litchralee

In American English (AmE) and British English (BrE), the verb "to table" is used in legislative debates. But the meaning is diametrically opposite: AmE uses the verb to mean the abandonment of a bill, analogized as though leaving it on the bargaining table to rot. Whereas the BrE verb means to introduce legislation, as in "bringing a bill to the table".

Both clearly share the same origin -- a piece of furniture -- and yet diverged as to what act is described by the word.

Other confusion arises from the verb "to sanction" which can mean "to allow" but sometimes also "to prohibit" or "make punishable".

And a more modern addition in slang vernacular: "to drop". In the context of artists, "dropping a mix tape" would mean to introduce new music. But "dropping a vocalist" means that the band has fired their singer. It would be confusing if both uses were found in the same sentence.

TIL the EAS broadcast on WX band doesn't include a digital sub carrier with a text version of the audio warning. That's an amazing omission, since even the nationwide timekeeping signal out of Colorado has both an audio and digital mode.

No constitution, no hard checks and balances

I'm an American, but IIRC, the UK does have an unwritten constitution, one that incorporates all the landmark legislation over a millennium. That is to say, rather than a dedicated, singular document that "constitutes" the boundary of the law, the British look to their still-active laws to ascertain what core rights and responsibilities must exist, and extrapolate from there. If this sounds wishy-washy, it's remarkably no different to how the USA Constitution is interpreted, under the "living document" doctrine. That doctrine in American law simultaneous recognizes that: 1) the exact text of the constitutional provisions must be adhered to (this is a basic tenant of "rule of law", and 2) those provisions may extend to analogous situations. Right-wing conservatives over here attempt to ignore the second, adopting the so-called doctrine of "textualism" (which would only recognize strictly the first aspect) but this "doctrine" only seems to be cited out when it's convenient, and hand-waved away when it's not. Hardly a doctrinal approach.

As an example of what is universally understood as being part of the British constitution, see the Magna Carta. Many of its provisions might no longer be part of the formal British body of law, but were translated into formal statute law, with its lineage acknowledged when it comes up in civil rights litigation. The current status makes the Magna Carta more akin to the US Declaration of Independence, which formally grants or recognizes zero rights but is still important in American constitutional jurisprudence. In that sense, the Declaration of Independence is a part of the supplementary body of the American constitution.

As for checks and balances, since the UK adopts the notion of parliamentary supremacy -- and still does, even after the creation of the UK Supreme Court in the 21st Century -- the checks exist within the Westminster parliamentary system. As currently formulated, the UK Parliament is composed of a lower and upper house, with the former seating representatives of the people and the latter seating representatives of .... nobility? The church? I'll just say that the House of Lords represents the "establishment". Not like "deep state capital-E Establishment" but just the institutions at-large. In that sense, the check-and-balance is one where the populist will is anchored by institutional momentum.

Is this alright? Personally -- and again, I'm an American, not a UK citizen -- it does seem rather backwards that the PM can advise the Monarch to create and appoint more hereditary peers in the House of Lords, which could stack parliament against the interest of the citizenry. I think the existence of bicameral legislative bodies to be an anachronism, especially in the USA where both end up being population-based (because prior court rulings ruled that land-based representation was unconstitutional, except the US Senate). The Nebraska unicameral legislature shows what can be done when the law-making process (committees, 1st reading, 2nd reading, floor vote, etc...) is consolidated, where testimony doesn't have to be taken twice and citizens need only voice public comment at one committee.

But I digress.

No guarantee of stability, a new govt can repeal any of the previous govt’s laws

Yes, and no. The UK has a very rich tradition of inking out their party platforms, to the point that when a new government and party are in power, it's not at all a surprise what laws they will change. Indeed, it would have been obvious for months to years, since the minority party forms the "shadow government", which is basically a demo to the citizens about what the government would look like if they were in power. Note to fellow Americans: "shadow" in this case does not mean nefarious, but rather that each designated person from the minority will "shadow" the actual minister (eg Dept for Transport) and thus go on TV to give interviews about how the minority party would have done things differently. If a journalist needs to fill airtime with multiple points-of-view, going to the shadow minister on that topic is a quick way to get an opposing perspective.

The only question then, in terms of stability, is which party prevails after an election. In this sense, while there may not be absolute continuity, there is still practical continuity: businesses and individuals can make plans in advance when they learn what's in the platform of the minority party, can start actioning those plans if the party has a likelihood of winning an election, can brace for change if a close election is called, and ultimately be ready for when the new party takes power and implements their changes. It's a pragmatic approach: change is the only constant, so might as well give sufficient notice when things do change. I would offer Brexit as an example of managed chaos, since the lead-up to the election made it very clear that the UK might indeed fall out of the European Union. And indeed, they did, but only after 4-ish years of uncertainty and negotiations, which while extraordinarily tumultuous for the country, did not somehow devolve into wholesale governmental collapse or the sudden breakdown of civic life. So even in a near-worst case scenario that changed the very fabric of the UK's legal situation, it's still holding on. Not too shabby.

