Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Raine, is that you?

Actually the Chinese models aren't trained to avoid Tiananmen Square. If you grabbed the model and ran it on your own machine, it will happily tell you the truth.

They censored their AI at a layer above the actual LLM, so users of their chat app would find results being censored.

It’s technically not countries participating, but broadcasters and they need to be independent of state control

So...same problem as the geography question then. How the fuck does Australia participate? As best I can tell, it's broadcast here on SBS, a state-owned broadcaster.

Fwiw the user in question hasn't posted since July 2023, and only ever did 11 comments and 3 posts.

My read of the meme was that the similarity is the point. "You vs the girl he cheats with", if one was significantly more attractive than the other would probably imply that it's the woman's fault for not being more attractive. But by showing them both basically the same, the message is "if he's a cheater, he's gonna cheat, no matter what you do. It's on him."

But maybe I'm putting too much thought into it.

This is ridiculous. There's no way a client calls a dolly a "pan".

That's obviously zooming.

Hamsters are reptiles now?

Well...

Fuck that was smooth.

Are you illiterate?

And there’s studies proving that’s the reality is, the vast majority of people are at least somewhat honest when filling out a Score ballot

1. It's never been used at the scale of an actual large country's national election. The stakes are so fundamentally different than any small-scale study.
2. Even if true, that's not necessarily a good thing. It just makes the vote of those who do vote strategically all the more powerful.

Cardinal systems devolve into approval, and approval doesn't allow expressing preference. And being unable to express preference lends itself to some of the worst strategic voting and reintroduces the spoiler effect in the place it's most important to avoid the spoiler effect: serious 3-(or more-)way races. If I'm an A voter, B is centrist, and C is worst, then under approval it's fine for me to approve of A and B if I know A can't win. But the moment A is a serious contender, choosing to approve of B decreases the chance A might win. But not approving of B increases the chance C might win. I'm stuck with having to make a terrible decision.

Ordinal systems don't do this. Some ordinal systems might be better than IRV and avoid the biggest criticisms of that system, but ordinal systems beat cardinal systems nearly every time.

But the main thing about all of this is that every single-winner system is always worse than proportional multi-winner systems. Moving to any system other than FPTP should be the first priority, but if you're going to spend time knocking down suggestions to improve to the most well-proven alternative, you might as well go all the way and advocate MMP or direct proportional, and on shoring up some of the weaknesses of that system (such as problems with party lists letting parties choose who gets in even if people don't like the candidate of the party they like, or how minimum thresholds can lead to some people's votes being effectively wasted).

Specifically here, where it is called “Alternative Vote”

Yeah that seems to be a very common alternative name. I'm especially not a fan of that name, since all it tells you is that it's "not FPTP". At least "Preferential voting" or "ranked choice voting" tells you something of the ballot.

IRV is also not devoid of strategy, as it can be better to rank your true favourite lower

I think you missed the part where I said that it can happen, but that it's rare and hard to predict.

Approval Voting is bad because of the simple fact that it doesn't let you express any preference. There's no ability to say "I'll take this guy if I really have to, to avoid the worst outcome, but if possible I would much prefer this other guy". In single-winner systems, having some mechanism to express that one candidate is better than another is absolutely crucial.

I agree it's a flaw, but the answer isn't to move to an even worse and more gameable system, it's to move to proportional systems like MMP.

Cardinal voting systems are terrible because strategic voting is as trivial as it is in FPTP. In IRV situations where strategic voting would be possible exist, but they're rare and hard to predict. In cardinal systems it's always best to give the maximum score or the minimum score, and never anything in between.

and ironically exacerbated the worst parts of FPTP like the trend to a two party system

Umm. Hi, Australia here. We've used IRV for our House of Representatives since 1918. IRV is definitely flawed, and I've said in the past it's the "worst acceptable system"*. But it's better in every way than FPTP, and definitely doesn't exacerbate a trend towards two parties. It doesn't create a proportional result that truly helps break the two-party system like STV (most notably used by Australia's Senate or Ireland's Dáil) or MMP (notably used in New Zealand and Germany) would, but it doesn't entrench it any more than FPTP. In fact, as of today, Australia's crossbench consists of only 1 fewer person than its Opposition, because independents and third parties have been rising considerably over the past 15 years or so, particularly at the 2022 and 2025 elections.

You're right that people should be clear about whether they mean IRV, STV, or another ordinal system, though.

the intent being to highlight that FPTP is an entirely undemocratic and unacceptable system to ever use.

I don't really care what the law calls it. One time an American law tried to call pi equal to 3.2. Had it passed both houses instead of only one, that still wouldn't have changed what pi actually is.

Ranked-Choice describes a feature of a large number of voting systems. Namely, any system that involves ranking candidates in order of preference. Instant-Runoff Voting and Single Transferable Vote are the two most popular such systems, but there are many others, including the Borda method and Ranked Pairs. It's better to just be clearer about what it is you actually mean, rather than use an ambiguous term that's going to lead to more confusion.

Young Sheldon is a spin-off to one of the most infamously unfunny sitcoms of all time.

IaSiP is incredibly famous and adored online. I couldn't even make it through one episode, myself.

St Denis I only know because my parents are obsessed with any medical show. It's basically trying so hard to be Scrubs, but without the charm.

Describing Harley Quinn as a sitcom doesn't sit well with me. It is great, though.

I haven't even heard of any of the others.

jlai.lu, maybe peut-être ?

That's my kink.

It is possible to be pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas at the same time.

Hamas might be doing bad things, but there is no need to condemn Hamas in order to also criticise Israel. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Hamas exists and has the power it does because of Israel.

I dunno how many people have seen season 2 of Star Wars: Andor, but there's a part in that where the Empire funds rebels on a planet specifically because they want them to do terrorism so they have an excuse to come in and genocide the people. They want to manufacture consent for genocide, and while we don't see a lot of the broader public's reaction, it certainly seems to have worked.

That whole thing is literally taken directly from real-world conflicts, including this one. Netanyahu himself directly funded Hamas because he knew they were more extreme than other Palestinian organisations, and by doing that, he helped create the conditions where he can continue to escalate the genocide while the world sits by watching. Every person killed or otherwise harmed by Hamas is Israel's fault. And that's before you get into all the murders of children, doctors, and journalists done directly by Israelis.

In Star Wars, we side with the rebels even though sometimes they do terroristic things that cause innocent deaths. Why? Because they're rebelling against genocide. Once the genociders are wiped out entirely, we can talk about how a good government for the people should be run.

I don't "support" Hamas, but neither do I condemn them. I recognise them as the direct result of Israel's genocide. Effectively, another agent of the Israeli government. The only way to defang Hamas's actions is for Israel to pull back, unilaterally, to the 1948 borders and to provide massive aid in reparation to the civilians who they have harmed through the IDF, through West Bank settlers, and through Hamas. Terrorists thrive in injustice, and anything that doesn't fully call for Israel doing everything to cease the injustice is pissing in the wind.

This would make an excellent copypasta, if it isn't already.