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Cake day: July 5th, 2024

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  • Ranked choice in the US is pretty much only instant-runoff (IRV).

    All the votes are tallied for a voter’s first preference, if no majority winner then the ballots for the lowest-voted candidate are re-tallied for their next preference - repeat until some candidate gets a majority.

    It is a terrible voting system, mathematically only barely better than first-past-the-post. The reason (in my opinion) that it has gotten some traction in the US is that it is the change that is least-threatening to the party duopoly, with the math telling us that is supports the same big-tent duopoly that FPTP does as an end-state.

    A better form of it is the condorcet method, where candidates are compared pairwise based on preferences. E.g. on how many ballots is candidate A ranked above candidate B? The winner of such an election is the one who wins the greatest number of head-to-head elections.

    STAR is interesting, but I personally find it too complex and it fails at preventing many different electoral pathologies.

    Approval voting is the method I prefer (mark all candidates you approve for holding this office). Immune to spoilers, simple to explain, adaptable to single and multi-winner elections, and ensures that the candidate that has the broadest electoral support wins.


  • There are a few edge cases that are generally considered ‘bad’ and best avoided in the study of voting methods. Things such as voting for a candidate actually reducing the chance the voter receives an outcome they would be happy with, or of there being a single person whose vote could alter the outcome of the election.

    The particular passage they linked is talking about the spoiler effect, where a candidate close in ideology to another candidate causes both of them to lose and a candidate of a different ideology than the one with the most support wins. E.g. in 1912 Roosevelt ran against Taft, allowing Woodrow Wilson to win with 40 ish percent of the vote, despite Taft and Teddy have a majority between them and being much closer on policy.

    Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a formal statement (and accompanying proof) that any ordinal system of voting, where voters indicate relative preferences between candidates, is subject to the spoiler effect. First past the post and ranked choice voting are among the worst in this regard, creating spoilers even in cases where voter preferences do not require such a condition to exist.

    Other majority-rule systems such as condorcet methods are less sensitive to spoilers and, under certain models of voter preferences (e.g. smooth ideological preference 'i like candidates on the right and I like them less the more left they are), is immune to spoilers.




  • The moon is receding from the Earth and would eventually roughly double its orbital period, while Earth’s rotation would nearly stop (one rotation every 47 days), and both would be tidally locked to the other. The same side of the Earth would always face the moon, and the same side of the moon would always face the Earth (as happens currently).

    This is all assuming the system would continue unperturbed forever, however, it won’t. Before the above happens, the sun will turn into a red giant and the drag from the expanded atmosphere will slow down the orbits of both the Earth and Moon, eventually leading to them both ceasing to exist - the moon from reaching the Roche limit above the Earth, and the the Earth from entering the Sun’s photosphere and eventually spiraling into the core.



  • Tests should be written from requirements. Using LLMs to write tests after the code is written (probably also by LLMs) is a huge anti-pattern:

    The model looks at what the code is doing and writes tests that pass (or fail because they bungle the setup). What the model does not do, is understand what the code needs to do and write tests that ensure that functionality is present and correct.

    Tests are the thing that should get the most human investment because they anchor the project to its real-world requirements. You will have tons more confidence in your vibe coded appslop if you at least thought through the test cases and built those out first. Then, whatever the shortcomings of the AI codebase, if the tests pass you can know it is doing something right.




  • Consider: the facts

    People are very bad at judging their own productivity, and AI consistently makes devs feel like they are working faster, while in fact slowing them down.

    I’ve experienced it myself - it feels fucking great to prompt a skeleton and have something brand new up and running in under an hour. The good chemicals come flooding in because I’m doing something new and interesting.

    Then I need to take a scalpel to a hundred scattered lines to get CI to pass. Then I need to write tests that actually test functionality. Then I start extending things and realize the implementation is too rigid and I need to change the architecture.

    It is as this point that I admit to myself that going in intentionally with a plan and building it myself the slow way would have saved all that pain and probably got the final product shipped sooner, even if the prototype was shipped later.



  • To put some math around CO2 usage:

    The entire structure of plants is built primarily from CO2. A tomato plant and fruit grows from seeding to maturity in about 60 days, and will yield about a kilogram of dry plant mass.

    That mass will be about 20% carbon, meaning each plant would need to uptake a net 3.3 grams of carbon - 12.3 grams of CO2 per day. A person exhales around 1Kg of CO2 per day, or about as much as would be needed to supply 81 tomato plants.



  • It’s never been tested, so it is an open question. Not many people would be bold enough to try, and I don’t think Trump actually will either, but eventually this will go to the Supreme court.

    The main problem is, at the time the 22nd was written, there were plenty of cases of presidents who weren’t elected to the office, so why would the text specify only the electoral pathway if it were meant to cover all possible pathways? Even in the most broad reading (no elected official can become president after having been elected president twice), there remain appointed positions within the line of succession - namely secretary of state - that would completely avoid the election clause.

    I agree with you that the intent of the 22nd was to ensure a 2 term limit. Unfortunately the language is not that definitive and the current administration has little concern for following the unwritten rules.



  • So the constitution doesn’t actually prohibit anyone from serving more than 2 terms as president, it prohibits someone being elected to the office of president more than twice (or once if they assumed office for more than 2 years of someone else’s term.

    In 2029 Trump could be elected as speaker of the house and then Vance and Dr. Evil resign as POTUS and VP and bam, Trump round 3.

    Trump could also be directly elected to the Vice Presidency, though the legal ground there is shakier given the 12th amendment.

    Ultimately, SCOTUS would need to weigh in because there is enough ambiguity in the constitution to allow for just the scenarios above.

    Good thing SCOTUS is chock full of no-nonsense nonpartisan jurists of the highest integrity.



  • Liberal Democratic Party is the name of the party, they are conservative in Japanese politics.

    ‘liberal’ in general political discourse doesn’t mean ‘left-wing trending towards communist’ as it is used in American communication, it is simply the historical opposing view to absolutism (e.g. Absolute monarchy). Liberal thought centers around individual freedoms; modern-day conservatives advocate for permissive individual freedoms by limiting government’s role in as many facets of life as possible (in theory, real parties and platforms have little to do with their marketing). Modern-day liberals advocate for positively identfying and enforcing freedoms through law. Illiberal thought is common in the west, and advocates for limiting individual freedoms for one reason or another - Germany’s prohibitions against Nazi speech, and the US’s restrictions on recreational drugs are examples of illiberal policies.


  • Bro it isn’t worth it. I respect what you are trying to do, but Lemmy is an echo chamber on these things. You are completely right in what you are saying, but you’re wasting your time commenting here.

    Clearly, if Kamala had won she would have personally resurrected every dead Palestinian and single-handedly repaired all the infrastructure. Let’s conveniently ignore that she was Vice President in an administration that circumvented Congress multiple times to deliver arms with less oversight, that (almost) every US elected official has vocally supported Israel’s actions for 70+ years, and that Kamala herself committed to nothing of substance on the topic.