Election reforms. IRV, public campaign financing, nix the electoral college, proportional representation, etc.

Is that even a close call? If Trump called me a shithead I’d wear that as a badge of honor. If Mr Rogers called me a disappointment I would question my life choices.

Yeah backreferences in general are not “regular” in the mathematical sense.

“It’s true that I hear lots of women, and men, who say ‘you’re very brave,’” she said. “I say it’s not bravery, it’s will and determination to change society.”

Prior to the 2016 election, I was hopeful that the freedom caucus and the rest of the far right was getting too crazy for the general public, and that its support would collapse leading to a bit of a normalization of politics.

Wishful thinking, in retrospect.

The solution is for states to allocate delegates proportionally. That is in the best interest of each state, so it’s not fragile. It can be accomplished one state at a time, so it’s logistically easier.

Isn’t this overlooking that each state that does this, especially swing states, does it at their own disadvantage? States that allocate their electoral votes all-or-nothing have more sway over politicians who receive those votes (because the politicians are, in turn, are incentivized to spend their effort on states where the return on that effort is larger, and an effort that wins you 5% of the vote in an all-or-nothing swing state could win you the whole state’s worth of electoral votes, compared to 5% of electoral votes in a proportionally allocated state).

Better investigate Hunter Biden and Burisma even harder then!

I heated up some soup that I made a while back and froze. I make some good soup!

A 0x0 px jpg (trying to get an old webcam working, unsuccessfully)

I live in the suburbs of a decently sized but not super large city in WI.

• Convenience store: 120 m
• Chain supermarket: 2.6 km
• Bus stop: 5 m
• Park: 450 m
• Big supermarket: 3.1km
• Library: 1.5 km
• Train station: 58.9 km :(

Oh shit, we haven’t? Do I… do I have to start saying stuff about eating pets?

When ChatGPT first started to make waves, it was a significant step forward in the ability for AIs to sound like a person. There were new techniques being used to train language models, and it was unclear what the upper limits of these techniques were in terms of how “smart” of an AI they could produce. It may seem overly optimistic in retrospect, but at the time it was not that crazy to wonder whether the tools were on a direct path toward general AI. And so a lot of projects started up, both to leverage the tools as they actually were, and to leverage the speculated potential of what the tools might soon become.

Now we’ve gotten a better sense of what the limitations of these tools actually are. What the upper limits of where these techniques might lead are. But a lot of momentum remains. Projects that started up when the limits were unknown don’t just have the plug pulled the minute it seems like expectations aren’t matching reality. I mean, maybe some do. But most of the projects try to make the best of the tools as they are to keep the promises they made, for better or worse. And of course new ideas keep coming and new entrepreneurs want a piece of the pie.

That does seem to at least help. It seems to be harder to trigger the problems with higher values. I could still get it to happen with the quant at 2048, but I had to really work at it.

I notice that the + Firefox line seems to show up with a quant of 900 even when the minimum value is higher than that? That seems weird.

Is this the Simpsons approach? “I’m just going to fire my chain guns like this, and if you get shot down it’s your own fault!”

Two spaces after periods.

The winner of the popular vote within the state wins the state’s electoral votes. And Florida has a sizeable number of electrical votes.

“Don’t elect the other guy” campaigning is strongly incentivized by first past the post voting, unfortunately. Not that that’s the sole cause, but… it’s certainly not helping.

Doesn’t take a “church boy” to not assault someone, dipshit.

I mean, going from this example it seems like everyone should be afraid of good guys with guns.