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.

Battle Tested Strategies? Amazon aren’t very subtle about this being all out intentional circumvention attempt. Why don’t you name your holding company as “tax evasion incorporated”, while you are at it Amazon.

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.

Systemically nigh impossible due to spoilering effect, wasted votes, gerrymandering and so on under FPTP. Even then all would happen is the new party replacing on of the existing ones and still stuck with two party system.

YouTube, cgpgrey, animal Kingdom votes videos.

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

2. 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 violate you for both GDPR and DMA violation, plus with some extra rules and explicity for DMA”.

Always 50/50 because two party system, FPTP and electoral college.

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.

Newer ever take Klarnas word for anything. They are the fine and Dandy company whose business model involved by routine fishing for customers bank authorization credentials.

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.”

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.

There not being a better play doesn’t mean that play is a good one. It is a bad play, just the least bad one. What it means the system overall is broken and careening ro a crash, since the actually good plays are not politically viable. Mind you not that they wouldn’t be voter viable, but the gatekeepers who get to choose what is put in front of voters viably don’t want them there, that kind of politically non viable.

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.

Well even on not being rare, lynxes are stalking predators. Given what noisy clumsy travels us humans are and their keen senses, one is lucky to see a lynx. Since firstly they are always stalking or hiding just naturally and specially so hiding upon most likely spotting human way before human spots them. One could go right by one and not notice it. We aren’t on their menu given our size and not being normally encountered prey species. Also as stalkers unless it is something like a mother lynx protecting its young, it won’t make itself known. Far rather hides and let’s you pass without encounter. Since one less risk of the lynx getting injured in fight, if it can’t just hide away and go unnoticed.

Though on top of that some species of lynx are very endangered.

I would also add that isn’t empty talk like “Well he said it once, non biggie”. That statement by POTUS itself drove the national policy other countries. When POTUS says “other nations you are with us or are our enemies”, that matters.

That is a signal the reverberates around with “do we dare to anger USA on this one”. The Afghan war partisipants list is long and contains some not so obvious participants often doing rather small token participations. Which I think is exactly “Well we have to show we are with USA”.

For example here in Finland in the after action report of Finnish participation in Afghanistan tells the reason wasn’t building peace, it wasn’t even combat experience. It was “coalition and alliance building” aka showing USA “we are with them”.

In the after action study one of the interviewed decision makers literally directly quoted:

Yhdysvallat sanoi 9/11 jälkeen: olette joko meidän kanssa tai meitä vastaan.”

United States said after 9/11: You are either with us or against us.

Right above explaining how it was 20 year long very unpopular operation caused losses and achieved nothing in Afghanistan, but hey the Finnish NATO application will go through with flying colors.

The whole time the media blitz was about “Helping and building peace in Afghanistan”. When in reality we went in because USA publicly extorted pretty all of west to show colors.

This isn’t only in Finland in other European after action reports have shown similar “We went in, because Bush publicly demanded show of loyalty”.

Well mostly the flaw is people assigning the test abilities it was never intended. Like testing intelligence. Turing outright as first thing in the paper presenting “imitation game” noted moving away from testing intelligence, since he didn’t know to do that. Even on the realm of “testing intelligent kind of behavior” well more like human like behavior and human being here proxy for intelligent, it was mostly an academic research idea. Not a concrete test meant to be some milestone.

If the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think’ are to be found by examining how they are commonly useit is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

Turing wanted a way to step away from stuff like “thinking” and “intelligence” directly and then proposed “imitation game” mostly to the rest of the academia as way to develop computer systemics more towards “intelligent behavior”. It was mostly like “hey we need some goal to have as a goal to have something to move towards with these intelligence things. This isn’t intelligence, but it might be usefull goal or tool for development work”. Since without some goal/project/aim to have project don’t advance. So it was “how about we try to develop a thing, that can beat this imitation game. Wouldn’t that be good stepping stone. Then we can move to the actual serious stuff. Just an idea”.

However since this academic “thinking out aloud spitballing ideas” was uttered by the Alan Turing, it became the Turing Test and everyone started taking it way too seriously. Specially outside academia. Who yes did play the imitation game with their programs as it was intended as research and development tool.

exemplified by for example this little exerpt of “not trying to do anything too complete and ground breaking here”:

In any case there is no intention to investigate here the theory of the game, and it will be assumed that the best strategy is to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a man

It is pretty literally “I had a thought”. Turin makes no claims of machine beating the game having any significance other than “machine beat this game I came up with, neat”. There is no argument of if machine beats imitation game, then X or then it means Y is reached.

Rest of the paper is actually about objections to the core idea of “it could ever be possible for machine to think” and even as such said imitation game is kinda lead in or introduction to Turing’s treatise various objections of various “it would be impossible for machine to think” arguments. Starting with theological argument of “only human soul can think. Hence no animal or machine can think.” … since it was 1950’s.

Yeah. Unless he has evidence… Yeah, don’t go around spewing that kind of stuff. How about going with “looks like middle-aged man having midlife crisis and currently in the “gym rat” phase of it”… little dig in there, but you know more realistic. Yeah he is little funny with the shirtless sports posing, so throw some shade over it. However it in no way implies cheating on his wife. Don’t know if he is, don’t know if he isn’t, but getting the middle life crisis hobby of “jiu-jitsu” doesn’t tell anything about that.

As said I think him getting in shape, sports and posing is way more about just bulk standard mid-life crisis. “Oh I’m getting little old. When did that midsection and belly got so wide. I should start a sports hobby to get in shape and avoid cardiovascular disease”. Some people get a motorbike to catch the lost youth. Others become gym rats/sports nuts to try to catch back their lost youth body.

Again which really wouldn’t be that interesting except billionaire and also him apparently getting so hooked on it, that he started competing in tournaments.

Doesn’t also remove anything from his horrible record of business ethics. He has absolutely horrible business ethics as most of these silicon valley billionaires in the advertising/social media sphere. Comes with the territory. One doesn’t start a targeted advertising social media business, if one values the ethics of peoples right to privacy.