BreadstickNinja

The states she needs are all on a knife's edge. She's polling slightly better after the debate but things could easily revert over the next seven weeks. This election will be decided by turnout. I get frustrated with these articles proclaiming she's ahead in a single poll with a result that's inside the margin of error. Harris needs to beat both Trump and complacency.

If you can do a good thing for women's rights and simultaneously piss off terrible people, well, that's just a win-win situation.

Superbly written article. The author distills the conflict very accurately.

It's a great way to replace competent human workers with a lower-cost, lower-quality alternative. Wall Street may buy that anti-worker BS but workers tell a different story.

Literally an article in Forbes today that says 77% of employees report that AI tools make them less productive: https://www.forbes.com/sites/torconstantino/2024/09/12/77-of-surveyed-employees-say-ai-tools-make-them-less-productive/

Oh yeah, I love my Index as well. I think it's a lot of fun as a gaming device. But the big money is in B2B sales, which is why tech companies try to convince everyone that blockchain/VR/LLMs have all these corporate applications that just make no damn sense.

It's a fun toy. It's not a research aid, it's not a productivity tool, and it's not particularly useful in the workplace.

It's honestly very similar to the VR craze of a few years back. Silicon Valley invented a fun toy and then tried to convince everyone that it would transform the workplace. Meetings in VR and simulated workstations and all that. Ultimately everyone figured out that VR is completely useless in the workplace and Silicon Valley was just trying to find ways to sell their fun toy. Now we're going through the same learnings with AI.

It's actually not easy to ensure that an LLM will cite a correct source, in the same way it's not easy to ensure that it will provide accurate information. It's based on token probability, not deterministic lookups of "this data came from this source." It could entirely make something up, then write "Source:" and then probabilistically write "Wikipedia" because those tokens commonly follow those for "Source."

If you have an AI bot that looks up information in real time, then that would be easy. But for a trained LLM, the training process is highly destructive. Original information is not preserved except in relationships based on probability.

You do it by comparing the state voting results to pre-election polling. If the pre-election polling said D+2 and your final result was R+1, then you have to look at your polls and individual polling firms and determine whether some bias is showing up in the results.

Is there selection bias or response bias? You might find that a set of polls is randomly wrong, or you might find that they're consistently wrong, adding 2 or 3 points in the direction of one party but generally tracking with results across time or geography. In that case, you determine a "house effect," in that either the people that firm is calling or the people who will talk to them lean 2 to 3 points more Democratic than the electorate.

All of this is explained on the website and it's kind of a pain to type out on a cellphone while on the toilet.

I'd be faster without autocorrect than with. I feel like it chooses the wrong word more often than not.

Honestly, I miss the real keyboard from my 2009 Blackberry. No substitute for haptic feedback.

There are a wide range of computer skills. Being able to interact with a word processor extremely efficiently is a highly valuable tech skill. Someone who knows about processor architecture but can't touch type is arguably more tech-savvy but also less useful in most office jobs. So I'd say that the secretaries were indeed tech-savvy in a way that was useful for their positions.

That's the sad truth of it. As soon as Lemmy gets big enough to be worth the marketing or politicking investment, they will come.

I probably can't afford that car, but I definitely can't afford that blender.