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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Aka FPTP wasting votes in most USA states since someone thought it great idea to issue electors as state size blocks. When Constitution gives each state right to decide ways of apportioning their awarded electors.

    State starts awarding 3 democrat electors and 7 Republican electors and suddenly both parties care to entice voters to try to make it 2 and 8 or 4 and 6.

    Doesn’t even take removing the electoral college. Just state deciding “state wide FPTP is stupid”, we are going to start using something more proportional.

    Even in swing states it would still work, work better. Since there would be fight over is it 5 and 5 or 6 and 4.


  • Well one doesn’t necessary need to get rid of electoral college, if the electors were appointed by proportional vote and representation. At that point it would be just a smudging filter. National popular vote with extra steps and some added in accuracy due to one being able to do so much proportionality given how many electors there is.

    So the main problem is not electoral college, but the voting method. Just as note since also getting rid of electoral college isn’t a fix, if the direct popular election uses bad voting method. Like say nationwide plurality vote would be horrible replacement for electoral college.

    Though I would assume anyone suggesting popular vote would mean nationwide majority win popular vote. Though that will demand a “fail to reach majority” resolver. Be it a two round system (second round with top two candidates, thus guaranteed majority result) or some form of instant run-off with guaranteed majority win after elimination rounds.

    TLDR: main problem I winner take all plurality, first past the post more than the technicality of there existing such bureaucratic element as electors and electoral votes.



  • More like there was concerted effort way before Trump. Tea party movement ring bells anyone still and so on? At the time Trump wasn’t at all that much involved in politics and so on. He was still doing The Apprentice and so on.

    Trump is just a figure head of way broader movement, not the planner or brains of the thing. He is just riding the wave, that already existed. Though I must admit might he is pretty decent fire and brimstone crowd pleaser and thus has probably driven some of the base to be more energetic and radical compared to situation where someone less “charismatic” was the lead candidate.


  • Well thing is polls are always little bad at predicting in this kind of situation. Since for example, if Harris was the candidate, the campaign machine would change messaging behind her. This might affect things and so on.

    So any one who isn’t the main candidate has to be taken with “what would be this persons chances on election day taking in account between now and then campaign machine will be pushing them

    Many many other candidates have benefit of “don’t look like they are at deaths door and statistically aren’t beyond the expected life expectancy of USA population for person born so long ago.”

    Since realistically for example as morbid as it is ( and democrats and Biden forced themselves for me to making this comparison by insisting on the old man), one isn’t voting for President Biden for 4 years. Nah it’s like maybe 1-2 of President Biden and then rest of the term President Harris. Since that man is so old and looking bad health, he gets elected he is going to die in office. He will die in year or two also out of office, but well he really should take his retirement and enjoy the year or two of life he has left.

    So the “Harris wouldn’t be better choice”, well she will be the choice in year or two. Don’t think voters don’t take that into account. People aren’t dumb and can read life expectancy chart and use their eyes.


  • Well problem is most of the polls are general popular opinion votes, but US presidential election is not a straight popular vote. As such the general “who majority of the nation like” doesn’t really matter. Secure states are secure, so you might as well not ask their opinion and leave them out of opinion poll. Focus even on voting district levels in states the use electors to elect the electors and so on.

    Problem is such polls are really hard work… Almost no one does those and instead tries to read tea leaves out of general opinion polls. Polls which simply don’t have the granularity of data to make conclusions. You need to ask “what is mood in this swing district in this swing state”. After you have first added up the secure states, well with some looking of “are our old estimates of what are secure states for blue or red correct”. Not that opinion wise all states aren’t purple, but as far as election system results go there absolutely is blue and red states.

    As I understand even in USA maybe one of two whole nation granular polls are done, with the actual amount of data to actually conclude how the actual electoral votes split. Given as said, since in some cases it isn’t “you have to go down to state by state”. Nope “we have to go district by district since this state has weirdo way of electing electors or adding up the totals.”


  • 30 years away from it (reduced from the original 100 years they provided only 5 years ago)

    More like estimates on this are completely unreliable. As in that 100 years could have as well been 1000 years. It was pretty much “until an unpredictable technological paradigm shift happens”. “100 years in future” is “when we have warp drives and star gates” of estimates. Pretty “when we have advanced to next level of advancement and technology, whenever it happens. 100 years should be good minimum of this not being taken as an actual year number estimate”.

