Then it should have no effect.

This is just a nice way to define file-discrete .rc scripts. Like, maybe you have one for shell stuff, one for your custom collection of command aliases, one for initializing pyenv+pyenv-virtualenv, etc. That way, you have domain-constrained .rcs, and it’s easier to scan through things to see if something funny is going on / is broken or whatever.

They will claim voter fraud, even though there is next to none. They will be perpetrating electoral fraud (as they did in 16 and 20).

Edit: 2000 too, as was mentioned

Yeah that’s pretty much the plan, I think. But also, remember the MAGA dipshits have gotten a hold of a ton of election-related positions in GA, and I’m sure they’ll be fucking with the ballots in other ways too.

Russia’s been imploding since they got out from under the USSR (technically, Russia is NOT the successor state of the USSR; the geopolitical lineage of the USSR passes through Kazakhstan, as the final member of the USSR; they’re the ones who turned the lights off and disbanded the club, as it were).

And, you know, intelligence levels.

Trump speaks at a 3rd grade level, even when not at a podium of some sort.

That roughly checks out with our electoral results tbh

Yeah, guess she didn’t get (or couldn’t read?) the memo

Yeah, because there’s a positive correlation between mental health issues and homelessness. I’m not super shocked that people in that line of work have difficulty seeing the distinction between homelessness and a strongly nomadic lifestyle. The “they seem offended” vibe might actually be more along the lines of frustration and sadness that they THINK you need help but are refusing to let them help you. At the same time, I dated a girl who was a social worker years ago, and she absolutely knew some people in the field who just straight up had a savior complex and would get angry at people who wouldn’t accept help… so it could be that too.

So like… they should avoid their nominee…?

I swear to god these dipshits have zero self awareness

Don’t know, don’t care, because that’s a stupid fucking movement if you’re actually interested in preventing a fascist electoral victory.

Particularly because some will take that to mean they should vote third party, which given how our shitty electoral system works, is essentially just a vote for Trump in terms of the end result.

Though it was a few years ago, as someone who has worked the polls, here is what I recall about the poll operation and ballot collecting process:

In MA, absentee/early ballots are sent out with barcodes that can be mapped back to a central DB. Afaik a maximum of one early ballot is sent out to any given voter. If you lose it, you’re walking to your polling station on election day. The mailed/dropped off ballots are scanned so that they’re routed to the correct voting precinct; they’re given to us on Election Day to run through with the in-person ballots.

On Election Day, we sit there with registered voter lists (the list is shared, not duplicated - i.e. someone works a-f, someone else works g-k, etc.); people come in, tell us who they are (no, no id is checked, but they do need to give us a full, correct address that matches their stated name); they are marked off as “voted” on the list. Voters are provided with a ballot once they have been found on the list and marked off.

Absentee ballots are run through the machines throughout the day; for every single ballot, we match it to a name on the list, and . If there are any duplicate ballots, that is caught at the voter list checking phase, and is flagged thusly for any necessary follow-up (confirmation, disambiguation, or legal action as necessary) and the extra ballot is set aside (whichever one we come across second).

I’m pretty sure we had zero duplicates when I did it in the 2020 presidential (I feel like I would have remembered that, considering the political context at the time), and iirc we processed something in the neighborhood of 10,000ish ballots.

Don’t forget - Newt Gingrich (may he be ever fucked by rusty rebar in hell) was leading the impeachment charge while he was in the throes of his OWN sex scandal.

I’m just waiting for them to threaten to nuke the pickle jar because it’s resisting being opened too much

That’s gonna be a nope from me, dawg

It’s kinda interesting in how it actually roughly parallels the dawn of the nuclear age in some specific ways. Namely, that there’s a clear “purity” line established by the advent of the technology - and I mean that literally, not figuratively. Content on the internet is going to have a very similar dividing line. But it’s also going to be way harder to definitively source data from before that line, unless someone clairvoyant happened to offline and archive a huge storage array with a complete internet snapshot right before ML made its public debut. And I know exactly what the scale of that storage commitment would be, and how much it would cost. So I’m certain nobody has done that.

Uh, good.

As an engineer who cares a LOT about engineering ethics, it is absolutely fucking infuriating watching the absolute firehose of shit that comes out of LLMs and public-consumption audio, image, and video ML systems, juxtaposed with the outright refusal of companies and engineers who work there to accept ANY accountability or culpability for the systems THEY FUCKING MADE.

I understand the nuances of NNs. I understand that they’re much more stochastic than deterministic. So, you know, maybe it wasn’t a great idea to just tell the general public (which runs a WIDE gamut of intelligence and comprehension ability - not to mention, morality) “have at it”. The fact that ML usage and deployment in terms of information generating/kinda-sorta-but-not-really-aggregating “AI oracles” isn’t regulated on the same level as what you’d see in biotech or aerospace is insane to me. It’s a refusal to admit that these systems fundamentally change the entire premise of how “free speech” is generated, and that bad actors (either unrepentantly profit driven, or outright malicious) can and are taking disproportionate advantage of these systems.

I get it - I am a staunch opponent of censorship, and as a software engineer. But the flippant deployment of literally society-altering technology alongside the outright refusal to accept any responsibility, accountability, or culpability for what that technology does to our society is unconscionable and infuriating to me. I am aware of the potential that ML has - it’s absolutely enormous, and could absolutely change a HUGE number of fields for the better in incredible ways. But that’s not what it’s being used for, and it’s because the field is essentially unregulated right now.

If this is ML-targeted, frankly it’d be a great test case for making the judicial system decide whether content generated largely or wholly by a machine learning system shall even be considered as “speech” in the traditional sense, since it’s the system doing the “speaking”, not a human, and the Bill of Rights does not offer any protection to non-humans.

Hell I’d be surprised if we’re in the top two dozen