• 11 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2021

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  • Either ranked-choice voting or majority judgement.

    Here's why

    Majority Judgment:

    1. Voters grade each candidate on a scale (e.g. Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Reject)
    2. The winner is determined by the highest median grade
    3. Ties are broken by measuring how many voters gave grades above and below the median

    Ranked Choice Voting:

    1. Voters rank candidates in order of preference
    2. If no candidate has >50%, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated
    3. Their votes transfer to those voters’ next choices
    4. Process repeats until someone has majority

    Majority Judgment optimizes for:

    1. Consensus/Compromise.

    By using median grades, it finds candidates who are “acceptable” to a broad swath of voters. A candidate strongly loved by 40% but strongly disliked by 60% will typically lose to someone viewed as “good enough” by most. This pushes politics toward centrist candidates who may not be anyone’s perfect choice but whom most find acceptable. The grading system lets voters express “this candidate meets/doesn’t meet my minimum standards” rather than just relative preferences

    2. Merit-based evaluation

    Voters judge each candidate against an absolute standard rather than just comparing them. This can help identify when all candidates are weak (if they all get low grades) or when multiple candidates are strong. It moves away from pure competition between candidates toward evaluation against civic ideals

    Ranked Choice Voting optimizes for:

    1. Coalition building

    By eliminating lowest-ranked candidates and redistributing votes, it rewards candidates who can be many voters’ second or third choice. This encourages candidates to appeal beyond their base and build broader coalitions. Unlike MJ, it’s more focused on relative preferences than absolute standards

    2. Elimination of “spoiler effects”

    Voters can support their true first choice without fear of helping their least favorite candidate win. This allows multiple similar candidates to run without splitting their shared base. The system is built around the idea that votes should transfer to ideologically similar alternatives


    Both systems optimize for honest voting more than plurality voting, but in different ways:

    MJ encourages honest evaluation because exaggerating grades can backfire if too many others don’t follow suit RCV encourages honest ranking because putting your true preference first doesn’t hurt your later choices

    The key philosophical difference is that:

    • MJ asks “What level of support does each candidate have across the whole electorate?”
    • RCV asks “Which candidate has the strongest coalition of support when similar preferences are consolidated?”

    This means MJ tends to favor broad acceptability while RCV tends to favor strong but potentially narrower bases of support that can build winning coalitions. Neither approach is inherently more democratic - they just emphasize different aspects of democratic decision-making. </details>


  • Thanks for sharing your method.

    As to your take on Anki, I think it’s fair and accurate. I agree with you in that the learning curve is not in the features or the interface, but as you said: in the pacing. I really hope I can try to space the cards as much as possible, so that a regular practice doesn’t become burdensome.


  • I’m generally skeptical of comments on the internet, so almost every time I have read comments like this one that you’re reading right now, I’ve been like “yeah right”. Kinda like how “lol” means “laughing out loud” but when you read it online you don’t really expect whoever wrote “lol” to have laughed out loud? Anyway, I was drinking coffee, I read your comment, I snorted in laughter, and now my white shirt is full of coffee.

    I guess I’m also kinda mad at myself for laughing so hard at such a silly joke. Regardless, have an updoot 👍


  • and Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis and Pascal’s wager, all subject to the validity threat “What alternative explanations are there?” and “How can I be wrong?”. All of these thought experiments are unfalsifiable. They can all be explained with different theories. They all rely on circular reasoning. They all anthropomorphize entities that maybe don’t resemble humans at all. They all fall for the mind projection fallacy. They all are prey to selection bias, because they cherry-pick scenarios among countless alternatives.





  • I agree that we shouldn’t jump immediately to AI-enhancing it all. However, this survey is riddled with problems, from selection bias to external validity. Heck, even internal validity is a problem here! How does the survey account for social desirability bias, sunk cost fallacy, and anchoring bias? I’m so sorry if this sounds brutal or unfair, but I just hope to see less validity threats. I think I’d be less frustrated if the title could be something like “TechPowerUp survey shows 84% of 22,000 respondents don’t want AI-enhanced hardware”.


  • You’ve got a good point. I wonder if this an example of a trade-off between convenience and security. If you’re logging in and you get an MFA prompt, a Yubikey has to be physically searched, while Bitwarden or Proton Pass only have to be clicked. A Yubikey can only hold a limited amount of accounts, while Bitwarden or Proton Pass could hold many more. Of course, a Yubikey could be used as MFA for Bitwarden or Proton Pass, but that would create a single point of failure and reduce factor separation (which I think is your original point).

    While I posted a Bitwarden or Proton Pass recommendation of sorts, I genuinely wonder if it’s advisable to not use MFA at all if the factors will not be separated. Or, perhaps, the best security solution is the one you’ll actually use. I guess the answer is the good ol’ “What’s your security model?”