    30 years is “we see maybe a potential path to this via hypothetical developments of technology in horizon”. It’s the classical “Fusion is always 30 years away”. Until one time it isn’t, but that 30 year loop can go on indefinitely, if the hypothetical don’t turn to reality. Since you know we thought “maybe that will work, once we put out mind in to it”. Oh it didn’t, on to chasing next path.

    I only know of one project, that has 100 year estimate, that is real. That is the Onkalo deep repository of spent fuel in Finland. It has estimate of spending 100 years being filled and is to be sealed in 2120’s and that is an actual date. Since all the tech is known, the sealing process is known, it just happens to take a century to fill the repository bit by bit. Finland is kinda stable country and radiation hazard such long term, that whatever government is to be there in 2120’s, they will most likely seal the repository.

    Unless “we invent warp drives” happens before that and some new process of actually efficiently and very safely getting rid of the waste is found in some process. (and no that doesn’t include current recycling methods. Since those aren’t that good to get rid of this large amount and with small enough risk of side harms. Surprise, this was studied by Finland as alternative and it was simply decided “recycling is not good enough, simple enough, efficient enough and safe enough yet. Bury it in bedrock tomb”).



  • Main issue comes from GDPR. When one uses the consent basis for collecting and using information it has to be a free choice. Thus one can’t offer “Pay us and we collect less information about you”. Hence “pay or consent” is blatantly illegal. Showing ads in generic? You don’t need consent. That consent is “I vote with my browser address bar”. Thing just is nobody anymore wants to use non tracked ads…

    So in this case DMA 5(2) is just basically re-enforcement and emphasis of previous GDPR principle. from verge

    “exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data.”

    from the regulation

    1. The gatekeeper shall not do any of the following:
      (a) process, for the purpose of providing online advertising services, personal data of end users using services of third parties that make use of core platform services of the gatekeeper;
      (b) combine personal data from the relevant core platform service with personal data from any further core platform services or from any other services provided by the gatekeeper or with personal data from third-party services;
      © cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper, including other core platform services, and vice versa; and
      (d) sign in end users to other services of the gatekeeper in order to combine personal data,

    unless the end user has been presented with the specific choice and has given consent within the meaning of Article 4, point (11), and Article 7 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679.

    surprise 2016/679 is… GDPR. So yeah it’s new violation, but pretty much it is “Gatekeepers are under extra additional scrutiny for GDPR stuff. You violate, we can charge you for both GDPR and DMA violation, plus with some extra rules and explicity for DMA”.

    I think technically already GDPR bans combining without permission, since GDPR demands permission for every use case for consent based processing. There must be consent for processing… combining is processing, needs consent. However this is interpretation of the general principle of GDPR. It’s just that DMA makes it explicit “oh these specific processing, yeah these are processing that need consent per GDPR”. Plus it also rules them out of trying to argue “justified interest” legal basis of processing case of the business. Explicitly ruling “these type of processing don’t fall under justified interest for these companies, these are only and explicitly per consent type actions”.





  • That is just its core function doing its thing transforming inputs to outputs based on learned pattern matching.

    It may not have been trained on translation explicitly, but it very much has been trained on these are matching stuff via its training material. Since you know what its training set most likely contained… dictionaries. Which is as good as asking it to learn translation. Another stuff most likely in training data: language course books, with matching translated sentences in them. Again well you didnt explicitly tell it to learn to translate, but in practice the training data selection did it for you.





  • Nah. 2k$ was a cheap PR face save for them. Pay 2k$ or deal for weeks and months with “remember how Tesla was a stingy bad corporate and cancelled a large order to a small business without compensation”.

    Noh they can go “Well yeah the cancellation wasn’t exactly gracefully, but hey we compensated the business for it. Our bad.”

    Mind you even just paying the while 15k$ would have been small change for them. So I guess they are not utterly (business relations wise) horrible company, but still a cheap conglomerate.


  • Well difference is you have to know coming to know did the AI produce what you actually wanted.

    Anyone can read the letter and know did the AI hallucinate or actually produce what you wanted.

    On code. It might produce code, that by first try does what you ask. However turns AI hallucinated a bug into the code for some edge or specialty case.

