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chaos

@ chaos @beehaw.org

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Joined
3 yr. ago

  • She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.

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  • There is basically zero actual evidence here. The argument basically goes "this could've happened, then this other thing could've happened, then a third thing could've happened, someone said something vaguely ominous in a group chat, and then something we all know is impossible happened: Donald Trump was elected President despite being obviously bad. There's only one conclusion: the election was stolen and now we just need to track it down." Read the article again and try to pick out the things that are shown to have actually happened and weren't just suspicions or possibilities.

    It doesn't hold up for the same reasons the 2020 doubts didn't hold up. Did they do this in every state? Because the results were pretty uniform across the country, it was a big swing right. It'd be the biggest and most successful conspiracy in history, getting away with rigging a wide variety of completely separate voting systems, many of which are heavily or entirely paper-based, many of which are run by blue states or weren't even competitive, with no leaks and no discrepancies in any of the public records.

    Or, maybe, just maybe, Biden was incredibly unpopular and Kamala didn't run a good campaign, while Donald "I'll fix everything and everyone will be rich" Trump promised to take action and not just continue the same policies for another four years, so people gave him another shot. "Oh, but he had felonies! Surely the electorate would never!" Yeah, they would. We elect terrible people all the time. He won. This isn't productive.

  • Opinions: Do you feel Python is a more object-oriented or procedural language?

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  • Computers only have one language and one data type. Everything else is a construct, which we can build up into a beautiful thing: a mathematics that exists in the real world instead of the pure realm of axioms and symbols, and because it's purely our own creation and not the universe's, we know it from the fundamentals and don't have to struggle with all the unknowns of physics, which presents us with very different, more mysterious mathematical objects to interact with instead.

  • OpenAI is Ditching TypeScript to Rebuild Codex CLI with Rust

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  • Yeah, TypeScript has to integrate with JavaScript for practicality's sake, which pierces a hole in its ability to do proper, rigorous type checking. It's closer to machine-readable documentation that helpfully flags some errors than an actual type-checked language, which will make you get your types right instead of gently suggesting that there might be an issue the way TypeScript does.

  • Jigsaw Trolley Problem

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  • C3.

    Albert is very sure that Bernard doesn't know either. Bernard would know the location if it was in 5 or 6, indicating to all of us that Albert was told a row that isn't A or B.

    Now that Bernard can also deduce that it's not A or B, he's narrowed it down to one possibility. That means all of us now know it can't be column 1 either, because if it were, he wouldn't have gotten anything from that new fact.

    Finally, now that column 1 is eliminated, Albert has deduced the location. Row D would've left two more possibilities, but row C leaves just one. Albert must know it is in row C.

    For the rest, well, there isn't even actually a question, I suspect you'd open a door and pick a box and hope that you've got a gold ball to pick, and it's not clear that he's following Monty Hall rules and always opening a bad door, but I think knowing which ball got thrown would make the rest of the odds fall into place.

  • Dems join GOP to kill vote impeaching Trump over Iran strikes

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  • I'm not saying they were right, I would've voted to impeach too, I'm saying it will have zero effect on the world so there isn't much sense in getting upset about it.

  • Dems join GOP to kill vote impeaching Trump over Iran strikes

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  • Honestly, I don't care. It's not like anything was ever going to happen on this front anyway. I'm sure they figured this was a free opportunity to show voters that they don't always toe the party line.

  • Netflix Shows Are Suffering Because It Takes Too Long For Them To Return

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  • As the other comment said, Severance is going to get truckloads of money for the foreseeable future, it's one of Apple's biggest hits. And the delay for the second season wasn't intended; it sounds like they weren't happy with much of the second half and had to go back to redo it. That being said, I won't spoil it too much but

    the second season does also end on a kind of "wow, what's the fallout from this going to be" note, so if you were bothered by the season 1 ending it might hit the same nerve.

  • Why make it complicated?

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  • More specifically, they're borrowing the more mathematical meaning of variables, where if you say x equals 5, you can't later say x is 6, and where a statement like "x = x + 1" is nonsense. Using "let" means you're setting the value once and that's what it's going to remain as long as it exists, while "var" variables can be changed later. Functional languages, which are usually made by very math-y people, will often protest the way programmers use operators by saying that = is strictly for equality and variable assignment is := instead of == and = in most C-style languages.

  • Bad brainwaves: ChatGPT makes you stupid

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  • Thinking through a problem yourself, or taking an idea and putting it into words, is like exercise for the brain. You may think you understand a thing from reading or hearing about it, but it's only when you do it for yourself that you discover what you really know and what you don't. It's the difference between learning what a square root actually is and how to press the square root button on the calculator. It's the difference between learning to drive and learning to turn on self-driving mode. Even if the outcome is the same, the learning experience is day and night.

    Once you understand a concept well enough, then using an LLM to get some busy work done or just get a starting point that you can improve isn't all that bad, much like using a calculator after learning pen-and-paper division, but trying to use one while learning is almost certain to hurt your understanding, even if the LLM doesn't outright make a bunch of stuff up.

  • Lawsuit Alleges 'Secretly Altered' Vote Machines Stole Election From Kamala Harris

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  • Some states do it this way. Other states do it all electronically (fewer now than in the past, thankfully). Other states do it all on paper and do the counting with offline counting machines, then spot check some precincts at random. Some do it by mail entirely on paper.