  • We are at risk

    of losing many developers who would otherwise choose a license like the GPL. Fortunately, I’m glad to be surrounded by people, just like you, who care about licenses like GPL. By uploading this type of content and engaging with it, be show our commitment to it. I wish to suggest how we can deal with this threat.

    We will lose developers who choose GPL if we use words that suggest GPL is “restrictive”. Sure, the word “restrictive” was avoided in this meme by using the word “copyleft”, but the cognitive jump from “permissive” to “restrictive” is minimal: just add an “opposite” and you’ve got “permissive is the opposite to restrictive”. It really is that simple. That’s how brain works (check out Relational Frame Theory to see how that works).

    So what can we do about it?

    Well, we can approach this with science. There is a historical global trend towards people being more meta-cognitive. That means that people are becoming more aware of how our thoughts interpret everyday reality and how to be intentional with our relationship with our thoughts so that we live better lives. We know this trend is happening to virtually everyone everywhere because of the work of brilliant sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Christian Welzel. Heck, even the history of psychology —going from noticing and changing behaviors (behaviorism) to noticing and changing behaviors and thoughts (cognitive-behaviorism), to noticing and changing the context and function of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions (functional contextualism)— reflects this trend.

    We can use meta-cognition in our favor; we can use the meta-cognitive tool of framing to change how we think about GPL and MIT licenses. Effective communicators like influencers, political campaign experts, and influential activists use framing all the time. For example, instead of using the dangerous framing that suggests GPL is ‘restrictive’, we can use another one that truly displays the virtues of the license.

    What would this other frame look like? I may not have a perfect answer, but here are some

    ways of framing (thinking about) the relationship between licenses like GPL and MIT:

    (ironically!!!, these were ‘suggested’ by an LLM; I wonder if these frames already existed)

    • “Investment-Protecting Licenses” vs. “Investment-Risking Licenses” (as in developers invest by working on projects that they could (not) lose the ability to contribute to)
    • “Community-Resource-Guarding Licenses” vs. “Exploitation-Vulnerable Licenses”
    • “Give-and-Take Licenses” vs. “Take-and-Keep Licenses” ⭐
    • “Freedom-Ensuring Licenses” vs. “Freedom-Risking Licenses” ⭐
    • “Contribution-Rewarding Licenses” vs. “Contribution-Exploiting Licenses”
    • “Open-Source-Preserving Licenses” vs. “Closed-Source-Enabling Licenses”

    I’d be happy to hear what you think, including suggestions!


  • A friend of mine and I have gotten used to using it during our conversations. We do fast fact-checking or find a good first opinion regarding silly topics. We often find it faster than digging through search-engine results and interpreting scattered information. We have used it for thought experiments, intuitive or ELI5 explanations of topics that we don’t really know about, finding peer-reviewed sources for whatever it is that we’re interested in, or asking questions that operationalizing into effective search engine prompts would be harder than asking with natural language. We always always ask for citations and links, so that we can discard hallucinations.


  • The article’s “valuing your time” argument is problematic in certain contexts. My brother has had so much trouble with his dual-boot (Windows and Linux). Yes, he could learn how to solve something in Linux every time a problem arises, but he also has to deliver his projects on time. Because of that, he mostly spends time on his Windows dual boot. Yeah, it sucks ethically and has its own pragmatic issues, but he has never had issues resolving dependencies or hunting down the most recent version that can actually be run in NixOS.

    I don’t doubt these will become issues that will not be as problematic in the future, but right now my brother cannot use Linux reliably for his assignments.

    Edit: My brother has tried what I use: Fedora and NixOS. He has also tried PopOS.

    In Fedora, he found some of his software didn’t exist as .deb, and struggled to make .tar files work smoothly for him.

    He tried NixOS afterward. He really liked the whole immutability thing, as well as the idea that apps would have their own dependencies.

    His dependency problem happened in PopOS. If I remember correctly, it was a code editor that required a version of something that was different to what a package he used in his software was.

    I think the order he tried was Fedora -> NixOS -> PopOS -> NixOS -> ? (Haven’t talked to him about it recently)







  • You seem to be doing quite some things well. Maybe pay attention to your brushing? My dentist once had me brush my teeth in front of her and identified why in some teeth I’d consistently be clean and in others I’d consistently build plaque.

    Her recommendations: brush from the gum to the tip of the tooth. Try to aim at the holes between teeth. Pay close attention to the part in front of your tongue, in your lower front teeth; that part can easily build plaque if you don’t use the tip of your brush well to get in the holes between your teeth.