    Hallucinating is not a minor hiccup or minor bug, it is fundamental feature of LLMs. Since it isn’t actually smart. It is a stochastic requrgitator. It doesn’t know what you asked or understand what it is actually doing. It is matching prompt patterns to output. With enough training patterns to match one statistically usually ends up about there. However this is not quaranteed. Thus the main weakness of the system. More good training data makes it more likely it more often produces good results. However for example for business critical stuff, you aren’t interested did it get it about right the 99 other times. It 100% has to get it right, this one time. Since this code goes to a production business deployment.

    I guess one can code comprehensive enough verified testing pattern including all the edge cases and with thay verify the result. However now you have just shifted the job. Instead of programmer programming the programming, you have programmer programming the very very comprehensive testing routines. Which can’t be LLM done, since the whole point is the testing routines are there to check for the inherent unreliability of the LLM output.

    It’s a nice toy for someone wanting to make a quick and dirty test code (maybe) to do thing X. Then try to find out does this actually do what I asked or does it have unforeseen behavior. Since I don’t know what the behavior of the code is designed to be. Since I didn’t write the code. good for toying around and maybe for quick and dirty brainstorming. Not good enough for anything critical, that has to be guaranteed to work with promise of service contract and so on.

    So what the future real big job will be is not prompt engineers, but quality assurance and testing engineers who have to be around to guard against hallucinating LLM/ similar AIs. Prompts can be gotten from anyone, what is harder is finding out did the prompt actually produced what it was supposed to produce.



  • If they made 4 models, two different sized trucks and two different sized SUVs

    Yeah. The key is this will be a whole USA tastes specific brand for VW Group. Not just a single model. They are pouring lot of money into this and even VW Group don’t make a 2 billion dollar factory on a whim.

    Infact I would say what and how well the brand does couple first years isn’t that important to VW. If course they want it ramped up and profitable as soon as possible. However this has to be long term play. Otherwise they would have just launched SUV and Pick-up under VW or one other of their existing brands.

    Stellantis has Chrysler, RAM, Jeep and so on in place in USA. VW Group wants something similarly matching in place for North American Market. VW went through their brand and IP catalog and realised via Traton they own Navistar, which owns rights to International and well would you look at that International had a pick-up range named Scout. This all went on the burner pretty soon after the Traton-Navistar deal finalised in 2021.

    I would even say I wouldn’t be surprised, if other stuff wouldn’t later on appear from the design catalog as Scout branded for US Market. For example I wouldn’t be at all surprised say on a Scout Transporter cargo van later on and so on.

    So it might be VW Group has existing model somewhere around the world in place and think it might sell in USA. Well send the blueprints to Scouts factory and have them slap Scout badging and maybe some design curves on the outer paneling. Badge-engineering is a thing.

    Well ofcourse they have limited VW brand presence also, but we’ll it might be once Scout is up and running Scout might fully take over. Depends I guess how they see the brand caches.


  • Ehhhh. 2016, the year of an open no-incumbent primary? That is not called division, that is called primary democracy working as supposed. Primary is exactly the time, when party membership is under no obligation to show unity. That only needs to happen during the national election stage.

    Also just due to winning primary one isn’t as candidate free to ignore other candidate bases. Not out of any high ideals, but hard political reality. No voter is obligated to show up and voters are emotional beings. Slight them and they might stay home (which is the actual risk, instead of them voting for the other party).

    It might be “self-harming”, but again voters can be emotional instead of rational. One has to play to their actual psyche, instead of the idealistic perfect rational psyche one would want them to have. Atleast if one wants to win and shouldn’t the aim of democratic party be win by near any means begging, promising the moon to its base, being as enthusiastic and energetic as possible for the national good of avoiding another Trump presidency.

    People talk about electorates obligation to avoid another Trump presidency. What about DNCs obligation to go above and beyond to avoid another Trump presidency.

    Which is easier to change? The collective psyche layout of 300 million people or one party’s campaign program and political agenda? It’s easier to fix the candidate/candidates program to match the electorate, rather than fix the electorate to match the candidate.

    So if there is “division” among party base, it is the candidates and party programs job to move to match, cover and repair the cracks. Not out of high ideals, but since that is the one practically fast enough way to fix the issue. Base isn’t going to suddenly change their psyche and emotional state just, because DNC says to do so out of national good. Again emotional beings, not robotic, rational automatons.