AFAIK it was a Thursday night push for people in US mountain time / pacific time. But, that ends up being Friday early morning in Europe and Friday mid-day in Asia.

I could see an AI being up to the task.

There are no such things as AIs, but other than that, sure!

At least with such an artificial system, you can hard-code guardrails and a constitution that a parliament can agree upon.

You can bake in biases that you don’t even know are biases, which hands power to a certain group, and then that group refuses to fix the “AI” because doing so would reduce their power.

I don’t think anybody who works with computers would suggest that a computer be put in charge. It seems mostly to be the idea from people who only look at computers from afar and see them as these logical, unbiased oracles, which they’re not.

You forgot the most important part of that quote (that’s not actually a quote).

Just because it was misused before doesn’t mean it’s an unworkable idea. Would it really make things worse than the mess we have now?

Say, for example, you needed the support of a supermajority (67% or 75%) of the population to approve a test.

There are lots of potential flaws with the system, and lots of “attack vectors”. But, you don’t need to come up with a test that’s perfect, just one that improves the current situation, which is pretty dire.

Or, cut out the middle-bot and just worship the guy who designed the clockwork automaton.

People often pull out the supposed quote from Churchill that “democracy is the worst system, except all the others”. But, they omit an important bit from the actual quote:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

IMO, a critical part of that quote is “that have been tried”. The US is especially dumb here. A bunch of 25-year-old aristocrats from 250 years ago tried to design a government system. They did a pretty good job. But, they weren’t political geniuses, or if they were, they were heavily biased by the times they lived in. They came along nearly 200 years before the development of game theory, let alone centuries of work in political science. The constitution should be a living document, learning from the mistakes those 25 year olds made.

They didn’t understand the degree to which parties would take over. They didn’t know about game theory showing that a FPTP system inevitably devolves into a 2-party system. They thought about the threat of a demagogue in the president’s chair, but they were blind to the idea that he’d be the head of a party, and his party would prevent impeachment.

Unless it’s too late, the US should start amending the constitution and fixing these bugs. But, instead it’s seen as a holy document that should no longer be changed.

The last few centuries have been a process of taking power away from a hereditary class and distributing it to the people. But, the name “aristocrat” actually suggests why that form of government was supposed to be good. “Aristos” -> the best. “Kratos” -> rule. Aristocracy was supposed to be the “best” people ruling the country. It was the people who were educated from birth about how to govern ruling over peasants who had no education or knowledge of the world. Of course, the fact it was hereditary meant that the kratos were no longer really aristos.

But, maybe, there’s a germ of an idea there. For example, it makes no sense that education policy be decided by a cabinet member / minister who is elected by being the least bad option in some random district, then joining the inner circle of the leader, then being appointed in charge of education. The people making decisions on educational policy should be educators: teachers, professors, scientists who study learning, etc. Of course, you need checks and balances, and maybe popular voting should be part of that, but not in the current way. Maybe professional organizations and unions should have a formal role in government, instead of simply having to spend money to lobby the education minister.

I don’t know the solution either. But, what I know is that we should still be searching. Maybe the US is too far gone, but other countries should be coming up with new tweaks to their systems. Maybe (hopefully) that will mean less direct voting, and more decisions made by subject-matter experts.

It would have to be a big loss. If it’s at all close, there’s going to be a lot of violence.

The only other thing I could think of that could end things without a lot more violence is if a scandal finally stuck to him and resulted in him losing support. Like, the Epstein stuff. The right has spent years getting their base riled up against pedophiles and groomers. If people believed that Trump really was a pedophile, it could finally sink him. But, nothing seems to stick to him.

Whatever happens, I hope scholars can study him and figure out why he’s so charismatic to so many people. I don’t get it. I look at him and I see a dumb, fat blow-hard who lies constantly and can’t even string a sentence together. Yet, for some reason, other people look at that and see a hero.

