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.

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”).

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 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”.

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.

Well it could also be a lever or a switch.

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.

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.

Statistical photography aka computational photography aka supersampling. Statistically bin together number of smaller pixels to cut the amount of noise to create picture of a lower resolution than sensor level, but better quality.

Road or cycleway. Pedestrian only sidewalk is not place for bicycles or scooters due to their greater speed.

There is combined cycleway and walkways, but there the point is those are wider than mere sidewalks, so there is room for cycles and scooters to safely overtake pedestrians.

Also not only would they need more satellites, but satellites more densely in any area with multitude of customers. Which eventually hits RF interference saturation.

Radio signal has only so much bandwidth in certain amount of frequency band. Infact being high up and far away makes it worse. Since more receivers hit the beam of the satellite transmission. One would have to acquire more radio bands, but we’ll unused global satellite transmission bands don’t grow in trees.

Tighter transmitters and better filtering receivers can help, but usually at great expense and in the end eventually one hits a limit of “can’t cheat laws of physics”

Well he never won in the first place. This is the original final decision of him losing in the first place. What was “won” previously was SpaceX getting short listed as one of the companies to be seriously considered for award. Then followed the actual final full decision checks and SpaceX failed to meet criterion for the subsidy.

However this isn’t about your anecdotal experience. This is about what level of service they can guarantee as minimum and overall to meet the conditions of the subsidy.

I would also note this isn’t reinstatement matter. FCC refused to give them the subsidy in the first place with this decision. What SpaceX are trying to spin as reneg on previous decision is them making the short list of companies to be considered. Well, getting short listed is not same as being selected fully.

They passed the criterion for the short list check, but the final authorization and selection included more wide and more through checking on the promises of companies to meet criterion and SpaceX failed the more through final round of scrutiny before being awarded the subsidy.

Government having awarded bad money previously isn’t fized by following up bad awards with more bad awards. SpaceX exactly failed since previously money was handed out too losely and FCC has tightened the scrutiny on subsidy awards to not follow up bad money with more bad money.

Nobody is prevented from buying Starlink, this just means Starlink isn’t getting subsidized with tax payer money.

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.

Specially in say foggy conditions and little bit distance. At which point you won’t clearly maybe differentiate individual elements and more like that’s the rear and “block of light in middle, left and right”. At which point it all little blending one might infact be under impression “the light intensity lowered at the rear, huh, not braking then, did they have they parking break dragging they released or something… ohhhjj shuiiiiiit no it is braking hard”.

My two cents from here north of Europe and land of snow, rain, fog and occasional white out conditions.

Since I is decentralized, it is upto the intances. There is no central authority to eject an instance. Rather other instances individually block the instances they find objectionable to their own criterion.

At basic its that. Inpractice moderation federations and coalitions etc. have formed among instances of “we maintain joint blocking list and any of us can suggest new additions to it”.

Due to this one can get ejected from rather sizeable swath, if one one the moderation federations puts one on block list and that is pretty much as far as an “you have 24 hours or we boot you”. You get booted from all the instances part of that federation/coalition.

Plus stuff like just sources/authors trusted by various instances. “If this guy puts an instance on their published black list, we block. So far that guy has done good job with his list”. Ofcourse instance can at any point decide to not trust that list author anymore.

So there is no one “how mastodon does it”. Infact this is the one area where “on what instance are you” matters. Since how your home instance decides to do moderation and blocking, that is how your blocking happens. Plus ones personal additions on top.

Mastodon has a moderation action feature, where one can see listing of what instances and user have been blocked or other moderation action taken. There is explanation field there also for moderator to say “why” but obviously that is upto instance on what their policy is on how exacting their moderation documentation policy is.