ChairmanMeow

@ChairmanMeow@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  FPTP isn’t strictly necessary for districts, but it’s the most common. One way or another, you need some way to determine which candidate will ultimately represent a district. Unless you’re in a 2-party system, it’s very likely that this candidate will only represent a minority of voters in a district. Even with RCV you might get a “least disliked” candidate, but that’s still not a candidate that has majority support.

  Perhaps to make it easier to understand: there is zero guarantee that all voters in a specific district have the same voting preference. And those without a plurality opinion are likely to end up marginalised under a districting system. If another group in your district is slightly larger, you end up without representation. Without districting, these voters can band together and choose their preferred candidate, without being constrained by arbitrary district lines.

  Perhaps a concrete example will help. Take a random western country with a small minority. This minority doesn’t tend to aggregate in specific districts as much, they’re usually very well spread out over the country (let’s say there’s 2% nationwide, but at most 10% in any given district). Under a districting system, they’re likely to fail getting even a single representative, as they’re a minority in every single district. But under proportional representation, they could get a representative as collectively the minority is large enough to warrant representation with at least 2% of seats.

  There’s also systems like the Danish, which iirc tries to figure out how many districts should be appointed to which party by dividing up the national vote (though I’m not very well acquainted with it). But even such a system will then be forced to assign a district representative to a district where the candidate does not enjoy majority support.

  And that’s the issue with districting. It’s not possible to have a system that guarantees the national election results match the national voter preference, and that guarantees that district election results match the district voter preference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Districts by their very nature represent voters.

  I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.

  It’s really important to understand why this is not the case. Districted voting essentially introduces first-past-the-post voting at more levels. Each level of FPTP creates a larger disparity between what voters want and who gets elected. This is in part due to gerrmandering, but that’s not a required thing.

  Every time you decide a district election through FPTP, you essentially create a rounding error, a disparity between the election results and what voters actually voted for. This FPTP system then reinforces the two-party system that the US and UK have a very hard time escaping. And as you may be able to guess, having a mere two major parties to choose from is fucking terrible for getting niche voters represented. It’s why the US and UK see comparatively little regional focus and increased disillusionment with national politics in these areas.

  Abolishing districts actually helps local representation(!). Because under proportional representation, if someone campaigns on serving the needs of a small group of voters, said group can vote for them and they will be elected. It lets anyone basically define their own “district” of voters, without political manipulation. If they fail to attract a sizeable enough share of votes, then this electoral niche is simply too small to be represented at the national level, and this group should perhaps petition local government instead.

  We see this effect quite clearly in countries like the Netherlands, where there are quite a few national parties to choose from, and several focus on a specific group of voters (eg the BBB which focuses on farmers, or the FNP which focuses on people living in the region of Friesland.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Belgium Targets Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Sweeping Site Blocking Order⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Imo cities like Bruges or Antwerp are much nicer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wi-Fi 8 won't be faster, but will be better - more details emerge just hours after Wi-Fi 7 protocols are officially ratified⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s almost certainly some text preprocessor that treats training data first, so I’m not sure if your old-timey letters ever reach an LLM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Government responded to the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" Petition.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Even forums that might seem harmless carry potential risks, such as where adults come into contact with child users.

  Wait until the government finds out they’re gonna have to age-restrict playing outside. What a genuine bone-dead stupid take.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨She's a keeper⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This does assume that these are independent variables, which may not necessarily be the case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s true, those happened when Israel was funding and using Hamas to deliberately destabilize the more secular PLO, and followed decades of Israeli occupation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But then Hamas got into power with a plurality of the vote and have been constantly attacking Israel ever since.

  Hamas has always been extreme in rhetoric, but the violence afaik began when Israel, the US and the PA attempted to coup them out of power.

  There have been a few times in this war there has been ceasefires with hostages exchanged for prisoners. Hamas eventually stops releasing hostages and the conflict resumes.

  So far every ceasefire was broken by Israel, because they were unwilling to enter the next phase of negotiations which was a precondition to the release of more hostages.

  It doesn’t seem like Hamas wants sovereignty, they could have had that if they wanted it.

  Like how Israel respects the sovereignty of the PA in the West Bank? Yeah right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At this point the hostages are Hamas’ only bargaining chip left. At the same time, Israel has very publicly stated that their primary war goal is not the release of the hostages but the total extermination of Hamas. So even if Hamas released the hostages, by Israel’s own admission, the war would not end (it may even intensify as there’d be no hostages to avoid bad PR for).

  Also, nobody thinks Hamas are saints. But the people of Gaza should not have to face extermination by explosions, gunshots or starvation because of their crimes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I personally haven’t had to use a chromium browser for anything yet since my swith to Firefox. Only to test a render bug in chromium that Google hasn’t bothered to fix in over 9 years for a case that works correctly in every other browser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI’s Sam Altman warns of AI voice fraud crisis in banking⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean it’s a valid concern. He’s also nowhere near the first to voice it. I attended a presentation from a Microsoft exec who explained that Microsoft had already developed very powerful voice mimicking technology, well ahead of anything public at the time. It required only a few seconds of speech before it could fully replicate your voice. But their ethics board or whatever stopped them, due to the massive fraud risks. Nowadays I think they’ve adapted the tech to voice recognition used in Teams instead.

