smitty1e

I'm reminded of the Nick Raskulinecz interview[0], where he prevailed upon Rush to re-use some of their motifs because "you own that" and there would be no shame in alluding to their own art instead of always doing something fresh.

So you hear a little "Bastille Day" in "Headlong Flight". Oh, yes.

[0] https://youtu.be/oQognzPVOIo?is=XAiy0EhMps3QrdrR

Hope she keeps her pimp hand strong.

Asked Grok the difference between mxc and flatpak:

"So MXC is a cross-platform “what may this workload touch?” layer aimed at agents. Flatpak is a Linux app format whose sandbox happens to share a backend with MXC on Linux."

> Why?

For a non-trivial amount of ballots, the overhead of securely managing the ballots is substantial. You're casually driving up staffing costs all over the place, and legal challenges will ensue if everything is less than meticulous.

To your point, though, Virginia blows a great deal of money on elections. Check out all 19" of our local glory: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/elections/sites/elections/file...

Given how sucktacular Google's basic search has become, I don't see how dropping it into the Swamp can worsen it.

This is the United States, where the need to over-engineer everything is never suppressed.

> Extend the question why are rapidity of results and ease of setup/teardown of the voting place design goals at all?

Because it is a low-frequency, high-importance activity that uses public facilities.

Because people instant gratification.

We close the polls at 1900 and have a Collector Officer run one copy of the data on a thumb drive to the County.

The Chief gets to deliver a backup a couple hours later.

Hand-counting the ballots instead of scanning would be expensive in terms of time and money, and error-prone.

I'd argue that Fairfax County, VA is about optimal, all factors considered.

As I'm fond of saying: "Virginia is for lovers...of elections."

I've got over a decade of experience supporting elections using a ballot scanner.

The need to balance voter security, with auditability, rapid Ness of results, with ease of setup/teardown of the voting place, is hard to beat with scanners.

Just telling the truth,

Even subtexually,

Seems an inevitable

Underbussing on this

Site.

> Reddit is selling access to its data, but that data is human-generated and depends on a flagging community the company seems, at best, indifferent to.

Well, how much genitAIlia do you need to see?

It's not my contention that AI & people do not both conform to Sturgeon's Law[0].

Rather, that AI is unlikely to produce a fresh Marcin Patrzalek[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[1] https://youtu.be/zbfKFa-reBE?is=pHxTCFcfyU0evbvi

If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.

One wonders at the fresh/derived breakdown.

"AI slop", for example, appears a regression toward some "mean".

But from whence come the fresh insights?

> how does the human look forward

Well, through the metaphysical lens that has both powered innovation and stumped the Really Smart Types since antiquity.

If training data are purely historical, then how does the AI look forward?

And if human mathematicians are drummed out of producing future training data, then can AI end up proving itself so much "eating the seed corn", only at scale?

This point came home recently in doing a little macro to load a directory of GeoJSON documents into QGIS.

You need to load the Python console to get the proper environment, and you can't just say logger.debug() to get a trace.

This is because QGIS runs in the Qt event loop.

Big cluebat: QGIS (qualitatively, and for the regular pythonista) is like doing everything via asyncio.

Ah, so: no wonder it's such a challenge.

How about engineering usage when removing material from, e.g., a beam, can help achieve overall weight/flexibility goals?

A non-networked, physical system is not an "extra hassle".

It is a sensible fallback plan to keep the system functioning when the Magic Wand, inevitably, has its failure moment.

Affording users of public services a modicum of choice to avoid the Magic Wand is an important side effect.

We get the roads re-surfaced at a frequency that, magically, mirrors elections.

Zany stuff.

> AI-generated art and music have become the defining aesthetic of fascism in the 2020s

If Reddit could use AI to detect and nuke all of the AI-generated, gentially-shaped fruits and vegetables from the feed, that would be swell.

It's much less the mechanism of AI than the potential policy implications.

That much concentrated data/compute is Checkov's Gun[0].

To assume we can find some policy lock for that gun is to believe the laws against murder preclude violence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun

I mean, it is taught. In school. And, maybe, there is some residual skill out there in the fleet.

Doing a fix, like playing music well at all, takes copious practice.

As long as GPS stays bullet proof, Navies are in good shape.

It's going to be a hard come-to-Beevis moment if the magic signal goes away and people have to remember celestial navigation.

Not sure you can even find a sextant on most vessels.

So too these AI services.

> The only problem of money is inflation.

Counterfeiting enters the chat.

But, rather that a wide Edenic expanse of communication, we seem headed toward walled gardens with gatekeepers and a need to pay money for all the usual reasons.

This seems both inevitable, and an occasion to tout the https://www.fsf.org

Was the documentation for each function a full-on essay?

EULA; euthanasia: who needs more than four letters?

To say nothing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.