The senate is by no means fair or democratic, but its borders reflect something that exists apart from the purpose of electing senators and whose borders are not drawn for the (sole) purpose of obtaining a majority in the Senate.
It’s not gerrymandered in the way that a “whites-only” sign isnt sexist.
I’m not going to get into a pointless argument about whether or not the worst part of your proposal is “people” or “math”, since this is a system question and the distinction is irrelevent.
Humans will attempt to distort whatever system you decide. The only thing that has ever constrained this impulse is other humans with opposing interests. If you do have that what math is actually used becomes irrelevant, and if you don’t then the math is just a game that the humans who want to break your system may play or ignore as they choose.
There was intentional miscounting in the 2020 census, even though that was only used to determine relative distribution of representatives among the various states. Every politician in the country already has huge lists of where their supporters live, and it is already obvious when they’re pulling shenanigans. And yet they do it anyway, because mere shame is not enough to keep humans from being jerks to obtain power and wealth.
My preferred alternative is not to rely on software or laws, but other humans and a dramatic expansion of whose votes matter in the country from “just those who won” to “essentially everyone.”.
I don’t know whether it’s cute or terrifying that you think you can solve a political problem with software.
Humans can and will game how many people are reported as living where. And they’ll intentionally misinterpret the algorithm you write. And they’ll lie about what your magic box says. And if they’re ever caught doing it they can and will be either ignored by the humans who enforce laws or just be given pardons by the governing humans who wanted the system mucked with in the first place
The only thing in our species’ history that has ever served as a check against the selfish creativity and audacity of humans is the selfish creativity and audacity of other humans.
Passing government functions off to a computer only encourages corruption and distortion in either the implementation, the input, or how the output is handled.
It’s like trying to engineer anti-cheat on a system where not only does the user own their own hardware but also the marketplace vendors, the courts, the OS vendors, and your servers.
Algorithmically generated districts just give a sharper target, and allowing the existing systems to include multi-member districts just makes gerrymanding easier.
The only way to prevent gerrymandering is with either districts that don’t change (statewide), or changing the rules of the legislature so gerrymandering doesnt matter
My favorite potential fix is direct proxy voting. Tie vote weight in the legislature to how many citizens voted for you, and send either the top N vote-getters or everyone who gets at least X% of the votes cast to the legislature.
“At Large” means that the senators would be elected by the whole state, which is the only way to avoid gerrymandering and identical to how the current rules work.
Having all of Congress be at-large would essentially eliminate gerrymandering by just letting any majority in a state decide everything.
I think thats the single worst change we could make, beating out term limits. ~Because if only lobbyists and staffers can be long-term careers we’d never have principled professional politicians, just short-term figureheads~
CA can have four at-large seats for the whole state up for election every two years.
They would have the same long-view that existing senators have, and would not be internally less responsive than the current system
While English has largely commingled conditional and unconditional love, as a Christian I feel obligated to point out that Jesus definitely doesn’'t love you because He wants to fuck you.
The senate was conceived at a time when the most populated states were filled with slaves and disenfranchised poors who couldn’t vote. There’s no reason to discard a longer-termed gerrymanderjng-immune chamber of Congress just because we want the 70 million Americans in California and Texas to not be subjects of the 1 million in Vermont and Wyoming.
Stacking the senate to reflect population is fine. Especially if we change the house to only care about voters
Because drug dealers are people who couldn’t get better jobs. Which suggests they aren’t quite as competent as the lawyers and plumbers and bodyguards who also on occasion kill their rich clients, leading to having a higher rate of the economically unsound activity.
Plus growing up rich is apparently a disability that can get you off a rape charge, so the rich kids are more likely to do the things that you’d kill them over, and drug dealers are more likely to be armed and willing to kill than pizza dealers.
The key phrase is tell a lie not speak a falsehood. All the magic does here is reveal his honesty or dishonesty.
And since he eventually becomes either a real boy or ordinary puppet, it’s hardly an infinite source of wood.
~Excellent point that the only things worth invading Earth for are those things found only on Earth.~
FOSS projects that are covered by a copyleft license can only prohibit the sort of derivative work that they could haul someone into court to stop.
LLM training advocates argue that their use is technically “educational” and so they feel justified in ignoring copyright, and since none of these companies have been destroyed by lawsuits they’re essentially right.
And that’s ignoring that there’s probably a license grant in the GitHub TOS that can be read as giving permission for activities that reasonably include LLM training.
I was born when Carter was POTUS and recall the Regan presidency.
For my perspective the biggest shift isn’t technology or TV always being in color or even that the bigots went from smiling politeness to objects of derision to unapologetic hypocrites. Rather, it was the absence of the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon.
When I was in kindergarten we had air raid drills – what to do if the bombs started falling. Up until the very first Gulf War we lived with a constant awareness that any day could literally end us all, and most of us became extremely cynical because of it. Irony and punk ruled, and it wasn’t until the USSR fell apart that we all collectively realized that life would actually go on without a nuclear apocalypse.
The 90s were essentially one massive party. The cold war has been won, our long wartime compromises were unnecessary, and this fancy new Internet would bring us a future where we were all rich and happy and at peace.
2001 is just outside of your scope, but the terrorist attacks that year were the end of the 90s just like the fall of the Soviet Union was the end of the multi-decade horror that I was born into.
There are a bunch of other weird little things we could go into, like banking by phone or going to an ATM first and then shopping with the cash, or how cigarettes were everywhere and we thought everyone was cis and straight or “weird”, but that constant slow-burning fear is the thing I remember most.
It was so bad, and we were so convinced that doomsday was coming, that on the day of the 9/11 attacks I remember thinking “what took them so long.”
LLMs are less human than monkeys, and so are not granted any copyright at all for any near-art created through them just as a human can’t claim copyright over what apes do with a camera.
The question isn’t whether or not the overgrown reddit-comment-simulator is original or not The question is if its output counts as writing and acting. And the answer to that is a strong no.
They didbt kill it. They issued a court ruling about how two conflicting laws interact whose interpretation could drive federated social media underground if commercial social media don’t lobby for a sane regulation that doesn’t treat the modern Internet like pre-internet print media.
So…
Some troll put together a fake ad, put it on a ad-sharing site saying someone was a prostitute, and the site took down the ad about an hour after the someone complained. But in that hour some other trolls copied the ad elsewhere, and so the someone sued saying the ad-sharing site should have stopped the other trolls.
The upset someone sued in file-sharing site in Romania, and rather than getting laughed out of court like a NFT dork complaining about right-clicking they got a favorable ruling, and now both halves of the fediverse are unlawful in the EU.
I think you need to intentionally misread that sentence to get that interpretation. But, since you asked:
[Since] EA [is] including women in a video game, [and responded to complaints by] saying “accept it or don’t buy the game”, [their message is clear] and anyone continuing on [with their complaints] after that is absolutely perpetuating a societal ill.
I’m not all that interested in letting you sealion about how it’s unfair for me to dismiss somebody’s “very real” concerns just because unrepentant sexist bigots are also making sexist attacks. So I’ll also quote and annotate my original point:
[Bigotry is] either an easily addressed distraction or it’s a persistent problem [that is more urgent than near any other concern].
There are four things that matter for transfer speed between storage devices.
USB sticks tend to be flash memory with relatively equal read and write speeds, but the spinning disks in a hard disk drive are noticeably unequal. So, unless the USB is very slow, you’d expect a USB to HDD copy to be slower than either USB to USB or HDD to USB.
You can also be slowed down by antivirus scans, on-disk encryption, search indexing, or even the need to move bits from the USB bus to the HDD controller.