bss03

Not that following the law is a big priority for this administration, but doesn't ICE have limited-to-no jurisdiction in OK? I thought they could only operate withing 300mi. of a land or sea border.

EDIT: Nope. As far as I can tell, ICE jurisdiction is anywhere federal law applies.

I disagree that it is fair use. But, I was actually expecting the judiciary to say that it was. So, despite the ruling, I AM still mad that they used copyrighted works (including mine), in violation of the terms. (And, honestly, my terms [usually AGPLv3] are fairly generous.)

I'm also concerned about labor issues, and environmental impact, and general quality, but the unauthorized use of copyrighted works is still in the mix. And, if they are willing to all my private viewing of torrented TV "theft", I'm willing to call their selling of an interface to a LLM / NN that was trained on and may have incorporated (or emit!) my works (in whole or in part) "theft".

Labor issues are mostly solved by making to the workers control the means of production, not captial. Same old story.

Environment impact is better policed independent of what the electricity/water is used for. We aren't making a lot of headway there, but we need to reign in emissions (etc.) whether they are using it to train LLMs or research cancer.

Quality... is subjective and I don't think we are near the ceiling of that. And, since I don't use "AI" for the above reasons, it really isn't much of a concern to me.

For me it was Disney floating the idea of asking the wrongful death suit be dismissed because of the liability waiver in a Disney+ free trial.

I have the $$$, but I don't agree with the terms for any of the streaming services, so I'll just sail the seven seas and toss a doubloon (coin) to independent creators (my witchers) when I can.

Love the person; hate the ideology. /s

Oh! My Goodness. That's certainly unintended. /s

You don't need "AI", at least not the kind of unpredictable over-hyped bullshit called "AI", whether it's an LLM or something stupider.

https://bdistricting.com/2020/ applies an predicable algorithm to produce geographically compact, equal-population districts.

Of course, those are not the only "fairness" constraints we want to impose. The VRA "required" packing to ensure representation for historically disenfranchised populations, e.g.

I think this is an important point that https://bdistricting.com/2020/ glosses over. Some of the representation "guarantees" that were part of the VRA are actually defeated by doing purely geographic districting. Oft-times there's enough BIPOC population that's widely distributed, but needs to be "packed" (to use the gerrymandering terminology) in order to given even a chance of proportional representation.

My state of Arkansas is a good example https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR_Congress/ BIPOC is >= 25% of the population, but to get a distract that was 50% BIPOC it would have to snake across the state in a way that would be very visually similar to a gerrymandered district.

Multi-member districts can help, but they cause a loss of representation locality.

It may be that it's impossible to produce an algorithm that satisfies all our (collective) fairness constraints.

I can choose to vote for my local politician [...] it gets counted to the person above them in the party

That doesn't sound like local representation to me. And, honestly, I'd like parties to have less influence on our elections, not more, but I guess that's a pipe dream.

What happens if you prefer a local politician that is an independent / has no permanent party affiliation? Bernie Sanders and Joseph Lieberman have held federal office without a party affiliation.

On the last bullet point, we probably need to federalize voter qualification and registration, first. Whether you can vote or not depends on what state you are in (felony disenfranchisement, e.g.). Some states let you register on voting day; others close registration weeks before voting day (and some incumbents try to purge voters as close to the deadline as possible). It's really quite a mess. :(

I think if we made it easier to vote, we wouldn't have to make it mandatory -- federal holiday on voting day, open/unrestricted early voting for a least a week before voting day. I'm against mandatory voting unless there's a "[X] Democracy is dead / a sham in $District" protest vote option or something similar. Incumbents already claim my support when I'm just trying harm-reduction and I actually support someone that never made it into the primary for wanting to tax the rich.

Thank you for the correction.

Local representation is valuable. In the Netherlands it is practically automatic since it is only 41,850 km^2. My state is 134,771 km^2 so you'd need to split it into about 4 pieces/districts to get as local representation. Oddly enough we get 4 congressional districts: https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR/ but we still have issues with Gerrymandering has the largely R government applies cracking approaches to any D voting localities.

Texas is much larger, with more population density variance, so the problems are magnified.

I do agree that instead of a lot of small, geographically compact districts, proportional representation in a larger, but still compact multi-member district is preferable, but that's not quite the problem we are having with districts.

Really what is needed is an open-source algorithm that we agree is fair and apolitical. But fat chance of that right now.

I had hopes for this at one point, but I think we might be in a Arrow-like situation, where there actually is no algorithm that satisfies all the fairness constraints we want to apply.