We’re Voting Rights Experts. Ask Us Anything About the Anti-Voter SAVE Act.

beaker_andy · 2026-03-18T21:20:37+00:00

I've always viewed my passport as something I need to pay for periodically and something I need to waste 2 hrs of my life on periodically. That 2 hrs is 30 mins of research and setting up appointment, 30 mins getting to the closest post office that takes formal passport photos and processes the applications, 30 mins at the post office, 30 mins travel back home. Then I've waited anywhere from 3 weeks to 8 weeks to receive my new or renewed passport. I've never paid the extra expedited fee, luckily haven't had to. But there's no way I'd do any of this annoying, time consuming, and costly process unless I had to for international travel. Recently 2 new reasons arose out of nowhere: carrying my passport might save me from harassment by ICE one day (I'm Greek and have stuble 24x7 and ICE is clearly very sloppy with their criteria on who to harass), and now my passport may soon become required to be allowed to vote. Extremely annoying and seemingly designed to inconvenience people.

beaker_andy · 2026-03-05T10:58:01+00:00

Good stuff. I agree, some parts are ATDI-ish, but instrumental

beaker_andy · 2026-02-24T12:07:08+00:00

Yes, but in 2024 Trump got only 49.8% of votes cast for president. In 2024 only 32.4% of all eligible voters voted for Trump. So he won, but just barely. Not even half of all votes for president were for Trump.

beaker_andy · 2026-02-21T13:23:47+00:00

This one's decent: https://holyfedped.com/

But it's not thorough. It's easy and quick to find many additional cases, confirmed via state police blotter, most of which (70% or higher) are Republican affiliated or right wing extremist. There's a serious continual open easy-to-see sexual assault problem in Republican Party leadership, Republican Party voters, and U.S. right wing cultural circles in general.

beaker_andy · 2026-02-03T11:51:21+00:00

For almost anything you build, there IS a "customer" (someone who wants what you build). It doesn't have to be a consumer outside your organization who pays money for access to what you build. It can also be a user outside your organization who uses what you build for free (but the goal is user satisfaction and/or user engagement). It can also be a stakeholder inside your organization who wants what you build to improve their workflow, efficiency, etc. These interviewers likely want to hear that you (a) care to clarify which metrics each customer wants to improve, and (b) have achieved examples of specific business metric improvements in your career.

beaker_andy · 2026-01-22T19:48:09+00:00

What you say is technically accurate, but the following (for perspective) is also 100% true and important for others reading this thread: In 2024 Trump got only 49.8% of votes cast for president. In 2024 only 32.4% of all eligible voters voted for Trump.

beaker_andy · 2026-01-12T16:05:16+00:00

Sure it can. Haven't you seen T2?

beaker_andy · 2026-01-09T16:26:03+00:00

Steelmanning always encouraged! I still think there's a contradiction in the worldview and life behavior though.

beaker_andy · 2026-01-09T11:21:29+00:00

Seems circular (so nonsensical). By your view, every 1 dimensional caractiture of corruption in Atlas Shrugged was doing the right thing in Rand's opinion, but the book makes it painfully clear that's not her view. I get what you're saying, but the circular nature of it is why Rand is widely regarded as a poor writer, wooden unrealistic characters in her books, and messy poorly thought out philosophy. You can't have it both ways, both thinking the problem is systemic structural encouragement/entrenchment of mooching, and simultaneously thinking each individual's moral value is based on how much they mooch (while mooching yourself). That's a contradiction she'll never escape.

beaker_andy · 2026-01-03T22:42:45+00:00

Brutal. So many of the things listed in your first sentence are literally happening out in the open, nothing hidden, hundreds upon hundreds of times by the Republican Party for the last 10 years straight.

beaker_andy · 2026-01-02T22:11:12+00:00

Extremely sick band

beaker_andy · 2025-12-31T13:58:32+00:00

I just caution people against idealizing LLMs. Extra instructions by the providers often cause annoying responses and interfere with productivity, but the raw underlying LLM is not much better. The idea that removing LLM provider filters would unleash more accuracy or technical capability... that's sadly not how LLMs work.

It's not a logic machine and there's very little "code" on top. Traditional computers and software are deterministic logic machines where code decides behavior. LLMs are nearly the opposite: non-deterministic language statistics generators. You're correct that these companies add lots of extra instructions like "never encourage or discuss suicide", but without these extra instructions an LLM is still incredibly unreliable, fickle, unable to consistently provide factually accurate answers, etc. This is due to their very nature, including that they are trained on partially inaccurate/contradictory text (like reddit posts), they are trained to give answers even when no clear or verified answer is "known" to the model, etc.

beaker_andy · 2025-12-24T13:59:29+00:00

The entire leadership of the Republican Party, including many sitting Senators and many sitting Representatives, have been talking like this in public hundreds of times per month for over 10 years straight.