As for repealing "any" prior law, technically yes. But the institutional inertia is partially what blunts this power. Public advocacy organizations are -- to this American -- seemingly more transparent in their operations, and astroturfing is less an issue because of open-transparency when it comes to forming a legal company at Companies House. Likewise, the interests of businesses, the Church of England, the universities, workers unions, etc all find representation somewhere. So it's much harder than, say in the USA, to ignore whole segments of the population to make sweeping changes.

In English, the example I would proffer is "attorney general", which as-written refers to the chief lawyer that advises a state (sometimes exceedingly badly). But if reversed, "general attorney" could plausibly refer to a lawyer that can take on any type of legal work, not self-limited to ones within a particular specialty (eg divorce law, personal injury, copyright, etc).

This is in the realm of postnominal adjectives, although not all reversals will yield recognizable phrases, and some will be nonsensical, like "the incarnate devil".

I have a suspicion that the closest that English gets to the Japanese kanji-switch might be in technical writing, specifically for the name for pharmaceuticals. Such names are often order-specific, because they draw from the chemical structure of a molecule. From the minimal Japanese that I know -- thanks anime! -- I'm aware that the word for "carbon monoxide" is composed of one carbon and one oxygen. But if I were a chemist or pharmacist, I might recognize the root components in the names "paracetamol" and "acetaminophen", which are the same thing.

I was going to write about how an existing tax agency (the California FTB) is already aggressive at tracking down high-earning residents that leave the state -- whether in-fact or on-paper -- in order to collect precisely what the state is owed per the tax code. That is, the FTB already engages and challenges the precise amounts that these former residents write on their final California tax returns, with some more spectacular results being some incredibly detailed timelines for when someone finally stops being a resident in California, as defined in state law.

But then I noticed that because of California's proposed wealth tax (aka Billionaire Tax) on the November 2026 ballot, the SF Chronicle has already started a series of articles to answer the specific what-and-hows of the wealth tax. This is the first article, pertaining to enforcement, and it agrees that the FTB would be capable of pursuing any high-wealth individuals that the proposal would tax. https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/ca-billionaire-tax-mechanism-21330110.php

This proposed tax in California is written as a one-time tax, so the question of whether high-wealthy people could flee the state is nearly irrelevant, because either they're subject to the tax or they're beyond the reach of the US courts (eg Venus). Almost. The remaining questions are legal in nature, and don't really change how the tax would be pursued. Whether FTB simply hires a dedicated team or outsources to private investigators, the task is still straightforward: follow the money.

Unlike civil lawsuit plaintiffs, who have more limited means of chasing down a defendant's assets in order to get paid on a judgement, the California tax authorities enjoy the benefit of the subpoena power, that can be used to compel companies and banks to tell the tax authorities about where and how wealth is being held. It is, after all, a core power of a US state to administer a tax, especially when the tax is authorized directly from the sovereign power (ie the citizenry). Any other result would conflict with the very purpose of a republic: to unyieldingly serve the people.

(short on time, so here's an overview to answer part of the question)

All password managers that are worth their salt (cryptography pun intended) have to anchor their trust to something, be it the OS's secret-storing APIs or a piece of hardware like a TPM (typically built into your machine's motherboard), an HSM (eg Yubikey) device, or an external source of authentication outright (eg a smart card, akin to what the USA Military does). Without any sort of trust anchor, a password manager is little else than a random program that happens to invoke a few cryptographic algorithms. It would be almost trivial for a malicious actor to use a bog-standard debugger like GDB to read the program's memory and steal the secrets, either after it has been conveniently decrypted by the program or by spying on the program while it performs the cryptographic algorithms.

Since a password manager runs within an OS, meaning that you already have to trust that your OS isn't an NSA backdoor, it makes sense to rely on the OS for storage of secrets. What the password manager does is provide the frontend for adding/updating secrets from the OS's store, while also making sure to authenticate the user prior to allowing access to the store of secrets. Once again, this is where hardware modules can come into play, but it can also be done using a main password. That is, you need to unlock the password manager before the secrets it contains are available for use.

Rather conveniently, the OS can also provide this authentication functionality: if you have already successfully logged into the computer, then that's a form of authentication. The most basic-but-reasonably-secure password manager would use two APIs to offload the difficulty tasks to the OS: the authentication API and the secrets API. That's the absolute bare minimum.

What Firefox's password manager provides, by default, is exactly that. But you can choose to upgrade to a Firefox-specific main password, so that if you forget to lock the computer, someone can't just open Firefox and use your secrets. This is one step above the minimum for a reasonably secure password manager, but it comes with the inconvenience of having to unlock the password manager every time you want to use a secret.

By and large, all password managers make these types of tradeoffs between convenience and additional layers of protection against certain threats. If your machine is inside the vault of Fort Knox and is actively guarded by people with machine guns and a keycard bullet proof door, then Firefox password manager is plenty acceptable.

Whereas a shared home computer in a situation where the disclosure of the secrets would cause a grave problem -- eg if an irate person finds that their spouse has a login for the local family court's online website, which might suggest a forthcoming divorce proceeding -- this might make sense to add additional layers. Indeed, some password managers can provide a decoy set of secrets, as a way of forming plausible deniability. If your situation needs plausible deniability, then Firefox's built-in password manager might not fit the bill.

