You mean to say we didn’t have these already? I just assumed we did honestly. Were we just buying time from commercial vendors?

Being from the UK I didn’t automatically consider them to be armed, but sometimes that is unfortunately necessary if the situation is dangerous enough. Surely you will need armed men in your ideal society also - forces from the outside may attempt to subvert it, and if a crisis emerges, order may break down.

I didn’t say prisons necessarily help people, and I agree with you that if anyone is reformed by prison, it’s in spite of the system. I think of a prison as a way to protect the innocent from dangerous people, but in most cases I disagree with sending non-violent offenders there.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I’d be keen to imagine another way forward, so maybe that’ll help me with some ideas, or at least understand the abolitionist viewpoint. I can see from skim-reading the preface that it attempts to answer many of my questions.

I wasn’t sure if I should introduce such an extreme example as serial killers to my argument and now I see why.

So perhaps let’s talk abstractly:

1. Some people are disruptive whether temporarily or permanently
2. In some cases, we might need to keep those people away from others.
3. If so, you need a place to keep them and,
4. Someone to take them there and,
5. Someone to make sure they don’t leave.

And it’s true that you don’t need police to investigate missing people. You didn’t answer my question though- in your ideal society, if not a police force, who does that job?

I agree that many crimes are only committed out of economic despair. Ideally, everybody has all the resources they need.

Are there not other reasons behind crimes?

For example, what do you do if a serial killer finds themselves in your society? Who would catch them and who would prosecute?

The police also handle other non-crime tasks such as finding missing people. Who would do that?

I have been thinking about this idea for some time also but a couple of things have always bugged me-

Firstly, how does this interact with privacy? For vote delegation to work, I think the votes would have to be public, or you can’t make a decision on who to delegate your vote to- someone could claim to have one set of views but vote contrary to that. People could come under pressure to vote one way or another.

Also, who crafts the legislation that is voted on? How do you prevent bill rolling (two unrelated ideas are boiled down to a single binary choice) and splitting (a new service is voted through but the taxes to fund it are not)?

You said local government at least so a national or state government could help craft these things, but what if the proposed legislation doesn’t actually hurt local people, but doesn’t take into account the actual problems they have locally? For example, what if it would help to allow building in a particular area, but the state government doesn’t know that and it never becomes a priority?

It’s still an emerging technology so it makes sense that many of the early adopters are IT nerds. Early Reddit was the same- the most active communities were IT, programming or video game related. More diversity will appear in time.

I’m reading this as a play to allow communities to have their own paid for areas and Reddit takes a cut in exchange for hosting this.

I recall a while back they were looking at a way to financially compensate major contributors and moderators, so possibly this idea is being revisited in a way.

Right now though, most people contribute to communities to share their knowledge or creativity and to connect with others- and monetisation might be there in the background but isn’t a first class feature of the platform. It makes business sense to make this play, even though it’ll make the site worse.

To conclude: Reddit becomes an only fans competitor. Calling it now.

Passkeys (depending on implementation) are more resistant to info stealer viruses.

The private key portion can be in your OS’s credential store and can be used to sign the challenge without being revealed to the calling application.

Of course this doesn’t work if you got rooted, but a lot of viruses of this kind try to steal what they can get as a regular user, and you can get a lot, ie AWS credentials, saved browser passwords etc.

In my view it’s cheap defense in depth.

My son is teething so it was a loud and not at all relaxing weekend. When we were able to convince him to sleep though it was great, caught up with the Olympics and caught up with some sleep. Such is the glamorous life of a new parent.

Well I had hoped, naiively that Reddit would respect the developer community that had helped make their website so popular. A community of developers provided apps and services for them for the simple price of a free API. I thought the APIpocolypse might happen, but I thought reddit was special somehow and they would see how beautiful and vibrant that community was and not damage it for fear of damaging the soul of the website. Yeah, that was pretty fucking naiive.

Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.

And no mention of what happens to their API but knowing google it either goes away entirely or totally changes with significant rework required.

Related, the reason I no longer use any google API: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc

Precisely, you don’t have to be deeply technical to understand this, you just have to be willing to put in a little bit of work.

I also found it a little complex and daunting at first as it was my first contact with the fedirverse, and I’ve been on the internet since pretty much the start.

We’ll make it a great place to be, and other people will see the benefits and put in the same work too.

Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.

I could be tempted but none of that is going to happen. Even though this move will kill the community, it won’t kill it fast enough to cause a problem. There’s just too much money to be made.

I don’t know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

Yes, I loved that sub too, even though I have nothing to do with the food service industry it has been interesting reading about one of the more challenging and somewhat thankless market segments and the passion and camaraderie of those who work in it. I do hope that something equivalent is started here.