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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • It always annoys me when I see something that boils down to ‘nth order derivative flips sign’ where it’s unclear what order derivative the article is even talking about.

    To be clear this is a change in the direction of the trend of the month over month inflation index. So we’re talking about some third order derivative changing sign. Which frankly is about to be expected, at that point any signal is going to be noisy.

    The more down to earth statement is that the month over month inflation was very high and has now stabilized somewhat at around 4.5%ish which is still high (works out to about 70% yearly). It needs to be about a tenth of that.

    Note that the decrease in the month over month inflation is not a sign of things improving. It is a sign of things getting worse at a slightly lower rate than earlier. That’s what annoys me about using such high order derivatives, it obscures the real problem.

    Roughly speaking this article is discussing how far someone has pressed the gas pedal while heading towards a cliff, while the real problem is that they’re pressing the gas pedal (or more urgently they’re heading towards a cliff). Of course that last fact hasn’t changed so they manufacture a news story out of it by finding a derivative that did.














  • Put simply you just give every candidate points out of 10 and then elect the one with the highest average.

    Approval voting (not acceptance, my mistake), simplifies things a bit by only allowing none or all points. Which is the best if you want to vote tactically anyway.

    This method sidesteps a couple of the issues that Arrow’s impossibility theorem raises, and is easy enough to understand. Ranked choice is better than first past the post but still has the issue that adding an additional candidate can affect the end result in complex ways.

    With approval voting most aspects are easy to understand. Adding or removing candidates trivially has no effect on the rest of the result. And while you can still vote tactically the only real tactic is where you put your cutoff, you should still vote for the option(s) you like best.





  • Fair. It’s not too hard, but most lemmy UIs make it a bit harder than it needs to be because they want to be a fancy JavaScript-ridden mess of html tags.

    On old.lemmy.world it is supremely easy, you just use the element picker tool of uBlock to select all posts, add the ‘magic’ command :contains(reddit) to filter out the word you don’t want (in this case reddit), and you’ve got your filter. This would result in old.lemmy.world##.post:contains(reddit).

    On lemmy.world it is trickier because it is the kind of HTML no sane person would write. Doing the above you end up with lemmy.world##div.mt-2.post-listing:contains(reddit) which is messy, and misses a line that is used to divide the posts. With some manual tuning you can first simplify the first part to ##.post-listing:contains(reddit) and then add :xpath(.|following::hr[1]) to get rid of the annoying line. This results in ##.post-listing:contains(reddit):xpath(.|following::hr[1]).