Politics require more than good intentions.

See how many vile, empathy-void sociopaths are elected across the world because they have the political skills required to make things happen.

What I try in practice is to lead by example, and be a good neighbor/citizen. In my village, 90% of the people would rather bitch about the mayor or public services not cleaning up the park for months or years, when you can simply grab few plastic bags and clean most of it in few hours. I'm glad my initiative has pushed more citizens to actively care and take matters in their hands.

Yet the scope of degeneracy and risks are now at the global stage and I don't think I can do much when people with the wrong incentives are elected in office, if there's elections at all.

And very soon, as economics and behavioral sciences suggest, we will have world events directly influenced by people having the incentives to make them happen for financial gains only.

There's a reason we have banned and prosecuted any hint of insider trading or match fixing for centuries. Yet we play dumb on way more serious risks, allowing betting on whether a country will attack another and labeling it "information hedging and price discovery".

I can't but look at the modern world with worry. We live in increasingly Orwellian and dystopic times. The world has never been so rich and evolved, yet, as a society, we're increasingly unhappy, alone and void of purposes that aren't greed and selfishness related.

We're looking at the decadence of a civilization and all we can do, at best, is post about it over the internet, and that's when we're in the aware crowd not falling for bitter insulting and fighting because somebody else holds different ideas.

I would really want to know what can we do, as average Joes, when the most powerful people in the world fall in line and are terrorized to speak their mind. And that's when they're not actively contributing to the very same decadence.

Not really.

Most European countries have parliamentary democracies.

It's not a winner-takes-all system ala presidential and semi-presidential republics where effectively individuals:

1. rule without opposition. There's no opposition it's not represented in that branch.

2. rule without even needing support of their own parties. The Italian prime minister or the German chancellor have to fight every day in parliament to have support of their parties and the other parties coalitions.

3. a single individual can claim popular mandate. In parliamentary systems you vote for parties/coalitions, not individuals

There's a reason why this authoritarian trend goes from the Philippines, Nicaragua, to Belarus, to Turkey, to Russia, to most African countries and now US. They are all presidential republics.

The last parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian has been...Sri Lanka. Almost 50 years ago. Presidential ones? It's basically every year.

Systems with winner-takes-all mechanics do not represent voters, and power is too concentrated.

Parliamentary democracies might be labeled as less efficient, that I can agree, but they have strong antibodies to such people.

See Austria or the Netherlands as examples where strong far right authoritarian-wannabes individuals became prime ministers...and then nothing happened and their governments didn't last.

What I like most about nixos is that you can have deterministically cached packages you don't need to rebuild every time in your ci.

It's also simple to setup dev environments with nix.

Curious if the author tried the new Redis module that brings HNSW vector search to redis.

From what I've seen is fast, has excellent API, and is implemented by a brilliant engineer in the space (Antirez).

But not using these things beyond local tests, I can never really hold opinions over those using these systems in production.