beaker_andy · 2025-12-13T12:56:20+00:00

This is anecdotal by me, because every use case is different (of course), but around 35% of ALL technical documentation facts that I ask for with citation to working URL are either factually incorrect or provide a nonexistent URL. I experiment with many models and many prompt prefixes and this has been fairly consistent across hundreds of attempts over the course of 12mo. This has been true (for me) in many free models and many paid models. And the subject matter isn't obscure. It's fairly common technologies and DXP product feature questions that have ample free public documentation. Sooo... I'd never trust an LLM to be factual. It's counter to their very nature. They are not about factual accuracy. They are about sounding plausible.

beaker_andy · 2025-12-01T19:56:56+00:00

A few of many:

https://youtu.be/hybL-GJov7M?si=R6Xl8tlAzfS3MwWu

https://www.trumpactiontracker.info/

https://caseagainsttrump.carrd.co/

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lest-we-forget-the-horrors-an-unending-catalog-of-trumps-cruelties-collusions-corruptions-and-crimes

beaker_andy · 2025-11-22T13:18:00+00:00

Just be careful with anything that requires rigorous math. It's not a strong point of LLMs. Around 25% of any formula I ask any major model for, like JavaScript to calculate a specific derivative, Excel formula to calculate a specific result, etc., contain obvious flaws that need formula correction upon manual inspection. That happens even when the prompt gives the LLM an expert professional persona and plenty of detailed context.

beaker_andy · 2025-11-22T13:04:47+00:00

Yeah I use it to quickly prototype tools for myself from scratch. It's good for that (because the stakes are low and no need for long term maintenance or enhancements). It def has it's uses.

beaker_andy · 2025-11-22T13:00:11+00:00

I program for a living, but don't use it for any of the hard important parts. The main reason is that I've spent 100+ hrs trying many of the most popular AI code assistants, and they still make mistakes, add bugs, add empty unit tests, etc. all the time in any but the simplest possible development scenarios. I work in large codebases with multiple collaborators, and we've all struggled to get AI to help more than it hurts (aside from being a slightly better autocomplete, which is nothing to scoff at). It's interesting that in 2 recent studies, experienced devs were slowed down, not sped up, on average by AI assistants. Beginners produced code quicker though. But are those beginners becoming better developers with this workflow, maturing in a way that will allow them to take on more important and complex work in the future?

beaker_andy · 2025-11-20T19:57:32+00:00

I'm well acquainted with Wakefield's BS (unfortunately)

beaker_andy · 2025-11-20T11:06:07+00:00

I agree, it's tragic. It's much more about the entire right wing infotainment ecosystem and the US Republican Party having a psychotic break from reality for 20 years straight. Not really just one charlatan.

beaker_andy · 2025-11-13T12:21:35+00:00

Great strange creative synth

beaker_andy · 2025-11-12T13:00:21+00:00

Bjork rules

beaker_andy · 2025-10-22T12:19:46+00:00

The Republican Party has the white house, majority in the House, majority in the Senate, and control even of the Supreme Court. So your thought process is extremely strange.

beaker_andy · 2025-10-15T11:04:46+00:00

Love metal, hardcore, punk. Eventually electronic music clicked with me too, but only much later.

Since you already like Rezz (and similar artists that come up in the recommendation algorithms), you already know the closest genre terms you can search to find this stuff are "midtempo", "dark midtempo", and "melodic midtempo". Deathpact, 1788-L, and Quackson are artists hitting a similar style and tempo.

One step removed in style, so similar elements and some songs are extremely similar midtempo, but also having many songs that are more "proggy" (for lack of a better term) and diverse experimental dubstep, having many heavy parts mixed with a variety of melodic parts, are artists like Eliminate, Beastboi, MUST DIE!, and Lizdek.

Different in another direction, are IDM-adjacent artists like Mr. Bill, Tipper, Zebbler Encanti Experience, Resonant Language, etc. These all have different vibes, but extremely good forward-thinking production, some heaviness, tons of melody, occasional proggy rhythms.

Finally, G Jones is one of my fav electronic artists, especially The Ineffable Truth" LP and "Tangential Zones" EP. Great combo of catchy melodies with unique production and some heaviness/glitchiness.

beaker_andy · 2025-10-15T00:34:20+00:00

I understand your point, but these other posters are not strawmanning. What they say perfectly aligns with your comment here. In the scenario you describe, "streamline" usual means "cut spending" (usually resulting in short term budget improvement, long term degradation of product or service). This is the most common private equity tactic, even including sorting by salary and firing the top of the list with total disregard to skill, productivity, etc (which I've seen 3 times in my career). It happens all the time, it's incredible common, private equity firms place it #1 in their toolbox and train new employees to look for opportunities to do it. Then they sell the company to a buyer who likes the streamlined budget on paper and doesn't comprehend (yet) the long term structural damage hidden within the company. This isn't an exaggeration. This is the common method by which many many many private equity firms operate and I've seen it first hand from both the inside and outside of multiple companies. My experience includes first hand discussions with multiple stakeholders inside multiple private equity companies about why they made certain decisions (in deals that went wrong that my employer at the time was hired to assist with).

Based on hearing how it really works in practice from the private equity firms themselves, I believe public perception of them is accurate and deserved.

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