    And that's the big reason why this line of inquiry is nonsense. The entire country showed a huge shift to the right, not just the swing states or the states that are more vulnerable. That's 51 entirely separate election systems that you'd have to manipulate, make sure public information about the election matches exactly, and also not go so far that any independent exit polls show anything fishy either. The scale of conspiracy to do it in even one state, make no mistakes, and have no one leak is hard to believe. Doing it across the entire country? You're going to need a lot more than "I feel like the numbers are fishy" to be convincing. The conservatives were wrong when they said 2020 was rigged, and anyone saying 2024 was rigged is equally wrong.

  • She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.

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    • Don't run a senile old man
    • Hold a proper primary so that a popular person gets the nomination instead of someone like Kamala Harris
    • Promise material changes that will improve peoples' lives and don't say "we aren't going to do anything different, but the other guy is a fascist so you have to vote for us"

  • She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.

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  • Data that makes no statistical sense. A clean sweep in all seven swing states. The fall of the Blue Wall. Eighty-eight counties flipped red—not one flipped blue.

    "When the hurricane blew through, every single window of my house was broken. Surely you'd think at least one would survive through sheer chance. I refuse to believe my windows could've been that breakable, so this is evidence that my house was sabotaged."

    Donald Trump outperformed expectations in down-ballot races with margins never before seen—while Kamala Harris simultaneously underperformed in those exact same areas.

    It couldn't possibly be that lots of low-information voters who don't give a shit about the rest of the ballot didn't like Kamala and decided to take another flyer on Trump because he was at least promising to shake things up and take action, obviously it's a conspiracy. We made it very clear that the economy was fine, and that if you were feeling financially stressed, no you weren't.

    If one were to accept these results at face value—Donald Trump, a 34-count convicted felon, supposedly outperformed Ronald Reagan.

    And this is obviously impossible because the author doesn't feel like it could happen. Surely the United States would never elect a bad person, that's not like us at all.

    Look, the results were pretty uniform across all 50 states, across all 50 completely isolated and different voting systems. The country took a big swing to the right, in swing states and uncompetitive ones, in states with paper ballots and electronic ones. We told the right this same stuff in 2020, it was true then, and it's true now. Rigging so many elections on the scale it would take to swing the overall results requires an insanely huge conspiracy with no leaks and no mistakes and perfect accounting for the massive number of public statistics and results surrounding elections. If it happened, we'd have more than a handful of conspiracy theorists saying "but these numbers look funny" and until that happens, pay this whole thing no mind.

  • The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math

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  • My favorite patch (other than "what frame of reference are you using for this and why that one in particular, none of them are more correct than any other") is to just say gravity continues to affect you even as you're traveling in time, effectively holding you in the same place if you're on a planet or in orbit.

  • I’m Facing Prison for My Climate Activism. Here’s Why: I’d planned to block the taxiway at Manchester Airport by glueing my hands to the tarmac.

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  • ... yeah, I mean, that'll do it.

  • If AI is so good at coding - where are the open source contributions?

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  • Do you think there's any reason to believe that these tools are going to continue their breakneck progress? It seems like we've reached a point where throwing more GPUs and text at these things is not yielding more results, and they still don't have the problem solving skills to work out tasks outside of their training set. It's closer to a StackOverflow that magically has the answers to most questions you ask than a replacement for proper software engineering. I know you never know if a breakthrough is around the corner, but it feels like we've hit a plateau for the foreseeable future.

  • Why Vim Is More than Just an Editor – Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained

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  • It's very good for navigating and editing text quickly, and fantastic for situations like "I need to do the same thing 100 times" with things like macros. Coders are frequently opening a big, complex file, jumping around it a lot, changing big and small parts of it, and doing repetitive tasks. For something more like writing out thoughts for an email, editing them slightly, then being done with that text forever, there aren't as many advantages, you're spending most of your time in "insert" mode which is effectively "normal text editor that people are used to" mode. That said, it's one of those things where when you do get used to it and start to enjoy it instead of being frustrated by how different it is, you start wanting it wherever you have to type anything.

  • Question: Can I create a CNAME record to point a subdomain to a webpage e.g. blog.example.com -> example.com/blog?

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  • CNAMEs can only point to other domains. Redirects like that would be handled on the HTTP level, so you'd need a web server in the mix that sends requesters to the right place when they try to access the subdomain. It can redirect to anywhere, not just domains you control, so the Bluesky example would be handled the same way as the other one.

  • This will be really funny, until you remember 99% of current super hyped AI stuff is running on Python

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  • Love a language that doesn't care if you're using inputs to get outputs or using outputs to get inputs

  • Why we’ve fallen out of love with dating apps

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  • They also took away the ability to specify your answer separately from the answer you were looking for from others, so now it's just "did you say the same thing." Which doesn't make any sense for some questions, like "do you prefer a partner that is a) taller than you, b) shorter than you, c) doesn't matter", if you both picked A or B, you aren't a match for this question!

  • Rule

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  • It's worse, a single infinite loop will warm up the computer a bit, this program starts two copies of itself, each of which starts two copies of itself... unless you've set some limits on things the computer's going to be locked up within seconds.