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More detail on the topic https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/
How strong is the association between campaign spending and political success? For House seats, more than 90 percent of candidates who spend the most win.
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Money is certainly strongly associated with political success. But, “I think where you have to change your thinking is that money causes winning,” said Richard Lau, professor of political science at Rutgers. “I think it’s more that winning attracts money.”
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Instead, he and Lau agreed, the strong raw association between raising the most cash and winning probably has more to do with big donors who can tell (based on polls or knowledge of the district or just gut-feeling woo-woo magic) that one candidate is more likely to win — and then they give that person all their money.
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Money matters a great deal in elections,” Bonica said. It’s just that, he believes, when scientists go looking for its impacts, they tend to look in the wrong places. If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup
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But in 2017, Bonica published a study that found, unlike in the general election, early fundraising strongly predicted who would win primary races. That matches up with other research suggesting that advertising can have a serious effect on how people vote if the candidate buying the ads is not already well-known and if the election at hand is less predetermined along partisan lines.
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Another example of where money might matter: Determining who is capable of running for elected office to begin with. Ongoing research from Alexander Fouirnaies, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, suggests that, as it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy. In other words, the arms race of unnecessary campaign spending could help to enshrine power among the well-known and privileged.
Looking completely realistic and being able to discern between real and fake are competing goals. If you can discern the difference, then it does not look completely realistic.
I think what they’re alluding to is generative adversarial networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network where creating a better discriminator that can detect a good image from bad is how you get a better image.
The title partially answers this.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html
GMT is a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. The time can be displayed using both the 24-hour format (0 - 24) or the 12-hour format (1 - 12 am/pm).
UTC is not a time zone, but a time standard that is the basis for civil time and time zones worldwide. This means that no country or territory officially uses UTC as a local time.
The most ridiculous part about it to me is that you lose any semblance of accuracy with it. Not only is it not necessary for hunting or home defense, I’d argue it is not useful.
Its use is that is probably pretty fun to fire at a shooting range, and very useful if you want to fire into a crowd of people and indiscriminately kill as many as you can.
To help give love to some games I think are underrated, here’s a list of my favorite games with 4,000 reviews or less on steam under $25 ranked by my personal play time.
Neo scavenger $15
Post apocalyptic survival sim, that reminds me a tiny bit of Oregon Trail. There’s a good chance a scratch will kill you, and finding a plastic bag so you can carry more than what you hold in your two hands makes you feel OP. I’ve put 74 hours into this game, have died and restarted countless times, and have hardly gotten anywhere in it, but it’s exactly my kind of survival game
Fae tactics $20
Turn-based grid combat reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics, with just a splash of pokemon. The mechanics and setting I found really fun, although the difficulty can fluctuate a good bit at times.
Xenonauts $25
If OG XCOM went more crunchy than streamlined, it’d be Xenonauts instead of Firaxis’s Enemy Unknown. The combat gives you a ton of control during combat, specifying how much time they should spend aiming before shooting, specific hours of overwatch, crouching, etc.
Star Renegades $25 (currently $5)
Roguelike turn based party RPG. It doesn’t do a crazy amount that’s new or novel, but it executes very well, and lining up a good combo with your build feels amazing.
Rogue Book $25
Slay the Spire with some smart additions. Instead of one hero, you play two, which gives some extra possibilities to mix and match between runs. Instead of an overmap with a couple branching paths, there’s a hex overworld where you can use resources to reveal tiles.
Wildfire $15
Avatar the Last Airbender as a 2d stealth action game. The level layouts are great, and the ability upgrades strike a good balance between being impactful and not trivializing encounters.
Don’t Escape: 4 Days to survive $15
A classic point and click adventure, except using human logic instead of insane Game Logic. Reminds me of a bunch of similar games I played at the height of Newgrounds. It’s a tight, solid experience that doesn’t over stay its welcome.
Alina of the Arena $15
What if Slay the Spire had a hex grid system? I’ve seen other games ask this question, but Alina is the best I’ve played. There are some really clever design decisions they’ve made where certain builds very intuitively form some classic archetypes.
Shardpunk $14 (currently $10)
Roguelike XCOM themed as a crystalpunk version of Vermintide. Combat is solid, but the theme of running to the exit while shooting rats on the way with crystal powered machine guns sets it apart for me.
The Case of the Golden Idol $18
This one breaks my “4,000 or less” review rule by a little bit, so I’m putting it at the bottom, but it is one of my favorite games. I understand the love for Obra Dinn, but Golden Idol is better in my opinion. Each puzzle is a scene more or less frozen in time, which you can click on things for clues as what’s happening. What sets it apart is how you really do need to solve the mystery to progress; the game doesn’t walk you into it nor really lets you brute force it. Hands down the best mystery game I’ve ever played.
Really fun GDC talk by spiderweb games https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?si=mZdu6eyyWD4OEWGw
I think it highlights how perverse the stock market itself is. It doesn’t really seem like it functions much as a way for riskier ventures to raise capital outside of a bank, but a giant casino that gives the illusion of not being a zero sum game.
It’s hypothetically possible for a company to make more money in the stock market by investing in themselves than by creating anything (see Tesla). And if all companies could behave this way and somehow knew what the stock market would do for 5 years, I’d wager a TON of companies wouldn’t meet it, invest in the stock market, drive up the “value,” more don’t meet it, etc. etc. until no one is making anything, and everyone is happy with their paper fortunes and try to sell.
In my experience, it has not generated results in real time. I’ve either gotten the exact same response, or a prompt asking “would you like to generate an AI response to your search?”
So it seems like, and would make sense, that in a given time period they only generate a response once per given search, and reuse that response in the future, since that’s far more efficient
A monopoly with checks notes 30% market share. It has a plurality, but not a majority.
Weekly reminder that “trickle down economics” was always meant as a criticism. Coined by Will Rogers
This election was lost four and six years ago, not this year. They [Republicans] didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.
I’d just throw out that my recollection is that it was really more of a mid-to-late 2000’s thing for the oversaturation of WW2 games, if you’re willing to move your window forward a bit. That and there weren’t nearly as many games being released at that time period, so it didn’t take much to saturate the market; there were roughly 1/50th the number of releases in 2008 as today (https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/ using steam releases as a rough approximation of total).
In terms of specific games, I don’t have any that aren’t already mentioned elsewhere. The Battlefield, Band of Brothers, and Call of Duty recurring releases are really the big ones. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_video_games has a good list if you want to browse more.
misconfigured
Makes me skeptical this is a real “loophole”
The issue revolves around permissions, with GKE allowing users access to the system with any valid Google account. