Archive Team often uses the Internet Archive to share the things they save and obviously they have a shared goal of saving a copy of everything ever made, but they aren’t the same people. The Archive Team is a vigilante white hat hacker group (well, maybe a little bit grey), and running a Warrior basically means you’re volunteering to be part of their botnet. When a website is going to be shut down, they’ll whip together a script and push it out to the botnet to try to grab as much of the dying site as they can, and when there’s more downtime they have some other projects, like trying to brute force all those awful link shorteners so that when they inevitably die, people can still figure out where it should’ve pointed to.

It’s a new model this year, as Nate Silver took his with him when he left 538. The new one seems to put a lot of emphasis on “the fundamentals” this far out, that is, it “thinks” that the general environment and economy and such is pretty good for the incumbent and that the polls might move in that direction by the time election day comes along. And since it’s fitted to historical data, it’s also implicitly assuming that this election will be similar to past elections (like, say, including a competent campaign by a candidate who can get out there and effectively communicate accomplishments and a plan for their term).

I personally think those assumptions are pretty clearly wrong this year and so I’m more inclined to base my perception of the race on pure polling averages, which are looking quite bad for Biden.

“The US President might be in cognitive decline” is a massive news story, as is “The only opponent to a fascist is one more bad night away from his campaign completely imploding,” and also “the President’s own party says behind closed doors that he’s in massive trouble, but is sticking with him in public.”

Okay, after watching the video twice I think I know what the fuck he’s talking about. He thinks that you’ll request a mail in ballot, go to the polls, they’ll say you already voted, and then you triumphantly show the world that you didn’t vote, you still have the blank ballot, and obviously they’ve put in a vote for Joe Brandon under your name, is what they’ve done, those bastards. He has done a terrible job of explaining his plan, aside from it also being a bad plan.

As a former election judge in Minnesota, I can tell you exactly how this would go in real life in that state (where, to brag a bit, we have a very progressive voting system that makes it very easy to vote, all the things Republicans hate). You’d get your mail in ballot, then show up to your polling place with your blank ballot. Then when you ask to vote, they’ll say “yep, sure, come on in” and you can just go in and vote as normal.

(The rule is that even if you request an absentee ballot, you can still cast a vote as normal, and even if you have mailed it in, either they have already counted it and then the registration system will bar you from voting in person, or if you get there before it gets processed and vote in person instead, they’ll toss it out when they get to it.)

Worst case scenario, the election judges see that you’re carrying around an absentee ballot, and they’ll ask you to get rid of it because no one wants ballots floating around a polling place that aren’t valid. That’s the only thing I can think of that would be cause for a Republican to make a ruckus, but… like… yeah, you can’t just bring extra ballots to the polling place. And they won’t scan into the machine because they’re the wrong type. I really, really want to see videos of these people trying to catch the evil Democrats and then just, like, being treated normally though. (Even better if they raised a ruckus and then didn’t actually vote.)

There just isn’t much use for an approach like this, unfortunately. TypeScript doesn’t stand alone enough for it. If you want to know how functions work, you need to learn how JavaScript functions work, because TypeScript doesn’t change that. It adds some error checking on top of what’s already there, but that’s it.

An integrated approach would just be a JavaScript book with all the code samples edited slightly to include type annotations, a heavily revised chapter on types (which would be the only place where all those type annotations make any difference at all, in the rest of the book they’d just be there, unremarked upon), and a new chapter on interoperating with vanilla JavaScript. Seeing as the TypeScript documentation is already focused on those exact topics (adding type annotations to existing code, describing how types work, and how to work with other people’s JavaScript libraries that you want to use too), you can get almost exactly the same results by taking a JavaScript book and stapling the TypeScript documentation to the end of it, and it’d have the advantage of keeping the two separate so that you can easily tell what things belong to which side.

The Fairness Doctrine only survived the 1st Amendment because the airwaves are a public resource: each area only has one electromagnetic spectrum, and the sections of it that are useful for broadcasting are limited enough that not everyone can have a useful slice of the pie. As such, if you’re lucky enough to get a slice, the government gets to have a lot more control than they normally do over how you use it. You’re using something that belongs to all of us but only a few people get permission to use, so you have to do your part to serve the public good in addition to the programming you want to broadcast.

Cable has none of that scarcity, since we can have effectively as many cables in an area as we want, and each cable can be stuffed with more signal than the airwaves can, since you don’t have to worry about whether any given frequency can pass through walls or buildings, just copper. Without that, the government can no longer justify dictating content.

I’m shocked that we still allow armed bank robbery traps to be built all across the country, even good Real American towns. All that money just sitting there, but if you even once pull out a gun and try to take just a bit of it, they’ll put you away! It’s entrapment is what it is. So much for the land of the free.

For a couple seasons, there was a private subreddit where they had extracted the official streams of every NFL game, and you could just open it in a web browser and watch in full quality for free with no ads other than what was in the actual broadcast. And for a while, there was a promotion in a few European countries for free NFL Sunday Ticket access, and if you started the stream over a VPN connection into one of those countries, you could turn the VPN off and it’d continue working. Then some online magazine published the trick and it stopped working the next week.