zataomm
1yr ago
From the indictment:
COUNT 11 of 41
And the Grand Jurors aforesaid, in the name and behalf ofthe citizens of Georgia, do charge and accuse DONALD JOHN TRUMP [et al.], [...] unlawfully conspired, with the intent to defraud, to knowingly make a document titled "CERTIFICATE OF THE VOTES OF THE 2020 ELECTORS FROM GEORGIA," [...] insuch manner that the writing as made purports to have been made by authority ofthe duly elected and qualified presidential electors from the State of Georgia, who did not give such authority
Read the above and recall that what AshLael wants anyone still reading this to believe is that for the purposes of the Georgia indictment, it makes no difference whether in creating the alternative slate of electors (aka "fake electors"), the accused parties intended for the "CERTIFICATE OF THE VOTES" to deceive Congress into wrongly counting Georgia's votes for Donald Trump.
To echo a favorite line of mine, I cannot imagine an interpretation of the phrase "with the intent to defraud," or really the entire context and meaning of Count 11 and several other counts like it, that would make AshLael's position reasonable.
Whether the intent of the "fake elector" document was to deceive Congress matters to the legal case. Of course it matters. Anyone who says differently either hasn't read the indictment or is a troll.
zataomm
1yr ago
The first person to use the word fraud (without de-) was you. You stated that you didn’t think deception was an element. I commented that fraud would seem to always involve deception. That’s why it’s relevant.
I’ll ask you once again to consider the method by which Trump stole the relevant voter data. It involved lying. A lot. Do you think Trump would have been charged with theft if his claims about the election had been true? The indictment sure makes it seem like the fact he was lying is relevant.
Also, stepping back for a second, there are so many counts in the indictment related to forgery, false documents, and false statements, I don’t know how you managed to start a debate over the one count that (arguably, in your opinion) doesn’t involve deception.
zataomm
1yr ago
I can't imagine a definition of fraud that wouldn't involve some kind of deception. Merriam-Webster:
1a : DECEIT, TRICKERY
specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right
On the one hand, I'm sure you're right that it's not as good as a human developer. On the other hand, it's kind of like the web in general. Websites all kind of suck now because React gives developers the ability to be lazy and not worry about resource usage or anything else because everything's kind of "good enough." But the cost and speed advantage of using AI is so overwhelming that I don't think your concerns are going to hold up. Developers are just going to have to add more bad code on top of bad code until it works.
Full disclosure: I really think that a lot of concerns from sophisticated developers about how AI makes mistakes are just snobbery/posing. But that's what I, an unsophisticated developer, would think, right?
Like, I'm not saying I've never had an experience where AI is going down a path that I think is bad and needs to change course. But in those cases, I usually hit the stop button and say, "Hey, I think you need to do this in a totally different way," or I can just say, "Hey, your last change was terrible. Can you just revert it?" There are a few instances where I feel kind of dumb because I'm using three prompts to say like hey I need you to change the font size, when I probably could've done it more easily myself in that specific case. But overall, I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
zataomm
8mo ago
Absolutely incredible finish. Commanders avoided a very tough-luck loss by handing the Bears one instead.
zataomm
9mo ago
précipitâtes
Hey, we’re talking about New York magazine here. Get back over to the New Yorker with your weird orthography
zataomm
1yr ago
Horrifying. Context makes it a little better but definitely bad to imply any kind of debt owed to Trump by any of the justices. Not sure who Alina Habba is exactly though, she’s not one of the lawyers whose name appears on Trump’s petition to the court, all of whom surely want to kill her right about now.
zataomm
1yr ago
Yes, I agree with your assessment of Gorsuch and Roberts, which is why if they do agree I could pre-commit to following whatever they say as both wise and respectful of the relevant laws as written. Not sure what I'd do if they disagree but again I think you're right, Gorsuch is more likely to apply the law with strict correctness while Roberts will look for the decision that is best for the political system overall. My heart is with Gorsuch but I think I'd have to go with my head and favor Roberts.
zataomm
1yr ago
Looking at the IRS IRA required minimum distribution (RMD) table, at age 80 you are required to withdraw 5% from your 401k, and the percentage goes up each year after that. At age 75 your withdrawal already exceeds 4%. You don't have to spend it, but you do have to take it as income and pay taxes on it.
zataomm
1yr ago
To not clog up top comments, I'm deleting this and and putting it in a new thread which hopefully will be of interest to somebody. Colorado Supreme Court thread
I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases
I know what you mean. Any suggestions on how to break down the data this way? I mean, at some point, if you just define important cases as cases that go 6-3 along ideological lines, then by the way that you've defined it, 100% of important cases are going to be decided along ideological lines. I'm trying to think about what would be a good middle ground that's still data analysis-based while giving insight into these potentially controversial cases.
On the Agreement Matrix tab, I've added a checkbox that excludes unanimous cases from the analysis. Which I think is an interesting way to look at it, because you're seeing that if there's any disagreement at all in a case, then, for example, Thomas and Jackson are most likely to find themselves on opposite sides, while Thomas and Alito are most likely to be on the same side. You didn't really need data analysis to come up with this insight, but I guess it's good to confirm at least that data analysis confirms what everybody knows.
zataomm
7d ago
Thanks! My inability to find such a summary was what caused me to embark upon this folly.
zataomm
9mo ago
Thanks, this seems like an important insight. You could say that the economic value of land just isn't as high relative to labor as it was before, say, 1800. The American "empire" receives economic value from favorable laws in foreign countries: Apple can set up factories in China, the Gap can have its factories in Bangladesh, without the government of the United States actually needing to be in charge of the day-to-day business of government in those countries. And as the economy has become more complicated, it does seem like "workers + incentives" is a cheaper and ultimately more profitable technique than "slaves + force" for extracting value from labor. This seems like a new development, so I'm surprised to hear that it was already in Adam Smith. I guess the modern economy is older than I thought.