  Of course, MS wasn’t the only one working on this and other people have since published these solutions, so the cat’s out of the bag now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does he actually have a diagnosis or are you making that up or assuming things?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s applying existing solutions to a different programming language or domain, but ultimately every single technique used already exists. It only applied what it knew, it did not come up with something new. The problem as stated is also not really “new” either, image extraction, conversion and rendering isn’t exactly a “new problem”.

  I’m not disputing that LLMs can speed up some work, I know it occasionally does so for me as well. But what you have to understand is that the LLM only remembered similar problems and their solutions, it did not at any point invent something truly new. I understand the distinction is difficult to make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re referring to more generic machine learning, not LLMs. These are vastly different technologies.

  And I have used them for programming, I know their limitations. They don’t really transfer solutions to new problems, not on their own anyway. It usually requires pretty specific prompting. They can at best apply solutions to problems, but even then it’s not a truly generalised thing, even if it seems to work for many cases.

  That’s the trap you’re falling into as well; LLMs look like they’re doing all this stuff, because they’re trained on data produced by people who actually do so. But they can’t think of something truly novel. LLMs are mathematically unable to truly generalize, it would prove P=NP if they did (there was a paper from a researcher in IIRC Nijmegen that proved this). She also proved they won’t scale, and lo and behold LLM performance is plateauing hard (except in very synthetic, artificial benchmarks designed to make LLMs look good).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well the thing is, LLMs don’t seem to really “solve” complex problems. They remember solutions they’ve seen before.

  The example I saw was asking an LLM to solve “Towers of Hanoi” with 100 disks. This is a common recursive programming problem, takes quite a while for a human to write the answer to. The LLM manages this easily. But when asked to solve the same problem with with say 79 disks, or 41 disks, or some other oddball number, the LLM fails to solve the problem, despite it being simpler(!).

  It can do pattern matching and provide solutions, but it’s not able to come up with truly new solutions. It does not “think” in that way. LLMs are amazing data storage formats, but they’re not truly ‘intelligent’ in the way most people think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Completion is not the same as only returning the exact strings in its training set.

  LLMs don’t really seem to display true inference or abstract thought, even when it seems that way. A recent Apple paper demonstrated this quite clearly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Emma Watson banned from driving for speeding⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Normally speed checks take into account that the car’s speedometer and the speed camera are off by a bit, always in favour of the driver. So whilst the violation might be 38 in 30, the actual speed was likely a little bit higher (eg 40-45).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam is cracking down on porn games, to keep Payment Processors happy.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Chargebacks are incredibly expensive, yes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pop it in your calendars⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  According to Krafton’s statement the remaining employees are getting their bonus though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the Labour police state⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not specific to having a constitution. Judges in the Netherlands for example also cannot do a judicial review to determine the constitutionality of any passed laws. And that’s with a written constitution. There’s also no supreme court. The closest thing is the Raad van State (the “state council”), which evaluates all laws on proportionality, constitutionality, and executability, and then advises the government what to do with a law. It’s convention that that advice is followed, but it’s not required.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the Labour police state⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s still a judicial challenge happening. And just because the UK doesn’t have written constitution doesn’t mean there’s no constitution at all. Most of it is even written down, just not in one place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the Labour police state⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure that matters too much, frogs in the US are boiling fine too. The constitution can be brushed aside just as easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump says 'not going to stand' for Netanyahu's continued prosecution⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Trump would send fighters to force the plane to return.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a pretty fair point, though I assume a spare powerbank would solve the problem nearly as well (albeit slower and with a cable).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Screwdrivers are pretty entry-level tools though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never had one of those actually work…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla In 'Self-Drive Mode' Hit By Train After Turning Onto Train Tracks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Clearly the train didn’t yield properly, time to ban trains.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Israel and USA's bombing, wouldn't any supposed nuclear bombs go off if there were any?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, since they’ve been bombing nuclear facilities I can guarantee you that they have boat loads of very shitty (radioactive) chemicals laying around there which with these bombings now will also be spread around everywhere

  So far no radiation was detected, so perhaps it was stored more securely (or somewhere else).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PC Gaming’s Mascot Squad—who makes the cut?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m tempted to say that although many of these are gaming icons, they’re not PC-exclusive so they’re not really PC-gaming specific mascot material. Most of these characters are playable on consoles too.

  I guess this makes MMORPGs and RTS games prime candidates, like a character from Runescape, Starcraft or WoW. Or perhaps something that shows off modding, like the Thomas the Tank Engine dragon (even if the game isn’t PC exclusive).

  The Kerbals from KSP could be mascot material too. Dwarf Fortress would be an option too. Or what about a guest from Roller Coaster Tycoon 1/2?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Even sitting on a couch moves your phone more than simply laying on a table. They can use accelerometer data to determine how, if at all, it moved.