mountainriver

joined 2 years ago
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Here it sounds like he is criticising the parliamentary system were the legislative elects the executive instead of direct election of the executive. Of course both in parliamentary and presidential (and combined) systems a number of voting systems are used. The US famously does not use FPTP for presidential elections, but instead uses an electoral college.

So to be very charitable, he means a parliamentary system where it's hard to depose the executive. I don't think any parliamentary system uses 60 % (presumably of votes or seats in parliament) to depose a cabinet leader, mostly because once you have 50% aligned the cabinet leader you presumably have an opposition leader with a potential majority. So 60% is stupid.

If you want a combined system where parliament appoints but can't depose, Suriname is the place to be. Though of course they appoint their president for a term, not indefinitely. Because that's stupid.

To sum up: stupid ideas, expressed unclearly. Maybe he should have gone to high school.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 8 months ago

"Because we got paid, cause we got paid, cause we got pa-aid!"

To the tune of "Then I got high" by Afroman.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 9 months ago

So one one hand the CEO's want their minions back into office and on the other they want to replace them with AI's?

Sounds like a conundrum. Or a business opportunity!

Presenting Srvile! The brand new Servility as a Service company, with AI powered robots that will laugh at all boss jokes at the water cooler and say things like "That is such a great idea boss! Since I am an AI I can't realise that you are just regurgitating what you read on Xshitter!" and "We certainly need more AI to solve any problem!"

Call now to order!

(AI may at times be enhanced by remote human control for "quality control". Actual level of servility may vary and is not guaranteed.)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They are both stupid men who repeat stuff they hear to make them look good. So the question is who are this time the "very smart people" that are telling numbnuts like these two that nuclear war is survivable - and by extension winnable? Because if that is the US defense establishment, then yeah we might be cooked.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 4 points 9 months ago

I happened to come across an article mentioning the Robinson–Patman Act (from 1936) in relation with wage fixing by algorithm.

From Wikipedia: "a United States federal law that prohibits anticompetitive practices by producers, specifically price discrimination"

It might be relevant here. Obviously I am not a US lawyer specialised in monopoly law.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/

Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can't even buy gift cards at scale.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I must have missed the climate activist getting arrested because of protonmail. Any link or a name to search from?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 10 months ago

To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.

Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einstein's thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

On an old tablet I used Opera because it had a nifty function where you could zoom in and it made the text larger and enforced line breaks so that the text still fit the shown space.

I know Opera is horrible in many respects, but I kept that tablet for reading in the evening. Being able to zoom in and still just scroll down was very useful when tired.

Anyone happen to know any similar add ons for Firefox?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 10 months ago

Ah, but checking the actual grade gives a correct answer. Who wouldn't want to change that for a statistically likely answer?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 1 points 10 months ago (16 children)

Shouldn't they be fans of The Culture? And didn't The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?

(It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)

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