AI seems to be the whipping boy, but to me, it really seems more of a symptom than a cause. At its root, isn't this an issue of a decline in critical thinking?
Yes, in the case of Twitter/X. A considerably wider range of expressed preference&opinion is permitted there before platform moderators will aggressively ban or users start flag/report brigades.
People that repeat this line evince a basic lack of U.S. civics understanding -- the Executive branch simply does not have the authority to cancel or postpone elections.
If somehow an election still has not completed, there is no legal action short of an amendment which would provide authority for the terms of the Executive or of Congress to extend beyond their end date as well, as mandated by the 20th Amendment.
If the above somehow happened, the next holder of the office would follow the Presidential Succession acts, as defined and amended by Congress.
That said, the U.S. has not cancelled its elections, even in the face of significant unrest, the Civil War, or two World Wars. That sort of suspension doesn't even fit possible hypothetical situations.
If you think they're going to just outright coup and push that past the whole of the other branches of government, say so. Something such as 'suspending elections', in the U.S. is simple fearmongering. If we call that out for engineering, it should also be called out in other fields.
> People that repeat this line evince a basic lack of U.S. civics understanding -- the Executive branch simply does not have the authority to cancel or postpone elections.
They don't lack the understanding, they are simply paying enough attention to understand that the administration is already breaking the law and flagrantly violating the constitution. The prediction is not that the administration has the authority to cancel or postpone elections legally, but that they will try anyway. It is a reasonable belief, given all the crimes that they have committed so far.
> If you think they're going to just outright coup and push that past the whole of the other branches of government, say so.
That is the implication, yes. Before you dismiss it out of hand, remember that the president has already attempted a coup once before.
So the situation we are in is apparent to anyone who has actually been paying attention: Congress is functionally non-existent right now, having given up congressional power over both taxation and war. The Supreme Court has demonstrated repeatedly that they are in the pocket of the administration, and even if they change their mind at the last minute when they realize they too will lose power under a dictatorship, they have no way to actually enforce their rulings.
That leaves it to the states, roughly half of which will align with the administration, against the federal government. Bear in mind the distinguished individual currently in charge of the DoD is an alcoholic and religious extremist and under his leadership commanders throughout the military have started to refer to the war with Iran as a Holy War. [0] So it is unlikely the military will side with the constitution.
> They don't lack the understanding, they are simply paying enough attention to understand that the administration is already breaking the law and flagrantly violating the constitution.
Are you asserting that the current administration has materially interfered with elections? How so? Please attribute sources which spring forth from documentary disclosure, court discovery, or attributable sources.
> Congress is functionally non-existent right now, having given up congressional power over both taxation and war.
I'd say the current non-talking filibuster grandstanding shows this to be patently false. As such the conclusions in the rest of the paragraph are unsupportable.
> Iran as a Holy War. [0]
As I have mentioned elsewhere, the only reporting I can see from this comes from a single source activist litiguous organization who says their sources are anonymous. If any of those sources were actionable, IGs, their own lawyers, and numerous members of Congress would absolutely jump on them. It would be a carreer-makibg litigation move against any administration. Why havent they?
> Are you asserting that the current administration has materially interfered with elections?
Yes? They certainly tried to, and failing doesn't wipe that away. You clearly have paid no attention. Go watch the January 6th hearings and report back with your findings. Everything you are looking for is right there, complete with sources.
> I'd say the current non-talking filibuster grandstanding shows this to be patently false.
You think congress failing to exercise it's power shows that it can still exercise its power? What a curious exercise in mental gymnastics. I will maintain my current conclusion - congress has shown repeatedly that it cannot and will not exercise its constitutionally granted power. Don't pull something while you stretch and reach to claim that isn't so.
>> As I have mentioned elsewhere, the only reporting I can see from this comes from a single source activist litiguous organization who says their sources are anonymous.
Is Pete Kegseth quoting the fucking Psalms on a press conference enough?
Donald Trump has tried to overthrow an election once already -- first through conspiracy, then through violence. The fact that he's not rotting in a prison cell is largely due to corruption of the judiciary (Aileen Cannon).
> The fact that he's not rotting in a prison cell is largely due to corruption of the judiciary
That, and a persistent failure of congress to act. The Senate could have removed him from office and preventing him from running again after the insurrection attempt. They failed to.
Do you mean to say that the Executive Branch does not have the authority to govern in accordance of the rougly 58% of the electorate which voted for them?
Do you mean that they are exceeding ther mandate as defined by the written, customary, and precedential body of law?
Do you mean that the government just dosent matter and that we should not be a nation of laws?
I don't really think those are questions in scope for HN, but people that I have a good reason to think don't understand plain basics of U.S. Constitutional law are opining otherwise.
For example, unlike Italy where I'm guessing the parent commentor hails from, or the Russian Federation of which Putin's activities have been quoted, U.S. law does not permit the President to unilaterally change elections. That is the singular point at issue here.
