Django or NumPy and honestly just hoped there weren't any bugs, but if there were, you could plausibly step through the debugger and figure out what was going wrong and file a bug report.
Now, the LLMs are generating so many orders of magnitude more code than any human could ever have the chance to debug, you're basically just firing this stuff out like a firehose on a house fire, giving it as much control as you can muster but really just trusting the raw power of the thing to get the job done. And, bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't, so you can't stop using the tool but you can't really ever get comfortable with it either.