Honestly my impression as I start to learn about this topic is the opposite of this. It it looking like Britain (today Russia) really screwed things up. I get why they did it and saw it as their interest to oppose Germany, but everybody would have been better off just letting Germany (today America) win to establish pax Germana on the European continent.
But yeah, I guess I am trying to look for something deeper than "Putin is an insane tyrant" as the reason for Russia's current behavior. Do you really oppose even that minimal amount of respect and context applied to the current conflict?
zataomm
1yr ago
Trump has filed his petition to the Supreme Court asking them to review the Colorado decision. Lawyers writing briefs don't generally have the same opportunity for snark as judges when they write their opinions, so my favorite quote was:
constitutional speech protections should not turn on opinions from sociology professors
Which seems reasonable to me.
The brief contains a variety of arguments, some of which are stronger than others. One interesting argument I hadn't heard before is that while someone may be disqualified from holding office, they are still permitted to run for office. A bit hard to swallow in the case of a candidate counting on Congress to "remove the disability" after he gets elected to office, but, like I said, interesting.
The brief points out some deficiencies specific to the Colorado proceedings. Candidates are required to file a paper affirming that they meet the qualifications to be President, but the Colorado Secretary of State is not required to independently investigate this affirmation, and thus had no business doing so. A good point, but by now we have challenges across several states, so the Supreme Court is going to need to go bigger to resolve this issue.
The brief argues that the events of Jan. 6 were not an "insurrection", and even if it was, Trump did not "engage" in the insurrection. I agree with this, but my instinct is that the Supreme Court is not going to want to go so far as to make that determination.
The Supreme Court's two main options are unpalatable. They can:
- Point out deficiencies specific to the Colorado procedure
- Take up the case of Trump's eligibility themselves
The first doesn't go far enough, and won't resolve other states' cases, while the second goes too far, taking on more responsibility than the Supreme Court likes to have. For this reason, my expected outcome is for the Supreme Court to lean on section 5 of the 14th Amendment, saying that Congress and only Congress is able to determine eligibility for federal office. As @AshLael has pointed out, this is standard operating procedure for Roberts, he loves to write opinions which conclude by saying, in effect, "if Congress doesn't like this outcome, they are free to pass a new law to achieve the outcome they like."
zataomm
1yr ago
zataomm
1yr ago
Attempted crimes should be punished, but the details of why the "attempt" failed are relevant to determining whether it was a genuine attempt at all. In your attempted murder analogy, yes, you couldn't shoot me because your gun jammed, but if prior to that attempt you purposely manipulated the gun by jamming up the chamber so that a spent round would get stuck in there and be impossible to eject, that would be evidence that you never intended your "murder attempt" to be effective.
The fact that Congress wasn't fooled doesn't by itself make election fraud not a crime, but the fact that apparently Trump tried this maneuver in several states and in no cases were the "fake elector" votes counted, indicates that there is something suspicious about the narrative that he was trying to deceive Congress. Yes, they sent a piece of paper to Congress saying they were the duly-chosen electors and they were voting for Trump etc., but that paper was presented as what it was, an alternate slate of electors. At no point was Pence saying, "well, now I have no idea which ones are the real votes!"
zataomm
2yr ago
There seems to be some currency weirdness in Albania, like you can't bring Albanian hard currency out of the country? Do you happen to know whether the exchange rate at ATMs is fair or do you have to bring a bunch of Euros/Dollars and exchange them on the street?
zataomm
2yr ago
Gotta admit I'm not about to read all that API documentation for window.showOpenFilePicker() but it looks like the user has to have a lot more specific interaction, i.e. choosing files on local disk, in order for the site to have access. So you wouldn't be able to get access just using some generic popup.
zataomm
2yr ago
Aren't your question parameters too wide? If someone has a perfect (presumably zero day) exploit
I suppose so. If somehow Chrome granted a page access to the entire filesystem, obviously that would be very bad. But you're probably protected against such an exploit because come on, are you really going to be the first person they target with this attack? Although I retract this skepticism if you are actually a billionaire.
So okay, are they any known ways that a site could extract important private information about a user just by visiting a site (and, let's say, scrolling)?
zataomm
6d ago
using AI for a prolonged period will lower your overall ability to code as a developer
This strongly depends on what your ability to code was before you started using AI. The reality is a lot of people can make websites now despite not having a professional approach to coding. If you're a classically trained developer, computer scientist, and you only use Vim, then yeah, you're probably right. That set of developers is going to be a smaller and smaller proportion of the total as time goes by.
This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?
Oh, very much so. Github Copilot + Claude Sonnet 4, if you care to know. Technically I am a web developer but at this point I am basically all-in on using AI wherever possible. Nice to get done in a couple hours what would have taken me much, much longer, and much more frustration, using the old method of typing code by hand.
@Gdanning I deleted my comment on the CW thread, would you mind responding here?
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