jfengel

Quoting “All right, take 57" is meaningless if you don't point out that Grothendieck was trying to name a prime number.

Driving isn't the hard part or expensive part of a garbage truck. Sanitation workers have to hoist haphazardly-placed and badly-packed garbage cans. Some municipalities have cans that can be lifted by arms on the truck, though many don't, and even where they exist not everybody uses them.

It doesn't mean it will get passed, but it does mean you can campaign on it. If a majority of voters want something, and can be persuaded to vote for a candidate who is against that, it says rather a lot about the power of money.

Well, yeah. Ads work. Americans don't spend half a trillion dollars per year on ghosts.

We like to tell ourselves that it doesn't work on us. It does. And the advertisers love that we think it doesn't work, because that means we're not noticing.

And I've got no idea what to do about it. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear that advertising is free speech. You need a fig leaf that you're not coordinating your ads with the campaign, but they barely enforce that.

There are limits to how much it can do. They wouldn't be spending $1B+ this time around if the first few hundred million had worked. They're trying to limit the damage, and even after the fact it'll be hard to tell how effective the spending was -- there is not control country to compare it to.

But note that this is a midterm, and even if the opposition party wins, they're going to be ineffective. Just wait two more years, and that $1.2 billion figure is going to look like petty cash.

Extremely well. He's getting everything he wanted out of life.

If he's having sleep problems, it's because of the ketamine. His conscience, however, is not just clear. He is certain that he's making the world a better place for everybody who matters. (Which may be limited to just him.)

Mostly, advertising. Radio, TV, Internet, as well as the agencies that create the ads. Americans are utterly blanketed with political advertising during our interminable campaigns.

He's extremely limited in how much he can give directly to the campaign, but as long as you've got a fig leaf that you're not actually working for the candidate, you can spend as much as you want.

That's just the First Amendment in action. The Citizens United decision extended that businesses, as individuals pooling their money, but when you're a trillionaire you don't even need the Supreme Court's approval.

Some are. Usually on a campaign of "law and order", which makes Flock cameras an easy sell to their voting base. Because they let you keep an eye on the sort of people who are likely to be criminals. You know. Those people.

They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)

If this works, you will become embarrassingly rich. My fingers are crossed.

More of a temper tantrum. This happened back in July, after he lost the primary to a MAGA Trump supporter. (He has been fighting with Trump for a while, so he was targeted for primarying.)

So he introduced this bill, where it promptly died in committee. I don't know why anybody would submit it to HN now. I suppose that might be election theatrics.

People would still downvote. It's just that it would be limited to the people who are really intent on it -- that is, the brigaders. It's not like they're going to have any trouble coming up with an excuse.

So you have excluded the people who are casually reading the site and wish to filter out poor-quality comment. But the people who you wished to exclude won't be slowed one iota.

(I wouldn't usually say this but... I will greatly enjoy the irony if this comment gets voted down.)

Too bad this is just pre-election grandstanding. It's a really good idea.

Usually we don't talk about a bailout until a catastrophe is underway. Then they say "We need to fix this now, because of systemic risk, and we'll worry about preventing future problems later". Declaring "we will not bail you out" before the bankruptcies tells everybody that they'd better protect themselves from moral hazard.

This is a good test case, too. The AI companies aren't nearly as intertwined with the rest of the economy as the banks are. They can fail without kicking off a domino effect. Let them.

I hope it doesn't go away. I have a soft spot for Miquelon. It is part of France; they use the euro and have EU citizenship. It's the last bit of France still in North America.

The US used to. They just reversed that:

https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-announces-w...

Deregulation, doncha know.

The other guy didn't win, either.

He needs to decide what to do about those Arab parties that Netanyahu claims stole the election. He could turn them into allies, and win the election together, which would piss off a lot of people in his own party. And those people are tempted to jump ship over to Netanyahu, giving the election to him.

So the other guy is making a lot of phone calls right now. It's gonna be a rough day for him.

Did you read the rest of the article?

* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*

The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures

He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.

He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.

That's not "unfortunate". It was a deliberate choice. Any term used to describe the problem is treated as if it meant something bad, and then we're told we can't talk about it because it's "politicized". As if the entire point of the political process was about something other than resolving disagreements.

A tool like this would have been more useful over the summer, when the primaries were being held. Those are multi-way elections, with candidates holding a diversity of opinions. That is your best opportunity to sway policy.

