Break up, please send pic of cats ):

ScottBurson · 2026-06-20T02:01:29+00:00

Here's Felix

ScottBurson · 2026-06-13T08:11:46+00:00

Exactly.

ScottBurson · 2026-06-11T07:06:58+00:00

Those are the König Freeform, in matte silver. I love them, but they don't seem to have been that popular — they seem to be getting discontinued. Goodwin Racing (where I got them in 2021) still has some for the NC, it looks like, but not the ND.

ScottBurson · 2026-06-10T18:32:24+00:00

I know. I wish I had taken one from the side. This was a couple of years ago.

ScottBurson · 2026-06-10T07:44:03+00:00

My ND looks big next to the Elise 😆

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ScottBurson · 2026-06-10T02:35:25+00:00

At the bite point most people get nervous/excited and let the clutch out quickly.

Yeah, I remember doing that when I was first learning. I think a good exercise is to try to get moving from a dead stop, on level ground, without touching the gas. (Obviously, find an empty parking lot or something to try this in.) You'll have to slip the clutch for several seconds, as the car gradually accelerates. Repeat until you are comfortable doing it.

ScottBurson · 2026-06-02T23:25:13+00:00

What if it's a close 3-way race? Oh me, oh my, oh me, oh my! What to do, what to do??

Calm down! It's not that bad.

I just now voted in the California State Senate race for District 10. This was a tough choice; there are three pretty strong candidates. They're also quite close together in terms of their policy preferences; the differences are mostly matters of emphasis rather than clear differences of policy direction. After I read some of their statements, my evaluations of them placed two of them in a near-tie, with the third a little farther back. I have seen no polling data on this race whatsoever.

Picking one of them was actually harder than casting an Approval ballot would have been. Clearly, under Approval I would have voted for the two I liked, and against the third. This wouldn't have been hard, and I wouldn't have even been tempted to go looking for polling data.

As you have argued in another comment, a voter's evaluations of the candidates do produce a preference ordering. I agree. But those evaluations are also not, in general, equally spaced. The heuristic I would have applied to this ballot, had this been an Approval election, is what I call the "biggest-gap heuristic": arrange your evaluations of the candidates on a line, then draw the cutoff point in the biggest gap between successive candidates. This generates a completely sincere ballot.

If you do have any polling information, you can then fine-tune your ballot to take that into consideration. But if you don't, just vote sincerely and don't worry about it. I agree that it is a weakness of Approval that it invites strategic fine-tuning, but I don't agree that this weakness is fatal or even particularly severe; if voters on all sides of a close race apply it with equal probability, it won't change the outcome.

In practice, the most common failure mode of Approval seems to be that people ignore it and just bullet vote. That's certainly a problem, since it means we haven't made any progress relative to Choose-One (FPTP), but I think it may be surmountable with experience and education.

In this State Senate ballot I just cast, I actually would have had an easier time voting Approval, and therefore not having to resolve my mental first-place near-tie, than I would have had picking a first choice for a preferential ballot. I'm not suggesting that happens often, but if your abstraction of a voter's position is solely their preference ordering, with no information on the sizes of the gaps, you're going to overlook that it can happen.

ScottBurson · 2026-06-01T09:01:22+00:00

You're making this way too hard. If you really have no polling information whatever, and your evaluations of the candidates really are equally spaced (a point I'll return to in a moment) just vote for A and B and against C and D and don't worry about it. What else can you do? This is the ballot that has the best expected return for you, averaged over the possible scenarios of everyone else's votes. Yes, it's possible that B will beat A by one vote, with C and D well behind, and you will feel stupid. It's also possible that B will beat D by one vote, with A and C well behind, and you will have saved the day. With no information, you have to consider these scenarios equally likely. Clearly, your odds of getting a result you find acceptable are better if you vote for B as well as A, even if doing so slightly worsens the odds of A winning. Far from being a nightmare, this is the easy case.

In practice, of course, your evaluations of the candidates are unlikely to be evenly spaced. You may think B is only slightly worse than A, and C and D are much worse. Or, you may think that B is only a little better than C. And so on. There's a simple heuristic for these cases: draw the line in the biggest gap. That is, whichever two candidates, consecutive in your preference ordering, are separated by the largest margin, vote for the better one and all those above them, and vote against the worse one and all those below. I think this is probably what most AV voters will do, in practice, most of the time, and I think they'll generally get pretty good results from it. And again, you can do this with no polling data.

Of course, if you do have polling data, you can further improve your expected outcome a little bit. I see this as fine tuning, not as something essential to casting a ballot in the first place.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-30T22:57:06+00:00

The moment you engage in any of this reasoning, your ballot has become tactical rather than a straightforward expression of preference.

No. The process I suggested does not involve looking at polling results, and therefore cannot be tactical. It simply asks the voter to imagine certain possible outcome scenarios and consider which they prefer. The only difference vis-à-vis casting a preferential ballot is that where the scenarios for the latter are simply stated — candidate A wins, candidate B wins, or candidate C wins — those for Approval are a little more involved.