>>Do you mean to say that the Executive Branch does not have the authority to govern in accordance of the rougly 58% of the electorate which voted for them?
It has the authority to do that, it does not have the authority to break the law, which applies to them as well. The majority didn't elect trump to be king. Actions like the Tariffs and deployment of ICE in Minnesota, or the DOJ not prosecuting clear crimes from the Epstein Files are all indications that they, how to put, do not give a fuck.
>>Do you mean that they are exceeding ther mandate as defined by the written, customary, and precedential body of law?
Yes, provably so. In fact the tariffs are a good example, of both the illegal nature of Trump's executive decision and his complete carelessness about the decision of the supreme court.
>>Do you mean that the government just dosent matter and that we should not be a nation of laws?
You should, and your government is right now a group of grifters with no qualification who are trying to dismantle exactly that, one step at a time.
Your attempts at justifying their behaviour with legal finesse is a travesty and a clear dialectical game in favor of their objectives, and I would consider you an accomplice to their illegal plan to take over the USA.
What country are you currently looking at? What administration are you thinking about? We are dealing with the most corrupt abomination of government ever seen in a Western democracy, they've proven over and over they don't give a fuck about the law, and you come and give me a fucking ted talk about checks and balances?
Man the delusion runs deep.
Quotes and indepedently verifiable sources, please. For many metrics, this administration could be painted as the most law abiding administration of a Western Republic, in decades.
> For many metrics, this administration could be painted as the most law abiding administration of a Western Republic, in decades.
Oh. I suspected you weren't arguing in good faith. Now I know. Don't bother replying to my other comments, there is nothing to be gained here.
Decades from now, a child may ask what you did, when fascism was on the rise again. Don't lie to them. Don't claim you didn't know. You were warned, and chose to support the fascists.
It's not really worth investigation. All the current headlines around this event boil down to a single source report from a litigous activist organization that only claims "anonymous sources".
No corroborating IG investigations or official reporting or even FOIA suits/events, which a serious external investigation would use.
That doesn't make it impossible, just heavily unlikely. Furthermore, it has all the hallmarks of an unsourced smear campaign then used as a convenient 'source' for sensationalist reporting. If the average HN reader were to inspect that source, I exepct they would see the lack of investigative rigour and wonder how the word "source" could even come into consideration here.
The MRFF is saying they got hundreds of complaints. Seems reasonably plausible this actually happened. And given this administrations track record it's not exactly a stretch.
If they have hundreds of complaints, that would be a mineload of dynamite, figuratively, for lawsuits across the board. Why haven't they done so?
If you think the IG or direct lawsuit routes are unfeasible, there are tons of congresspersons on both sides of the aisle that would jump on that to get one over on the administration, as well. Their oversight powers do have some bite.
Even big copyright firms. Disney especially is known for rehashing existing material and then not allowing anyone else to do the same with their stuff. Disney does not have a lot of original stories.
What is Zulip's position on speech they/(you?) disagree with -- if someone is paying for non-selfhosted Zulip, are you going to delete/shutdown/dox users/operators that you politically disagree with?
If say the hyprland people were using a Zulip instance and someone astroturfed/brigaded/massreported a campaign to shut them down because they didn't agree to some external code of conduct and external enforcement of such, what would Zulip's response, as a company, be?
Moderation of self-hosted servers is entirely the responsibility of the server's owners (and perhaps hosting providers, if it's extreme enough). We have no way to know what's happening on self-hosted servers, and it's none of our business.
Regardless, there is no technical mechanism through which we could block access to a self-hosted Zulip server via the web application (which is hosted by the self-hosted server itself and designed to work on both desktop and mobile devices).
For Zulip Cloud, you can read https://zulip.com/policies/rules. One of the nice things about Zulip's model is that communities that we do not want to host can just migrate to self-hosting.
The illegal side of hosting, sharing, and mirroring technology, as it were, is much more free to chase technical excellence at all costs.
There are lessons to be learned in that. For example, for that population, bandwidth efficiency and information leakage control invite solutions that are suboptimal for an organization that would build market share on licensing deals and growth maximization.
Without an overriding commercial growth directive you also align development incentives differently.
There was some noise about an "Outland Edition" coming out in 2026 but all I can find now is AI slop, so maybe that's not real or maybe that's not done yet.
It could also be just a further deal with Quigley. You can already order from a dealer with the 4x4 option, and your vehicle will go factory->Quigley->dealer and be sold to you as "new", with good warranties.
Launchpad does this for everything, as does sbuild/buildd in debian land. They generally make it work by both: running the build system in a neutered VM (network access generally not permitted during builds, or limited to only a debian/ubuntu/PPA package mirror), and going to some degree of invasive process/patching to make build systems work without just-in-time network access.
SUSE and Fedora both do something similar I believe, but I'm not really familiar with the implementation details of those two systems.
I’m only familiar with the Fedora system. The build is hermetic, but the source input come from fedpkg new-sources, which runs on the client used by the package developer.
I do think AI adoption exacerbates said falloff.
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