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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Depends on the state, and when exactly the candidate dropped out.

    Basically the state holds a primary, and then a little later they have a state convention to assign delegates.

    If they drop out before the delegates are picked, the delegate selections are usually reallocated to the remaining candidates. If they drop out afterwards, their delegates may be expected to vote for them anyway in the first round, or they may be free to vote as they please depending on the state. If the candidate has endorsed another candidate, the delegate is often expected to vote for the endorsed candidate.

    “Expected” is important because their votes aren’t disqualified if they don’t adhere to expectations or anything, they just risk their state party being mad at them and if they’re someone with continued interest in party involvement, that’s a great way to make them not want to involve you. This is in contrast with the electoral college where faithless electors can see their votes not count unless they’re cast according to the election outcome.
    In both cases, electors or delegates are chosen for a mix of loyalty and dedication, usually as sort of a minor honor or reward, so it’s not common for them to go rogue against expectations.

    It’s why there’s an advantage to staying in the race longer: you get to pick the delegates you won, even if you drop out afterwards, and you can use that to get the frontrunner to involve you in their campaign in exchange for an enforcement.


  • It gets complicated because the parties can hold their primary elections however they want, independently by state because various rules mean you need a Democratic party for each state, plus the national party. So each state does it differently to some degree. Some vote for the candidate, and the delegates are assigned to vote for the winner, some get a proportion of the delegates, and in some the voters vote for the delegate based on who they support.
    They use that process to assign delegates who go and vote on who the national party will select for the national election. If the first election there doesn’t yield a majority winner, they keep voting but now the delegates can switch if they want, and members of party leadership can also vote. That hasn’t happened in quite a while though, since it’s much easier to know the counts accurately before the convention and do your politics by getting people to drop out and endorse you.





  • CEOs of companies that are adjacent to technology desperately want to ensure that their company isn’t seen as “outdated”, almost more than they want to actually not be outdated.

    So when a technology comes that everyone in tech leadership is saying is the bestest, they want to make sure everyone knows they’re totally with it, whatever the cool kids are talking about.

    Hype train goes chugga chugga.

    As the hype train slows, they still need to be onboard, but they set expectations based on what their people are actually telling them.

    So this is the CEO yelling to do something, and then the news slowly percolating back from the tech people that they can, but only a handful of projects can do so in a way that makes sense, has impact, and doesn’t disrupt a timeline or budget in a way that requires shareholder disclosure.





  • In a smaller local election a few cycles back, I got to trial a paper backed electronic voting machine they were testing out for people who have dexterity or vision problems.

    You basically got the same paper ballot as everyone else, but then you slipped it into the machine and it colored the bubbles for you after you selected the option on the screen.
    Then you took your piece of paper out and handled it like a ballot filled in by hand.

    Wasn’t networked and didn’t see anything that could tie you to a vote.
    I got to share my appreciation for the concept, but concern about difficulty verifying it filled things out correctly, and the potential for touch screens to be difficult to use or act funny, all the difficulties of ux work to handle fixing an error, and the need for the UI to be exceptionally clear, which was difficult on the smaller screen with the larger font.
    I think it also has screen reader support, but I didn’t use it, so I’m not sure.



  • Oh, to me it just doesn’t remotely look like they’re interested in surveillance type stuff or significant analytics.

    We’re already seeing growing commercial interest in using LLMs for stuff like replacing graphic designers, which is folly in my opinion, or for building better gateways and interpretive tools for existing knowledge based or complex UIs, which could potentially have some merit.

    Chat gpt isn’t the type of model that’s helpful for surveillance because while it could tell you what’s happening in a picture, it can’t look at a billion sets of tagged gps coordinates and tell you which one is doing some shenanigans, or look at every bit of video footage from an area and tell you which times depict certain behaviors.

    Looking to make OpenAI, who seem to me to be very clearly making a play for business to business knowledge management AI as a service, into a wannabe player for ominous government work seems like a stretch when we already have very clear cut cases of the AI companies that are doing exactly that and even more. Like, Palantirs advertisements openly boast about how they can help your drone kill people more accurately.

    I just don’t think we need to make OpenAI into Palantir when we already have Palantir, and OpenAI has their own distinct brand of shit they’re trying to bring into the world.

    Google doesn’t benefit by selling their data, they benefit by selling conclusions from their data, or by being able to use the data effectively. If they sell it, people can use the data as often as they want. If they sell the conclusions or impact, they can charge each time.
    While the FBI does sometimes buy aggregated location data, they can more easily subpoena the data if they have a specific need, and the NSA can do that without it even being public, directly from the phone company.
    The biggest customer doesn’t need to pay, so targeting them for sales doesn’t fit, whereas knowing where you are and where you go so they can charge Arby’s $2 to get you to buy some cheese beef is a solid, recurring revenue stream.

    It’s a boring dystopia where the second largest surveillance system on the planet is largely focused on giving soap companies an incremental edge in targeted freshness.



  • Yes, neither of us is responsible for hiring someone for the OpenAI board of directors, making anything we think speculation.

    I suppose you could dismiss any thought or reasoning behind an argument for a belief as “reasons” to try to minimize them, but it’s kind of a weak argument position. You might consider instead justifying your beliefs, or saying why you disagree instead of just “yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.



  • Those aren’t contradictory. The Feds have an enormous budget for security, even just “traditional” security like everyone else uses for their systems, and not the “offensive security” we think of when we think “Federal security agencies”. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco will change products, build out large infrastructure, or even share the source code for their systems to persuade the feds to spend their money. They’ll do this because they have products that are valuable to the Feds in general, like AWS, or because they already have security products and services that are demonstrably valuable to the civil security sector.

    OpenAI does not have a security product, they have a security problem. The same security problem as everyone else, that the NSA is in large part responsible for managing for significant parts of the government.
    The government certainly has interest in AI technology, but OpenAI has productized their solutions with a different focus. They’ve already bought what everyone thinks OpenAI wants to build from Palantir.

    So while it’s entirely possible that they are making a play to try to get those lines of communication to government decision makers for sales purposes, it seems more likely that they’re aiming to leverage “the guy who oversaw implementation of security protocol for military and key government services is now overseeing implementation of our security protocols, aren’t we secure and able to be trusted with your sensitive corporate data”.
    If they were aiming for security productization and getting ties for that side of things, someone like Krebs would be more suitable, since CISA is a bit more well positioned for those ties to turn into early information about product recommendations and such.

    So yeah, both of those statements are true. This is a non-event with bad optics if you’re looking for it to be bad.




  • Man, if they could get sign off to use the Olympics logo, it would more than make up for donating almost any number of condoms just in advertising options.

    Side by side shots of different pairs of pole vaulters flopping onto their landing mats. Scenes of different sports, starting with slow ones and cuts to different ones. Slowly, it starts to jump to faster sports, where the athletes are making more vocalizations, by the end it’s just a focus on curlers furiously brooming while they all do their excited yells of joy and then a moment of silence while we zoom in on some shotput throwers faces just as they’re throwing, and then cut to a rapid series of divers splashing into the water, audio overlay of a soccer commentator screaming “goal”, and then a pan across the cheering crowd. “Trojex: for when the world comes together”, with five overlapping condoms in the background, fading to the Olympic logo.