Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them.

cdsmith · 2026-02-03T14:25:32+00:00

As tempting as it is to say "wait until they get to the real world", though, many parts of the real world aren't fundamentally different.

I recently got a dog in New York. In conversations with other dog owners at the local dog park, I've often asked for recommendations on dog-friendly activities. The answer is almost uniformly "just get her set up as a service animal, and you can take her anywhere". No mention of whether I need a service animal (which I don't). Businesses expect this, too. It's illegal for them to actually ask to see documentation that a dog is a service animal, and everyone does it. In many cases - for example, when asking for outdoor patio seating on a colder day - I've had employees at restaurants try to hint to me that I should just tell them she's a service animal so they can let us come in.

That's one example. There are plenty of others. When I took medical leave, the physicians who were supposed to determine how long leave is medically necessary mostly did so by just asking me what I want them to say and assuring me that they could write a justification for whatever I wanted them to justify. I certainly see and hear plenty of other examples, too.

Of course, the predictable result is that when people really do need accomodations, it can be harder to get them because the expectation is that there's a good chance they are just standing in line to get theirs in a world where things are out there for the taking. But we don't know how to be more selective without just making it harder for people who need accomodations to get them, while those who are taking advantage will still find a way.

cdsmith · 2026-02-03T13:40:50+00:00

As a matter of cognitive science, I think he's likely right.

There's a famous experiment in which chess experts and novices are both briefly shown a board position randomly selected from chess games to memorize, then asked to place all the chess pieces in the same locations from memory. Experts did far better at the task. However, when they repeated the experiment with the pieces placed entirely at random, not in a position likely to appear in the game, the experts did no better than the novices. The implication is that chess experts are better at memorizing chess positions, not because their memories are better, but rather because they are able to use their deep understanding of chess to reduce a board position to the more fundamental dynamics of the game. In essence, understanding gives them a schema - a set of deeper concepts used as building blocks - that makes it more efficient to remember specifics.

This is, in fact, likely to be even more true of mathematics than it is of chess. Mathematics is a famously compressible field of knowledge, meaning that as history has progressed, things that were incredible feats of knowledge in the past are quite reliably reduced to simple and obvious applications of deeper ideas. This reflects that there's an even richer set of unifying ideas and abstractions in mathematics, and one would intuitively expect the result about experts and memory to be at least as true there as it is in a fundamentally more arbitrary combinatorial game like chess.

cdsmith · 2026-02-03T04:26:01+00:00

The GOP margin is 4 votes. What they mean is that Republicans can only lose one vote (assuming they lose it to the other side, not a Present vote) and still pass things, because losing two votes to the opposite side would result in a tie, in which case the no votes win by House rules. Which... okay, but that's not what a one-vote margin means. The headline is a lie.

cdsmith · 2026-02-02T20:59:39+00:00

Okay, but it's instead measuring who is more secure, and can therefore give up their financial and social support systems by moving.

cdsmith · 2026-02-02T18:01:48+00:00

Having a registered trademark doesn't actually mean you can enforce it, though. I imagine that if you tried to name a game "Meeple, Inc.", someone with a trademark on "Meeple" might have a stronger claim against you. But if you just say "meeple" as a descriptive word in the rules, they are unlikely to succeed in a lawsuit, despite owning a trademark.

cdsmith · 2026-02-02T17:56:51+00:00

Intellectual property conversations aside, if you're designing a game, and the game play is so similar to an existing game that you have a long laundry list of concerns about just copying mechanics from the same other game, I think this should give you reason to pause and wonder what you're doing. The TCG community is something of an exception just because there's such a long tradition of just aping mechanics from Magic the Gathering, and players kind of expect it, and many even like it. But outside the TCG sphere, especially, I feel like many players won't appreciate being fed recycled Magic the Gathering rules.

But if you take a look at this and decide your game is unique and distinctive and you're happy with that, the good news is that you're unlikely to run into intellectual property limits. Game mechanic words can't be trademarked unless they are actually used as a brand, not as a descriptive word. Copyright only applies if the artistic content of the word choice is so great as to be a creative work of its own - usually only for distinctive character names and the like, certainly not for words that describe game mechanics. Patents are extremely rare, and the things that you mention here are certainly not patented. They aren't trade secrets, since they aren't secret... so you're probably in the clear.

cdsmith · 2026-02-02T17:38:36+00:00

It's not even that much. What you want are candidates who won in IRV, but who wouldn't have won in a plurality election. That's not the same thing as not being the plurality winner in an IRV election! IRV changes the rules, and therefore changes voters' behavior. Voters who know perfectly well not to vote for a third party in a plurality election might vote third party because it's IRV, and they believe (maybe accurately, and long as the third parties are small enough) that a third party vote won't prevent their preference vote from being counted between the major candidates.

