I’m also on Mastodon as https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr .

  • 0 Posts
  • 84 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 2nd, 2023

help-circle



  • You sound like Humpty Dumpty:

    “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

    Using words that far outside their dictionary or conventional meanings is a not a path to clear communication.


    Separately, I checked, and I can no longer find the map of ICE jurisdiction that I was remembering, and as far as I can tell ICE’s current jurisdiction is anywhere federal law applies, including Oklahoma. So, I was definitely wrong there.


  • That’s not quite how jurisdiction works. County sheriffs aren’t shot at the border when they attend state court (in another county), but they don’t have jurisdiction so they can’t act as a law officer (e.g. arrest someone) in a foreign county.

    But, I agree that when the local police / national guard support / collaborate / conspire with ICE employees we are more likely to see a miscarriage of justice that goes unaddressed as the most likely outcome.


  • I’ve seen auto-calculated tip of all combinations of with/without tax, with/without percent discount, and with/without individual item discounts.

    I wish tipping would end, by mandating a living wage for all workers from the chef to the dishwasher and including all the waitstaff and everyone else in both the front and the back. But, until it does, I try to be generous with my tips, but also kind to people that can’t or are simply tired of “tipflation”.



  • I know it’s crazy, but I can absolutely understand this feeling. I had recently married Abby in Stardew Valley and was starting to make friends with the other villagers. I did something the game wasn’t expecting, and gave Seby a loved gift on his birthday, and then quickly triggered an event where we kissed! (FWIW, I think this behavior has been fixed and you can’t do this on the current patch.)

    I still feel bad thinking about that Abigail that I accidentally cheated on, and I haven’t loaded that save again. It’s been years; SV 1.4 wasn’t even out yet.

    So, despite how much I dislike all this “AI” hype, I really do sympathize for the users that feel like they’ve lost a relationship.



  • I disagree that it is fair use. But, I was actually expecting the judiciary to say that it was. So, despite the ruling, I AM still mad that they used copyrighted works (including mine), in violation of the terms. (And, honestly, my terms [usually AGPLv3] are fairly generous.)

    I’m also concerned about labor issues, and environmental impact, and general quality, but the unauthorized use of copyrighted works is still in the mix. And, if they are willing to all my private viewing of torrented TV “theft”, I’m willing to call their selling of an interface to a LLM / NN that was trained on and may have incorporated (or emit!) my works (in whole or in part) “theft”.

    Labor issues are mostly solved by making to the workers control the means of production, not captial. Same old story.

    Environment impact is better policed independent of what the electricity/water is used for. We aren’t making a lot of headway there, but we need to reign in emissions (etc.) whether they are using it to train LLMs or research cancer.

    Quality… is subjective and I don’t think we are near the ceiling of that. And, since I don’t use “AI” for the above reasons, it really isn’t much of a concern to me.





  • I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation “guarantees” that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there’s enough BIPOC population that’s widely distributed, but needs to be “packed” (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.

    My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.

    Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.

    It may be that it’s impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.



  • On the last bullet point, we probably need to federalize voter qualification and registration, first. Whether you can vote or not depends on what state you are in (felony disenfranchisement, e.g.). Some states let you register on voting day; others close registration weeks before voting day (and some incumbents try to purge voters as close to the deadline as possible). It’s really quite a mess. :(

    I think if we made it easier to vote, we wouldn’t have to make it mandatory – federal holiday on voting day, open/unrestricted early voting for a least a week before voting day. I’m against mandatory voting unless there’s a “[X] Democracy is dead / a sham in $District” protest vote option or something similar. Incumbents already claim my support when I’m just trying harm-reduction and I actually support someone that never made it into the primary for wanting to tax the rich.



  • Local representation is valuable. In the Netherlands it is practically automatic since it is only 41,850 km^2. My state is 134,771 km^2 so you’d need to split it into about 4 pieces/districts to get as local representation. Oddly enough we get 4 congressional districts: https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR/ but we still have issues with Gerrymandering has the largely R government applies cracking approaches to any D voting localities.

    Texas is much larger, with more population density variance, so the problems are magnified.

    I do agree that instead of a lot of small, geographically compact districts, proportional representation in a larger, but still compact multi-member district is preferable, but that’s not quite the problem we are having with districts.



  • Gerrymandering can still be effective with ranked choice. It’s harder, but you can still do both cracking and packing, you just have to model top-2 or top-3 preferences.

    Popular vote is already the norm for gerrymandered areas.

    I mean we should definitely implement Ranked Choice up and down the ticket, and implement Popular Vote for President, but neither actually solves Gerrymandering.

    I’d like to say “independent” redistricting organizations are the solution, but the practical success of those is mixed. The incumbents just pack those with cronies, or ignore them, sometimes with the assistance of the judiciary.