I want to stress that using any password manager at all is already a massive improvement in security posture, and that any additional features and frills are merely refinements. Some folks are in high-risk situations where they cannot accept the possibility of off-device secrets synchronization, which would rule out Firefox password manager. But if you don't have such requirements, and if you can trust your OS, then you can also trust Firefox to store and manage secrets.

I have a rule which is that when anyone asserts that something is "more secure" or "more performant", they need to come with specific evidence for those claims. IMO, those two phrases are often used to "handwave" away any criticism for the asserted position, as a form of thought-termination. I would suggest that you always ask "more secure from what threat?" in response to such empty assertions. If they answer you with a specific scenario, then you can assess for yourself if that even applies to you. If they cannot answer with specificity, then Hitchen's Razor should apply.

without always accounting for development speed, cross-platform consistency, ecosystem maturity, plugin/runtime complexity, UI flexibility, and the fact that some apps are doing much more than others

From the perspective of a user, why would they care about development speed? A user, by sheer definition of wanting to use the software, can only use software that is already developed. If it's not actually developed yet... they can't use it. So either they see the software at the end of the development cycle, or they never see it at all. Development speed simply isn't relevant to a user at that point. (exception: video games, but I'm not aware of any desktop game developed using a web framework)

As for platform consistency, again, why would the user care? Unless each user is actually running the same software on multiple platforms (ie a Windows user at work, Arch at home, and BSD at their side-gig), this is a hard sell to get users to care. A single-platform user might never see what the same software looks like on any other platform. Even mobile apps necessarily differ in ways that matter, so consistency is already gone there.

What I'm getting at is that the concerns of developers will not always be equally concerning to users. For users to care would be to concern themselves with things outside of their control; why would they do that?

Was this question also posted a few weeks ago?

In any case, what exactly are the requirements here? You mentioned encrypted journaling app, but also gave an example of burning a handwritten sheet. Do you need to recover the text after it is written, or can it simply be discarded into the void once it's been fully written out?

If encryption is to protect the document while it's still a draft, then obviously that won't work for handwritten pages.

At least for Lemmy -- I have no idea about kbin or other ActivityPub software -- there isn't a user-accessible way to back up one's account on an instance, nor to preserve any communities that you're a mod for. So yeah, if the instance goes down unexpectedly like due to data loss or an FBI raid, the communities and users that were on that instance will disappear.

It's true that other servers will have a cache of some of the existing community posts and the users on the departed server. But it's exactly that: a cache, which will eventually be evicted.

A similar situation occurs when a Lemmy instance changes domain name: all prior posts to the community (and the community itself) were homed to the old domain. So a new domain cannot have the same identity as the old; it will simply be a separate entity, even if all posts were somehow preserved and reposted on the new instance.

Is this Lemmy-specific? No, Mastodon and I think all other ActivityPub software, plus BlueSky have this property, because they anchor identities to DNS names. From that, the posts to a community are anchored to the instance, and the instance is anchored to DNS.

So if the domain is lost, then it's game over. But if the domain is still there but the disk got wiped, then it would be a matter of recovery from a backup. You do have a 3-2-1 backup strategy, right?

I will note that Mastodon has a user-initiated export feature, which functions as a backup, something that Lemmy doesn't have. A Mastodon user can export their data and then move their identity to a new instance. Lemmy can't do that today, but it should be possible. Though in both cases, only the saved account is preserved. To restore a Lemmy community would require a disk-level backup image.

(this is all conjecture based on my limited knowledge of Lemmy. A better answer would come from an instance admin or one of the Lemmy devs)

128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash

FYI, RAM and flash sold to consumers is always in Bytes (big B); it's only RAM manufacturers (and EEPROMs) that use the bit (small b) designation for storage volume, I think. If you're using both to avoid any confusion, I would suggest the following instead: 128 MByte. No one will ever get that confused with megabits, and it's the same style used for data transfer, which does still use bits: Mbit/sec.

I wish you the best of luck in your search.

some people

they say that it's definitely a thing

To borrow a phrase from the largest encyclopedia project in the world, citation needed.

This is not to say that you, OP, need to provide the evidence of a problem. But rather, whoever you're hearing this from needs to proffer up more than just weasel words.

There is only so much time before each of us shuffles off our mortal coil, so why spend it contemplating nebulous "issues" when the real issues are readily visible: a pattern of physical violence against LGBTQ+ communities. It's not exactly difficult to do a web search for "lgbtq violence".

And to be abundantly clear, proof of "a pattern" has to show a pervasive, widespread, or organized/systemic series of events. LGBTQ+ violence easily meets this criteria, sadly. Whereas violence against white people because they're white or violence against straight people because they're straight is none of these things.

Demand better evidence from your vendor of talking points. Perhaps switch suppliers if you're not satisfied.

I think it depends on which Amish community, since they all adopt different degrees of self-sufficiency. See https://nebula.tv/videos/hai-how-amish-people-get-around-not-using-electricity/ (or on YT).