logicbomb @ logicbomb @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

What happens to the rapist, then? Can he get partial custody of the child? Can he use that as an excuse to keep meeting or at least indirectly interacting with his rape victim?

What a great healing agent, to force women to be repeatedly reminded of that time when they were raped.

My computer is good enough to run any games I want to play, even recently released FPS types of games at reasonably high settings. Still not good enough for Win11. My weak-ass tablet, though, was upgraded straight away.

Are new instances automatically federated? If not, then it seems like making an instance, then hosting content enough to be federated, would be an awful waste of time and money, as I'd expect an instance like that would be quickly defederated.

I admit I didn't watch the video, since it is 17 minutes and I don't have time right now, but I'll just throw something out there that I think is a good rule of thumb.

When you ask questions like this, "Do AI-Generated...." so and so, you can usually find a common-sense starting point answer by substituting, "Do human-Generated..." AI has the ability to plagiarize, and so do humans. AI has the ability to plagiarize even when it's not asked to, and so do humans. Humans can even accidentally plagiarize, but it's harder to say that AI does things accidentally.

This rule of thumb doesn't always work, but neural networks attempt to simulate the way human brains function. Obviously, there are some differences. But it's close enough to get a starting point.

It's a complicated situation. A complicated question.

I’ve been involved in data science research on similar optimization problems, so I know full well how it works and what the shortcomings are.

....and there's the missing link that explains why you're acting this way. I've worked with enough data scientists to see what's going on. I don't trust data scientists unless they have some other field of expertise in addition. People who've been involved with data scientists enough to see what they're doing are probably going to often have similar outlooks to you.

You can quit the condescension. It doesn’t impress me.

I'm not trying to impress you. You may think you're telling the truth, but you are in fact spreading misinformation. There is a 0% chance that you are correct. You don't understand the subject and you're just bloviating. It's inherently offensive.

I’ll end this discussion by summarizing it for readers:

I wasn't impressed by your summary, so I made my own:

Me: With a basic understanding of logic and algorithms, there will definitely be a hands-off computer approach to redistricting that will lead to better results than anything a human can make. This is guaranteed. There is no way to dispute this.

You: I will pretend like I never said anything like "Algorithmically-decided districts will also inherently ignore communities, both historic and demographic, again creating a high cracking likelihood and creating outsized representation to the dominant political groups." or "These tech-bro-thinking solutions will never be the answer. The answer to redistricting* is to have a controlled political process with checks and balances." I will now pretend like I had a different, less stupid opinion, than the one I started with and that I have been arguing this entire time. I am doing this because either I was up to this point, completely unable to articulate myself, or because I have secretly realized that I was mistaken, and now I am too stubborn to admit it.

You run an optimization algorithm to figure out how to identify an optimal algorithm? That’s begging the question. It’s circular reasoning.

Do you understand that there is a difference between an optimal outcome and an optimal algorithm?

I also may be confusing the situation by using the word "optimal" slightly inaccurately. I tend to call "local extremum" "local optimum". It's not confusing to people who understand numerical analysis, but it is probably not appropriate when discussing things with a layman.

What you don’t understand is that whether that result is good/optimal or not is a subjective question the computer cannot answer.

Whether the result is good is the entire point of the field of numerical analysis. And it's something that you seem to know nothing about. This is where the giant gap is between us.

Over and over again I repeat, the decisions about how to weigh these metrics against each other is a political one.

The truth of a statement is generally unrelated to how often the statement is repeated. If you find a solution where happiness is maximized or dissatisfaction is minimized, then what's political about that? Just because the topic is political doesn't mean that the solution is also political. Otherwise, we wouldn't even be able to count votes.

If you can flip a seat by saying that having proportional racial representation is twice as important as having proportional religious representation, a political actor that wants to flip that seat will tell you that proportional racial representation IS twice as important as proportional religious representation. No computer will know that isn’t true. If you can make an election non-competitive by saying that the people in neighborhood K are a historical diaspora and must be kept together, an incumbent will do so. You can manipulate the inputs to manipulate the outputs.

You're literally taking an example of a typical failure of your proposed solution and attributing it to a computer. Those numbers that you're suggesting wouldn't be given by a human. They would be learned or discovered by a computer. You don't get to manipulate the inputs. You only get to say what is desired in the outputs.