By the time it reaches the general election, those policies are set. Regardless of what your candidate believes, they are going to vote with the party practically all of the time. Your chance to inform the party platform was during the primaries.

Honestly, the most important vote they cast is the first one, for Majority Leader/House Speaker. That determines the entire agenda for the next two years. If they lose that, nothing else they believe matters, because it won't come up for a vote.

Thanks for writing this, and it's useful to give it a test run now. But it'll really become useful around January 2028, when primaries ramp up.

Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement is.

White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.

Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.

That opens a can of worms that you're never going to close.

Maybe this is such an emergency that it's worth the risk. But the risk is extremely high; if you do it to them, even with the best of reasons, they are going to do it back to you for any reason they can think of.

Congress is largely impotent. Even if Democrats take both houses, it won't be by a veto-proof majority. Congress was designed to be "deliberative", so it has ceded more and more power to the executive branch just so anything actually gets done.

Zuckerberg knows that the power is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1st St. Maybe he'll change his mind in a couple of years, but he's going to spend those years doing his best to ensure that he doesn't have to.

How do I get in on that gig? I showed up because I thought I was protecting democracy from a felon who is taking billions in bribes. Like a chump!

He probably can rename New Mexico. Not formally, but he can tell government mapmakers to do it, and require it on government communications. Google would probably follow, after deciding that the national mapping authority overrides the local mapping authority.

It wouldn't change the actual name, as registered in law, and all of the things done by the state government wouldn't change. I'm not sure if it would affect the Post Office.

It would be a massive bureaucratic nightmare, but seeing it on Google would suffice for him.

I did early voting this morning. It's nearly always empty, especially at midterms. It was quite crowded, and the poll workers confirmed five times as many people as usual. The only time I have seen it close to this busy was in 2008, when Obama got voters genuinely excited.

I think that mostly represents how strongly people feel about the current situation, even though this is a blue state and many important roles aren't even being contested. The one other thing I can think of is that we have a pro-gerrymandering referendum -- the campaigners are making it clear that this is in response to the President's gerrymandering in red states.

Well yeah, but what does the law actually say?

No person employed in the executive branch of the Federal Government who has authority to take or recommend any personnel action with respect to any person who is an employee in the competitive service or any eligible or applicant for a position in the competitive service shall make any inquiry concerning the race, political affiliation, or religious beliefs of any such employee, eligible, or applicant. All disclosures concerning such matters shall be ignored, except as to such membership in political parties or organizations as constitutes by law a disqualification for Government employment. No discrimination shall be exercised, threatened, or promised by any person in the executive branch of the Federal Government against or in favor of any employee in the competitive service, or any eligible or applicant for a position in the competitive service because of his race, political affiliation, or religious beliefs, except as may be authorized or required by law.

That's great, but there aren't any consequences. It sounds like employees might be able to sue, and maybe get the promotion retroactively, but nothing happens to the people who broke the law. Which means it will continue to happen.

Actual paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.35254

In English, "apocalypse" refers to a specific revelation, the Revelation of John, which describes (among other things) the end of the world. The first word in the original Greek is "apokalypsis". We now conflate "apocalypse" with "eschatology", though that's not the original meaning.

Evangelical Christians are convinced that there is some place to go, namely Heaven, and that this entire earthly process is a waste of time. Jesus was pretty clear about the cup of soup, but they believe that the soup won't matter if they can run out the clock on the world.

It's more of a "where" than a "when". They call it Tesla Assisted Driving in Europe.

Other countries are more lax about what words mean.

I think Citizens United isn't even the problem any more. We now have near-trillionaires who don't require a corporation to buy elections. They can do it personally.

Wiktionary lists two definitions of "fuck you money":

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuck_you_money

I was unfamiliar with the second one, which is the one you give.

I was familiar only with the first one: the ability to leave your job, and burn your bridges behind you by swearing at your former co-workers. I think that's the older meaning; I found it in a 1970 book:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Deceivers/XoxBAAAAI...

Other books from the 70s appear to have that sense.

Publish or perish. The stakes are incredibly high. Cheating may be the difference between keeping and losing your job.

Especially since everyone else is aware of that. If you don't take the risk, you will lose to someone who did and got away with it.

This researcher is in China, where I gather the competition is even fiercer than in the West. I do not know that for a fact, but if it is true it makes it even clearer.

Viewed that way it's not foolish. It's actually mandatory. And it's just going to get more prominent as the AI makes fewer mistakes, and competitors get better at spotting and removing them.