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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!

    dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work




  • you can only vote above (party preference) or below (all preferences) the line on our ballots, so that’s not a situation that can occur, however i imagine it’d be something the actual counting system could tolerate - heck you could probably even assign someone an arbitrary 51 and imo the system could just grab that person out of the party preferences, sequence the list, and then put them in at number 51 and that’s your preference list

    otherwise, the party preferences are published in advance, so you can always print them off and tweak them, then vote below the line


  • yeah we have RCV for everything… everyone knows how to vote; it’s really not hard

    https://www.aec.gov.au/media/2022/05-11.htm

    this articles a little old and it’s changed a bit since then, but on a basic level it the same:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work

    the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)

    so your ballot paper has about 20 different parties[1] on it, ranging from the major parties (coalition/liberal/national and labour) to a few others (greens are becoming big, socialist alliance, etc), and then single issue parties (legalise cannabis australia, there was a high speed rail party at 1 point)… and it has a bunch of individual politicians below each party with their own boxes

    if you decide that legalising cannabis is the issue you care about, you can just number their box and they’ll allocate your preferences - hopefully based on how likely they think a particular politician is to support legalising cannabis. you can also put multiple numbers above the line and a range of other things, but at its simplest it’s putting a 1 in a box and going home

    some of this might be slightly incorrect because it can get very complex and i don’t really delve too deep into how the ballot actually works at its most complex level… but i think the great thing is that you can vote according to whatever complexity or detail you like and the system ensures your vote is allocated to who you’d most likely want

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Australia


  • sure! absolutely! for primaries go nuts, kick up a stink, let’s get a better candidate! totally agree!

    but when it comes to the election and if trump is the nominee for republicans and biden is the nominee for the democrats then you get the hell out there, suck up your pride and you vote against the dictator… and the only effective way of voting against the dictator is a vote for the democrats - not because you like it, not because it’s fair - but because the USA has a first past the post system and that’s just the bullshit reality of the situation

    and then, if you have the energy, you help at the local level to implement something like RCV

    (should be noted, i’m australian so i have no power to do anything, and a lot of people will say i have no business making comments like this because im not american! however america has placed itself in a position of power on the global stage - the way yall vote effects everyone! its critical - GLOBALLY - that trump doesn’t win)







  • i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative

    now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms

    i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle

    ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create

    the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated

    the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated

    with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original




  • that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this

    current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

    id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)

    but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”