After thinking about this REALLY REALLY HARD…offing him will do nothing to stop the creep of [fascism]

Who would step in to replace Trump? Trump has worked hard to discredit anybody who could potentially challenge him. Strongmen often groom a son to take over for them, but only after they’ve been in power for many years. Trump might want Junior to take over, but I doubt even Trump’s hand-picked yes-men would accept Junior at this point.

Instead you’d almost certainly get a power vacuum with various Republican factions trying to take over.

You cut one head off and 3 more will pop up

And those 3 would start snapping at each-other trying to become the dominant head. And, as long as they’re distracted snapping at each-other, they’re not going to be focusing on us.

IMO, Trump is also the only thing holding this right-wing coalition together. As soon as he’s gone the factions are going to turn on each-other. The bad thing is that they’ve already shown that they’re going to get violent when they feel their grip on power is slipping. I’m sure this assassination attempt is going to lead to right-wing violence, and if it had succeeded it would have been a lot more violence.

The most dangerous thing about Trump is that he’s he’s got almost half the US behind him. There are probably more cruel Republicans, and probably some who would be more effective at implementing their cruel policies. But, not many who would be able to get so much support and keep the coalition together.

The Republican base is getting smaller each year as old people die. It’s not a popular platform with the younger voters. If the US can avoid a Trump win this year, the MAGA version of the Republican party will probably fall apart. Then it will be back to the regular corporatocracy that the US has been dealing with for decades. If he does win… well I’m glad I don’t live in the US.

Honestly, just google it. Tons of people have that problem and if you search for it you get pages and pages of results.

No, it isn’t.

Linux on a laptop can’t even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.

Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.

Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.

Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.

The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.

AI has no concept.

LLMs are nothing more than “spicy autocomplete”.

Doubleclick has been Google for decades now. The difference is that (at least these days) most companies wouldn’t accept it if doubleclick ads had obnoxious pop-ups. But, they choose to have a Google sign-in form that has an obnoxious pop-up. Yes, it’s annoying that Google made an annoying login pop-up. But, much worse is that places like Reddit choose to go with that obnoxious pop-up instead of saying “we don’t want to force that on our users”.

What I mean by it not being a Google thing is that it doesn’t just appear there on its own, like it might if it were a Doubleclick ad or something.

This is something that companies like Reddit see and think “Yes, I want that obnoxious thing on my site”.

Worth noting, this isn’t really a Google thing. It’s something other websites do to allow you to login with various other credentials: Facebook, Google, Amazon – Twitter used to be common. It’s just that Google is obnoxious because when say Reddit allows you to login with your Google account, the login widget Google uses is an obnoxious pop-up.

The full scene if anyone’s interested.

Carl Weathers is an interesting contrast to Arnold. Arnold got his muscles by focusing on how he looked, on bodybuilding. Weathers developed his physique training for professional gridiron football. He played college football, then in the NFL (coached by John Madden) and CFL. Arnold used his unique physique as a way to get into movies without ever training as an actor. Weathers was studying theatre arts while playing college football, and finally finished the degree in 1974 just after retiring from pro football. He went on to get a master of theatre arts later.

Both of them pivoted extremely successfully to comedy later in their careers, with Weathers doing Happy Gilmore and Arrested Development, and Arnold doing his whole variety of comedy movies.

Also, good to know that Weathers loved this scene:

“Predator, the handshake. That’s iconic,” says Weathers, grinning from ear to ear. “The director shot that scene beautifully. And it’s a great movie. You put that movie in the theater today and it works just as well as it did back in 1987.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/baby-carl-weathers-has-a-stew-going

Another similar “shortcut” I’ve heard about was that a system that analyzed job performance determined that the two key factors were being named “Jared” and playing lacrosse in high school.

And, these are the easy-to-figure-out ones we know about.

If the bias is more complicated, it might never be spotted.

Yes, “Bias Automation” is always an issue with the training data, and it’s always harder to resolve than anyone thinks.

That’s virtua, not virtual.