What you're describing is a human failure. And then you're using that to say that a human solution is best.

And even if what you're describing was possible, it still doesn't answer the question of why, in your ideal scenario, is a panel of nonpartisan humans used, but when you imagine a computer scenario, you expect that all of these inputs will be determined by a single partisan human. Why wouldn't you assume a panel of nonpartisan humans for both?

Your argument here is completely dishonest. You should assume the same level of partisan participation in both sides of the argument. Whether it's completely drawing the map, or it's adjusting inputs, or it's deciding what outputs are best.

That's not at all what I said. Despite the fact that you seem to know very little about technology, up to this point you've at least been discussing the subject ethically. I would have thought straw man arguments were beneath you.

You've already listed several desired outcomes yourself, or at least suggested that you believe there are some. That voters are represented. Not only by population, but by modern and historic communities. Balancing many different factors to find what are called local extremum, or best known solutions, are problems that we've been using algorithms to solve for many decades. We can even use algorithms to prove that human solutions are suboptimal by looking at the algorithm's results and comparing them to human results.

Yes that is why you have to run an optimization algorithm. To find the best known solution based on measurable results. I suggest you read up on numerical analysis.

And I am listening. I simply know a great deal more about this subject than you do, so your perception of this conversation is quite different from mine.

The way optimization works is that you have a desired outcome, and you adjust inputs until you reach an optimal outcome. This is a specific area where algorithms are known to be effective. The desired outcome can be anything that is measurable. Whatever a person who looks at the result could possibly use to criticize it, for example.

You cannot simply dismiss an algorithmic solution. In fact, given enough time, it's guaranteed that an algorithmic solution will be the best available solution. I don't know how to refer to a person who denies this obvious fact, so I use the term technophobic. It could be simple ignorance or it could be some sort of irrational state of mind, but I think that's all encompassed by the term technophobic.

Let's say that you have the best possible group of humans making the map. How do they do it? If you can explain it, that is an algorithm. If it's an algorithm, it can be run by a computer. If you can't explain it, then how can it really be the best?

Speaking of transparency, there is nothing more transparent than an open source algorithm.

And as for the weights, that is an optimization that can be specified without human intervention.

Technophobia isn't a sufficient reason to double down on a system that we've seen over and over to be completely broken.

You're using "algorithmically-decided districts" to mean "districts decided by algorithms that only look at population". You can absolutely create algorithms that take communities into consideration. You can absolutely create algorithms that reduce the amount of manipulation allowed.

What you can't do is create truly nonpartisan groups. As long as you leave the decision in human hands, because it is so important, there will be humans out there trying to manipulate the results for their own benefit.

If you truly want a long-term solution, you should be looking at an algorithmic solution. Maybe it already exists. Maybe it doesn't.

It's an elected office. For better or worse, she had to run a campaign, and she had to make campaign promises.

If she's not allowed to fulfill her promises, then what's the point?

I guess he prefers weirdos who have themselves photographed half naked riding horses.

I don't understand what I'm reading here. Maybe California law is different, but if she was sentenced to probation, then doesn't that mean that she was found guilty?

If her defense was supposed to be that she was not responsible due to psychosis, wouldn't she be found not guilty due to the psychosis, and would be treated in a psychiatric hospital?

Without looking up the answer, tell me approximately how long Lincoln was president before the Civil War started.

I wouldn't say "surprisingly."

Holy crap that one sign goes hard!

"I wish Mary had access to abortion"

There are few theoretically possible technologies as overwhelmingly powerful as time machines. Even an extraordinarily weak time machine, for example, one that could only move you a few minutes back and forth, would be enough to make me insanely wealthy, assuming that it wasn't cost prohibitive to run.

Even people who build their own computers usually buy all the RAM they want at the time that they're building it.

The biggest difference to them is likely the feeling that they're losing their ability to upgrade, more than the actual upgrade itself. I still think that feeling is an important factor, though.

This one is easy. I would simply do what they tell me to do. After all, since they came back to see me, it's certainly because the future me sent them back in time.

If it wasn't me that sent them back in time, then it's probably a set up, and I would be powerless to resist it.

If they insisted on my ordering them around, I'd have them bring back a copy of their Wikipedia from 50 years in the future, and then I'd try to use the rest of the time to figure out the physics behind time travel, and see if I can't get plans for a time machine.