That explanation sucks.

First of all: you vote for a person. And not a party.
Secondly: in the first vote, you have more than TWO, you have perhaps a dozen, or more candidates.

If in the first vote, one gets more than 50%, it is settled already.

In countries like France it can easy be 3 or 4 rounds of voting.

What actually happens is: the low ranked candidates, get removed from the election.

And the voters who had voted for them have to reconsider who is the better candidate in the next round.

It is bottom line not a race between A and B, but a race about the losers: do they rather pick A or B, or skip the next round.

That is actually what the populace is fearing at the moment.
4 million "invalid" votes - how the fark is that possible?
The winner has 5 million more than the second.

Sounds like the loser tried to rig the elections, and lost in trying so.

I have friends in Brazil, they protested the whole weekend against "the far right", and still the second in elections came close to winning.

The highest UI check in the country is in Washington state, and only comes out to $1208/week, for a maximum of 26 weeks (barring certain exceptional circumstances). A Principal Engineer (level 65) at Microsoft averages just shy of $246k/year and this buyout is offering up to 39 weeks total.

Weekly, that's $4.7k vs $1.2k. Total, that's $184k vs 31k.

I can guarantee nobody smart enough to be an engineer at Microsoft (as much as we might make fun of their culture and products) is dumb enough to fail that one-question math exam.

To be clear, and despite the bad reporting, this "$80 billion loss" is a paper loss. For example, $72B of it is convertible notes. They became a liability because the valuation of the company skyrocketed. They have nothing to do with the company's operations.

An article says:

>Employees at internal levels 64 and below received one week of base pay per six months of service, for example, and employees at levels 65 to 67 will receive two weeks of base pay per six months of service, according to offers reviewed by Business Insider.

Within MSFT, here's what those "levels" mean for software dev positions:

68-70: Partner & Above [entirely different comp structure; limited quota]
65-67: Principal
63-64: Senior
61-62: Engineer 2
59-60: Engineer

When I left in 2022, you unofficially had a limited amount of time to make it to the senior band. The "up or out" philosophy very much applied to junior engineers; if you didn't have the potential to make senior engineer (because you hadn't made it yet after x years), you were managed out.

People who made it to Principal could park their careers at the principal level and stay there indefinitely, so long as they were providing good results (but were still subject to random layoffs not based on their own performance)

The VEOs and other "voluntary" downsizing plans have been targeting older, higher-level folks. Yes, those folks are more expensive. They are also more male, more American, and more white.

>I believe the future will include AI but it will be small models that are self-contained and that people have on their own equipment and not not spending vast amounts of money on paying for tokens to third-party companies

Why do you think there will just be one picture of the future?

For sure, self-hosted models will be part of the future (even if they are illegal). But I think paid services will also be part of the future.

Self-hosted and unencumbered workflows are a key part of the future for freedom / autonomy reasons. And for some, economic reasons.

But paid services and private models are also going to continue to exist.

Right now, 99% of humans don't even self-host their own _email_. Not only do they not run it on their hardware/environment, they don't even manage the service on other people's infra. They have no involvement whatsoever in their email service.

Some businesses are going to choose to pay an AI subscription, just like some businesses use cloud services today. In both cases, operating local IT infrastructure isn't their core business.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

I need food in my house.

If you stopped irrigating crops in the US desert southwest, there would be no water issues at all, either for households or for industry.

I'll repeat, it is agriculture that consumes meaningful amounts of water, not homes and businesses. Farms by water by the acre foot - an acre of land flooded to a depth of one foot. Water is not abundant on the scale of "farms buying it by the acre foot", but it absolutely is on the scale of "what you need for your house".

If you were worth listening to, you wouldn't have needed help to write that comment.

So far US courts have said that person cannot have a copyright.

This might change up in the future, but so far, the prompter is not considered to be a creator.

That comment was about what if that code is later determined to have a copyright apply to it.

"I'm sure if I cared enough to go looking".

So you just made a weird, false assumption in order to justify to yourself something you already wanted to do.

I used to have your viewpoint, by the way. The reality eventually became undeniable. Musk is a unique threat to western democracy.

I think AI copyright is going to kill Linux. Allowing uncopyrightable code into your project could be determined by a court to destroy your whole license, forcing ALL your code to be released as uncopyrightable and putting GPL-licensed code into the public domain where it can be monetized by corporations without having to give anything back. None of this is how copyright law is supposed to work, but if I've learned one thing about governments and laws and courts it's that they often aren't created for our benefit.

I would not trust ChatGPT to do literally any of those things correctly, as they can all be misinterpreted, and even when I ask AI to answer simple questions it often does that. If I want a timer, I run the timer app on my phone. If I want a reminder tomorrow, I run the calendar app on my phone. There's no question about whether it got the information into it I wanted, because I can see that I put it in there. I don't have to wonder whether the LLM will fail to put the information in, but then confidently tell me it did it correctly, and then tell me I was correct to push back when it didn't do it and I'm late tomorrow. Fuck all of that, all day every day, and anyone who thinks it's an improvement is not only mentally deficient but also training themselves to be even moreso.