Thanks for testing and reporting this! The QR endpoint itself works fine directly (POST /qr with {"text":"hello","format":"png"}), but sounds like the UI form may have an issue on mobile.
Can you tell me what happens – does the button just not respond, or do you get an error? I'll look into it now and push a fix if there's a mobile layout bug.
In the meantime, the raw API endpoint should work fine from any HTTP client.
Update: just pushed a fix that adds a loading indicator and visible error messages to the QR UI, so if it's failing silently that should now surface the error. Deployed ~2 min ago.
If you can reproduce it again and see an error message, I'd love to know what it says. Could be a rate limit hit, a CORS issue, or something else entirely.
I believe your view of what democracy is tainted by what USA democracy looks like.
Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.
Which countries do you have in mind? In my experience, most parliamentary democracies have rules which actually exacerbate the issue. See for example the elections last year in Germany, where the CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority in the Bundestag with less than 45% of the popular vote!
I thought "Dominate or be dominated" was the problem you saw in democracy?
Well, then I guess Germany's example is not too bad.
"CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority" ... well, no. That's not how it works at all.
CDU and SPD did not win a majority together, since they were opponents in the election, and fought tooth and nail over, for example, immigration issues. They did not, at all, campaign together.
They both failed to win over half of the parliament seats. In simplified terms, they both lost. Everyone lost, if you will, because the system is not designed for anyone to easily win over half of the parliament seats.
That's why they had compromise and form a coalition. Thus no-one rules completely over the other and, in theory, the compromises of coalitions have a better societal outcome than the extreme views one party or the other might hold on a certain issue.
I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here. Every democracy has a system for aggregating votes to parliament seats and the transmission is never 1:1.
In this case:
Votes for parties that don’t enter the Bundestag (e.g., those below the 5 % threshold) are not counted in seat allocation, making the share of seats for CDU + SPD higher than their raw vote share. Seats are redistributed proportionally among the parties that did enter parliament.
I don't see much of a problem.
The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream. This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it. This is a scenario for winner-takes-all situations between nations, which is a much much worse outcome than even a winner-takes-all situation between political parties.
The coalition government prevents a single party from controlling the government, which is definitely a benefit, since the two parties will somewhat limit the ambitions of the other. In the areas where they agree, though, those parties (who only represent 45% of the country) are able to rule the other 55%, who don't want to be ruled by them but have very few options for relief.
> I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here.
It's not about the vote, it's about the human beings who are ruled by a government they don't want.
We can all look at a country like North Korea, where the ruler is oppressing the hell out of his people, and feel for them. We understand implicitly that it is wrong for one man (or a ruling clique) to dominate the other 99% of people who don't want to be dominated by him. We can also look at a country like apartheid South Africa, where a relatively small majority dominated the majority, and say that is wrong. As people who've been raised and indoctrinated as (small-d) democrats, it's easy to look at our systems, where a paltry 49% (or, in Germany, 54%) of the people are being dominated by the other 51% (45%), but this is merely the result of habit. There is no reason that they should be forced to live and work and be taxed by a system they dislike or even abhor. And, of course, the sense that the evolution of the state has somehow "peaked" with democracy is an expression of the most common bias of all, which is our "presentism" bias--that past progress is obvious in retrospect but future progress is impossible, undesirable, or, at best, inscrutible.
> I don't see much of a problem.
Neither did Europe in the 20s, to their great discredit.
> The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream.
Because you say so?
> This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it.
Nine of the ten countries with the highest GDP per capita have a population under ~7 million: Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Singapore, Norway and Denmark. Perhaps you should inform them how "frankly absurd" they've been to forego the benefits of economies of scale?
There are reasonable adjustments that can be made, when there's a know issue. But the key term is: reasonable.
Their reaction, to me, speaks of denial or embarrassment and inflexibility. They're clearly aware they have an issue.
The team though can't be coming down on them and blaming rather than adapting too. Reasonable adjustments work both ways. Team work is not about blaming individuals but about working together. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
A string value in a json config needed to be updated.
On one prod instance, typo while updating the config by hand. Config validation of the software caught it, software stopped with the appropriate error message, a few minutes later we were up and running again.
We introduced work reviews on prod instances (similar to code reviews) after that.
Later, he then wrote a patch script to avoid making that mistake again.
In the json schema definition used in the script, the name of the property had a typo (how it came to be... no clue, copy paste should have taken care of that).
The script was part of a MR, the reviewer missed the typo. We noticed it in staging.
We introduced tests for config editing scripts after that.
And so it went on and on... The problem is not that it happens and we then refine our processes. It is the frequency.
What I’m seeing here is that you don’t have mature mechanisms to assure the reliability of your services yet. The second paragraph suggests that a misconfiguration was able to make it into production that arguably should have been caught at an earlier stage of the deployment pipeline. Anyone can make these sorts of mistakes; the fact that a particular colleague is more prone to them really doesn’t matter all that much.
Fortify your delivery pipeline and the problem should resolve itself.
They are not, but think of it like learning to play a guitar: at first, the strings cut into your fingers, but then you build up enough calluses and playing it stops hurting. Or, consider a building code: every rule was written in blood, and new buildings get safer over time.
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