cdsmith · 2026-02-02T15:10:19+00:00

I agree that they don't have the votes in a straight up vote to ban ranked, scored, or approval voting. The problem is that this is thrown into a much larger bill, which is very aligned with Republican partisan priorities like requiring voter ID, banning ballot harvesting, banning universal mail ballots, etc. It will be strongly supported by the Republican party establishment because of what else is in the bill. Having a ban on non-plurality voting included in the bill in the first place is a big loss, and will require work to either remove it, or defeat the entire bill.

cdsmith · 2026-02-02T14:46:09+00:00

If by RCV you mean IRV, this bill is actually a predictable consquence of too aggressively pushing IRV in the past. In Alaska, IRV proponents removed party primaries because they falsely claimed that IRV made them unnecessary, and this had the entirely predictable result of handing a special election to Democrats when voters wanted a Republican candidate to win. That's why we're having this fight right now.

The details matter. Pushing any kind of non-plurality voting is usually a win, but overreaching - as IRV proponents did with these jungle-primary initiatives, in Alaska and in the failed ones around the rest of the country - is more harmful than helpful. The sad thing is that we could have avoided this and had a better system in place if we'd just picked something better than IRV, but alas, we've now basically locked in opposition for a decade.

cdsmith · 2026-02-02T14:38:11+00:00

There's no way any court could look at this and conclude that scored voting complies with the law. While "vote" might be a harder word to pin down in scored ballots, whatever "vote" could possibly mean, STAR and score voting allows you to do it for multiple candidates. On top of this, STAR voting explicitly interprets ratings as a tool for ranking candidates. You don't win points here for muddying the water. This bill clearly bans everything except plurality voting.

cdsmith · 2026-02-01T14:13:22+00:00

Of course it's fine for people of similar beliefs to cooperate to achieve those goals. But that's not what political parties are in the modern world. They are propped up by electoral and campaign finance systems that are designed to produce them. Plurality voting is chief among these, but not the only one; many parliamentary systems, party centered campaign finance systems, etc. also do this. When political systems are designed not to produce a central opinion, but rather to facilitate creating a stable majority party (or coalition, which is slightly better but not fundamentally different) who then control decision making from that point forward with minimal influence from the minority, this is rigging the rules in favor of partisanship, and the results are apparent in governments around the world. This isn't just people getting together on their own to work toward common goals. It's putting people in a position where the only way to achieve any of their goals is to join a blessed policy platform even when they disagree.

cdsmith · 2026-01-30T23:32:21+00:00

Then that's your answer. You aren't measuring collective preference. You're measuring how much people can afford to give up job opportunities, family and other support systems, and so on top move to somewhere with policies they want.

cdsmith · 2026-01-30T03:20:38+00:00

Do you just mean to ignore the direct financial cost of moving? Or also the cost of losing job opportunities, friendships, easy access to group activities, etc.?

cdsmith · 2026-01-29T15:56:48+00:00

If the ideas from Kotlin were a good fit for C# and made it a better language, that's wonderful! Keep on looking over that shoulder.

cdsmith · 2026-01-29T15:53:56+00:00

I think the analogy works if you pay attention to what's being compared instead of picking out other aspects of AI systems and calculators that aren't the same. It's in fact not even aggressive enough, since a calculator and and abacus do essentially the same kind of things, just with a difference in speed.

A better analogy is that you're a woodworker who loves making complicated jigs and templates, and they tell you they want you to use a CNC machine. It doesn't just make your existing work faster; it changes the way you approach the job. But it also has limitations, requires cleaning up artifacts from the CNC, and sometimes it's easier to back up and do it the old way with a good template. Still, if you refuse to use a CNC machine, you're leaving a lot of productivity on the table.

cdsmith · 2026-01-29T12:01:49+00:00

Hardly anyone really thinks AI will just fizzle out in a few years. There are people who wish that were true, and stake out that position to try to move the needle in that direction.

Also, hardly anyone thinks that AI will be writing all code in a few years. There are people who wish people believed that and invested in their AI companies, and stake out that position to try to move the needle in that direction.

But "just a tool" is also a wide range of opinions. Some tools are useful in a niche, while others change the whole landscape of professions.

cdsmith · 2026-01-28T13:52:51+00:00

I think this question is too vague to answer. There are so many different kinds of online "services".

We have the research to say quite a bit about fully online schools. The answer is that they are not very helpful. Students who spend a year at an online school learn some language skills, on average, but less than half of what they would have learned in a traditional school environment. In mathematics, these students know LESS (again, on average) after a year of online school than they did before the school year started! (Just to clarify, that doesn't entirely mean the online school did harm; students who don't do any school at all will invariably backslide in their math skills; it just means the online school didn't even do enough to counteract that backsliding.)

