I apologize if the context/background comes off as an agenda. It’s not that I’m trying to convince people one way or another, but I am concerned the anti-AI sentiment may be causing people to dismiss useful tools. I was attempting to provide some of my thoughts including that concern as context to my more general question of what I might need to do to properly utilize the tools.

If it helps, I agree that you shouldn’t spend any money on anything AI. To me, most “generative” AI is like a programming package. NumPy is a genuinely a really big deal, and coding without it is foolish, but people who don’t code shouldn’t worry about it. It’s not yet clear to me where AI agents fall as a tool in the world, and I’m genuinely trying to work that out. It might be useful purely as a coding tool – at the very least I think I want to try it as a coding tool. I’m also a biologist so I’m very keen to use robots to automate routine tasks – not sure if the AI will be a tool to build that automation or be a part of it.

I’ve also seen the multiple sub AIs thing. I think they have tools too, but there is definitely an element of that.

there would mechanisms in place to educate

Could you imagine if he was quietly black sited and came back from lake laogai all “there is no war in ba sing se” upstanding citizen?

Also, I think this is more vocational training anyway, so probably not far off from the educational system you want anyway.

I don’t really know about term limits. Maybe people should be forced to take a break now and then no more than two consecutive terms in a row and not more than a third of the terms over some period of time just to prevent entrenchment, but I don’t want to stop people from voting for whoever they want to vote for generally.

I care about term lengths far more. Life terms? Yeah, no. To me, 6-8 years would a lot more reasonable maybe ten years if you really believe it’d be too unstable otherwise, but these lifetime appointments are insane. Honestly, I’m surprised terms that long don’t make them assassination targets. We should shorten their terms to prevent them from becoming targets for people who target those with too much power.

Eh, give it twenty years.

In that order or …?

Cereal is runny oatmeal, which is thick soup, which is heavily dressed salad; thus, cereal is salad.

When I was young I was really into Star Trek, and viewed the Prime-Directive as a good approach to foreign policy. As I got older and more into politics, I advocated isolationism. People countered that we should all help each other, and for a time I found that a compelling argument.

Now I see good intentions corrupted – sudden withdraw of help causing massive damage. I see a government that does whatever it wants around the world with nothing but apathy from its citizenry – facilitation of genocides and support of authoritarianism. I see the rounding up and abuse immigrants on one side and the use of immigrants to fill labor needs rather than fund proper training on the other. I see globalization used to cut workers wages under the guise of mutual dependence maintaining peace.

There is certainly value to helping others and maintaining peace, but generally, I think Americans need to push our government towards minding its own business.

I still think universities and academic societies should be hosting instances and funding them with dedicated endowments. It’d also provide a great way to request more money from people who feel a reciprocal obligation due to using the instance.

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Yeah, maybe for paper ballots have the default as equal to lottery than let people add numbers with negative being below the lottery position? Having a default solves a lot of practical problems, but I think summing all everything will still take computers. It’s just too much to determine what’s greater than what for every relation for every ballot then sum everything. Maybe doable for small numbers of people, but not for a whole city. Still paper ballot give something to go back and reference then you can use a program hash to validate the count.

When voters are required to rank every candidate vote splitting isn’t an issue. This is actually easier when there is a lottery rank because you can make a default ranking as equal to (or below) lottery, then just pull people above or below. Strategically, I think the lottery option is more a “candidates below this rank suck” option, which forces politicians to be at least better than random citizens from the perspective of most citizens.

I made a top level comment on this too.

In voting theory, there are these voting graphs where every candidates is a node. If you rank every candidate, you can draw directional lines between each node then sum all the ranking from all the voters to find a cumulative ranking.

Most people oppose this system for the practical reason of no one wanting to rank every candidate at the ballot box; however, I believe I’ve found a clever work around to this complaint. You have a none option (or a lottery option) and you allow people to rank people equally. From there it’s pretty trivial to set up a tablet or something where you can send candidates to the bottom or top and modify the <=> symbols between them. Everyone starts in a random order below the None/Lottery Option. If you want to get fancy you could even give people the option of grouping and moving an entire party on the tablet. In the cumulative ranking, anyone equal or below the None / Lottery option gets tossed. If it’s an election where you need multiple people just start at the top of the ranking and work your way down. Once you hit None/Lottery, your repeat the lottery or go without for any further seats.

The None/Lottery Option also prevents it from being weak to large numbers of candidates as frankly people will just ignore the vast majority of candidates leaving them below the none/lottery option. In a polarized society people will put the opposing party below the none/lottery option. You can vote [lottery > blues > reds] or [blues > lottery > reds] and it’s the same result for red vs blue.

There’s a slightly more advanced version of this where you put numbers on each relation then normalize. It gets complaints of not meeting the condorcet criterion, but it’s actually superior. I think this gets too complicated at the voting booth though, so whatever.

Some people do criticize this because strategic voting can get weird, but since this system has a none/lottery option that argument doesn’t hold water. If the population “strategically” votes [blue > yellow > lottery > red] and [red > yellow > lottery > blue] then [yellow > lottery = red = blue] is the favored result. They could easily swap yellow and lottery and get [red = blue = lottery > yellow]. They made their choice. That’s democracy, we ought to respect it.

Also, also, if it’s truly equal e.g. [red=blue > lottery ] just flip a coin. It’s unlikely to be truly equal but we’re already accepting some luck in this system.

One concern I have with direct proportional representation is that it will create secure seats, which no longer respond to their constituents. Competitive seats have to worry a lot more about how to satisfy their constituents, and can’t easily get away with corruption.

I like the idea of adding a lottery option to some sort of ranked choice. I’m perfectly fine electing good politicians, but if a majority of people think they’re corrupt, we should be able to rank a lottery option above them.

I’m fine with re-running if the chosen person opts out, but I don’t like the opt-in versions. I’m also not fond of some of the statistical biasing some people advocate with the system – a straight lottery where everyone has equal odds. I’d compromise on including felons, but personally I think including them incentivizes rehabilitation.

I also worry that this effectively gives power to public servants who are not necessarily good people – wasn’t Stalin originally a secretary? I can see every think tank offering up people with their own agendas to work in a new office but having an established office with entrenched interests also seems super dangerous.

Right! Plus, it’d be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!

While I don’t disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn’t a technical issue but a financing one.

I’ve been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they’d be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it’s not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.

Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to “salary overhead” while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves… Honestly, I’m probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it’s just too perfect of a solution.