PupBiru

i believe the general attitude on the threadiverse is that down votes are not a great option: they should represent low quality or untruth rather than simply dislike. given this preference, and downvote to hide might overload the downvote function: no longer is it a last resort, but it’s a normal part of browsing your feed. i’ve seen nothing but staunch opposition to overusing h the down vote feature in this manner

i didn’t downvote you, and i went to school before a bunch of things but technology evolves and either we evolve with it or we end up being just straight up wrong in a modern context

not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:

with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers

with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers

with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers

so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2

the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively

and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8

which is why we have kibi, mebi, gibi, etc

kilobyte (KB) is 1000, kibibyte (KiB) is 1024

at least according the the IEC, and id tend to go with them… SI units say that kilo means 1000

kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!

dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work

i’d avoid BIOS-based RAID… it doesn’t really offer many benefits over linux-based raid like MDADM, and MDADM offers a LOT of up-sides for portability, repairability, diagnostics, etc

let’s not go too far though… the holders of h264/h265 did put a lot of money and effort into developing the codec: a new actual thing… they are not patent trolls, who by definition produce nothing new other than legal mess

you can only vote above (party preference) or below (all preferences) the line on our ballots, so that’s not a situation that can occur, however i imagine it’d be something the actual counting system could tolerate - heck you could probably even assign someone an arbitrary 51 and imo the system could just grab that person out of the party preferences, sequence the list, and then put them in at number 51 and that’s your preference list

otherwise, the party preferences are published in advance, so you can always print them off and tweak them, then vote below the line

yeah we have RCV for everything… everyone knows how to vote; it’s really not hard

https://www.aec.gov.au/media/2022/05-11.htm

this articles a little old and it’s changed a bit since then, but on a basic level it the same:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work

the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)

so your ballot paper has about 20 different parties[1] on it, ranging from the major parties (coalition/liberal/national and labour) to a few others (greens are becoming big, socialist alliance, etc), and then single issue parties (legalise cannabis australia, there was a high speed rail party at 1 point)… and it has a bunch of individual politicians below each party with their own boxes

if you decide that legalising cannabis is the issue you care about, you can just number their box and they’ll allocate your preferences - hopefully based on how likely they think a particular politician is to support legalising cannabis. you can also put multiple numbers above the line and a range of other things, but at its simplest it’s putting a 1 in a box and going home

some of this might be slightly incorrect because it can get very complex and i don’t really delve too deep into how the ballot actually works at its most complex level… but i think the great thing is that you can vote according to whatever complexity or detail you like and the system ensures your vote is allocated to who you’d most likely want

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Australia

sure! absolutely! for primaries go nuts, kick up a stink, let’s get a better candidate! totally agree!

but when it comes to the election and if trump is the nominee for republicans and biden is the nominee for the democrats then you get the hell out there, suck up your pride and you vote against the dictator… and the only effective way of voting against the dictator is a vote for the democrats - not because you like it, not because it’s fair - but because the USA has a first past the post system and that’s just the bullshit reality of the situation

and then, if you have the energy, you help at the local level to implement something like RCV

(should be noted, i’m australian so i have no power to do anything, and a lot of people will say i have no business making comments like this because im not american! however america has placed itself in a position of power on the global stage - the way yall vote effects everyone! its critical - GLOBALLY - that trump doesn’t win)

i’d say that we need a way of communicating and making group decisions, but government is an organisation that makes the decisions of the group… a government isn’t a process; a government is an entity… if your group decision making is a process rather than delegated power, then you don’t have a government but you may be able to effectively run your society