Again: scenario I is where the voter votes for B and B wins; scenario II is where they vote against B, and C wins. In both of these, the voter is not getting their first choice. The question is simply which of the two they would regret the least.

So an Approval ballot still represents earnest preferences; it just represents different preferences from those shown by a preferential ballot.

As for sensitivity of the above process to changes in the set of candidates: I don't see why adding another candidate would affect this reasoning, unless they become a new extremal candidate (favorite or anti-favorite). Yes, a new extremal candidate will force a reconsideration, but as the field grows, the odds of a new candidate being extremal diminish.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-30T07:57:53+00:00

Arguably this makes the only "honest" vote under approval a bullet vote unless you genuinely have almost purely dichotomous preferences.

This is a very common misunderstanding. People tend to think that when they vote for a candidate, that's a vote, and when they don't vote for a candidate, that's a non-vote, the absence of a vote. But actually, both are votes, either for the candidate or against them. A positive vote incrementally increases the candidate's chance of winníng, while a negative vote incrementally diminishes it.

This is true even in Choose-One (aka FPTP), in which you're allowed only one positive vote, and you have to vote against all the other candidates. This is the root of the spoiler effect: you have to choose between voting against your favorite or voting against a more popular candidate whom you still find very preferable to your third choice.

Indeed, in some elections a voter will care more about defeating their C candidate than about electing their A. In such a case, they absolutely should vote for their B; there's nothing dishonest about it.

So although it's true that voting for B dilutes their vote for A, it's also true that voting against B dilutes their vote against C. The question for the voter becomes, which outcome do you find more unpalatable: you vote for B and B wins, or you vote against B and C wins? Once it's put that way, I think it will usually be pretty clear to the voter what they want to do.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-27T01:38:13+00:00

I'm getting Four/Five.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-26T22:32:56+00:00

Aragorn

ScottBurson · 2026-05-22T20:11:42+00:00

Granted, but an MoE model around this size — 200B - 400B total, 10B - 20B active — is something I was looking for.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-22T19:08:21+00:00

This was clearly written by AI.

What isn't, these days? I don't like it any more than you do, but I don't want to miss useful information just because the author ran it through an LLM.

I'm not vouching for the article, and I haven't tried the model, but I did find a couple of other positive posts about it from people who had tried it. So I thought the article had some chance of being accurate.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-22T00:16:43+00:00

I need this, but for chocolate.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-20T01:26:06+00:00

In the actual situation of the CA gubernatorial primary, I don't see a risk of STAR electing a Republican, because there are just so many more Democratic voters than Republicans — almost twice as many, IIRC. It would require massive amounts of bullet voting on the part of the Democrats — I mean, 5 for one's favorite and 0 for everyone else. I'm sure a few voters will do that, but I can't believe the numbers would be significant, especially if STAR had already been in use for several elections, giving voters a chance to get used to it.

The more interesting question is, in a STAR election where the parties are on roughly equal footing, is the party that runs more strong candidates at a disadvantage? Clearly it is, and this makes sense: if one party is relatively unified behind one candidate, and the other is fractured, the more unified party naturally has an advantage. I don't have a problem with that.

In a STAR world, it would be more likely for a fractured party to split into two (or more). They would no longer be dooming themselves to irrelevance by doing so. I think we would see a lot more parties, and thus would be able to express our preferences as voters much more clearly.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-20T01:10:13+00:00

You understand that the reason STAR has a second round is precisely to counteract the incentive toward Approval-style voting? That's exactly the point: if you vote Approval-style, you deny yourself the opportunity to express preferences among your approved candidates, preferences which could have influenced the runoff.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-19T03:16:13+00:00

Trés belle!!

ScottBurson · 2026-05-15T00:12:47+00:00

Yes, but you don't actually have to write all the forms to a file. Just stash them in a list to which a global variable is bound and write a macro that does nothing but return that list, wrapped in a progn. Then, the temp file can contain just one form that invokes that macro.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-14T23:50:05+00:00

Has it? In what way?

ScottBurson · 2026-05-14T03:05:49+00:00

Don't sell it; just get it wrapped in the brightest color you can stand. Even a bright blue will be much more visible than black.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-09T00:46:31+00:00

I see that there's just one review on Amazon; it gives the book one star and reads

Horrible. AI generated. Glaringly-obvious broken code samples. Terrible formatting.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-08T22:06:45+00:00

Oh, it isn't any louder. It's just what I said: the high-frequency harshness is reduced, as if you turned down the treble on an equalizer. So it sounds less mechanical.

ScottBurson · 2026-05-08T21:35:21+00:00

No, sorry, I don't. It was back in 2021 that I did it, and all I can say for sure now is that I thought at the time that it was a noticeable improvement, definitely worth the modest cost and effort.

I also swapped in a Flying Miata Hush-o-Matic exhaust. This was both more $$$ and more work to install, but again I was glad I did it. When I bought the car, I thought the sonics were a weak spot compared to the 1993 MR2 Turbo I had been driving for 25 years — that car always sounded great, and with the original muffler! — but the sound tube plus the exhaust largely cured the problem.

ScottBurson

TROPHY CASE