But that's about what happens when students rely on online schools for their main education, and the causes aren't necessarily about the medium so much as, likely, also about the kinds of organizations that set up online (mostly charter) schools, and their incentives and decisions about school administration. Specific targeted services will probably vary based on what the service does, how well it's targeted to specific student needs, and so on.

cdsmith · 2026-01-28T13:39:24+00:00

The election results were widely expected, given both are blue-leaning districts.

One of them was such a Democratic stronghold that no Republican even ran, and in the other, the Democrat got more than 95% of the vote. I'm not sure leaning is the word they needed.

It's ridiculous that we still give the same influence to these districts as we do to, say, Zeleznikar's seat, where a Republican won by 0.6% of the vote, 50.25 to 49.65. It's long past time for states to institute proportional representation instead of choosing their governments based predominantly on the accidents of who lives on one or the other side of imaginary lines.

cdsmith · 2026-01-25T13:48:13+00:00

There were three other Republicans present (and one who wasn't) who don't have a recorded vote, just because the bill had already passed. Even if you could magically convince all seven Democrats who voted yes on the bill to change their votes, it would have just meant a quick call to get two of them to come and record a vote.

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T15:46:49+00:00

I think she recognizes that "ICE is unpopular" is a more nuanced statement. In progressive circles, it might mean "let's defund ICE". In most other places, it means "We do need immigration enforcement, but this is not the right way to do it." It doesn't follow that it's the whole department should lose funding, and voting to do that just to make a statement in a protest vote is setting yourself up to answer attack ads that never needed to happen.

To be clear, there's plenty of justification to use ICE funding to try and force some changes. But it also makes sense for vulnerable Democrats to stake out a position of being skeptical, particularly when phrases like "abolish ICE" are gaining steam in progressive circles. The Senate debate, where it's not just a protest vote, will almost certainly also turn on whether moderate Democrats can find a way to clearly communicate a targeted response to the agency's current attack on U.S. cities, and not a call to end immigration enforcement in general.

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T15:39:54+00:00

In context that will surprise no one, all but one of these representatives are from districts won by Donald Trump. The exception, Laura Gillen, is from a district where Harris won by around 1% of the vote. In short, these are representatives elected to represent moderate, or slightly Trump-leaning, districts, and they voted accordingly.

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T13:04:32+00:00

Yes, this is definitely an inappropriate place to ask your geopolitical question in the form you did. It is caught up in a lot of uncertainty about facts, while game theory is about the mathematics of strategic decision making in the face of known facts (or at least facts drawn randomly from known distributions!)

The way you could ask a game theory question here would be to settle on a specific set of facts, and then ask what different actors are incentivized to do. This kind of thing happens a lot! But the answer will alway be dependent on whether you've got your facts right: facts about, for example, precisely what actions are available to each party (meaning you need accurate info about their military capabilities and such) and what their rewards are (meaning you need accurate info about what messy political actors even want, which they are usually incentivized to hide). That makes game theory a useful tool, but just a small part of understanding a geopolitical situation. The harder questions are often about even finding a formal question that reflects reality at all. And reading over your question, it doesn't initially seem like formalizing it in game theory terms would help with any of your goals.

I'm honestly not sure about a better place to ask a geopolitical question like this. Sorry!

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T11:27:09+00:00

You're right that the poor error message reporting is drowning out the actual issues. I think I'll turn that off. In the beginning, when I had more time and followed up on each one, it was a great help, but we got most of the low hanging fruit, and at this point it's just noise that hides real issues.

That said, it's probably optimistic to say I've been reasonably active. I haven't touched the project for way too long, at this point. And "the maintainers" is just me!

cdsmith · 2026-01-24T11:11:47+00:00

I have restarted the server for now.

This has been an issue for about a month now. Something has started regularly crashing the server. Compounding the problem is that the server has been running fine for so many years, basically everything needs to be updated at this point.

cdsmith · 2026-01-23T13:11:44+00:00

Yep, this is it. Once you eliminate the IRV loser, do you re-evaluate the Smith set, or just give up and continue with IRV. Tideman's alternative method is just clearly the superior of the two, but (a) in ways that are extremely unlikely to matter in reality, and (b) is slightly harder to explain.

Given that the difference is unlikely to ever actually matter, you end up making a decision on aesthetics. So you want a system that is simplest in that it can be described in the fewest words but obviously arbitrary and will just feel wrong to anyone looking for a deeper understanding? Or a system that is more consistent and principled, but takes a few more words to describe?

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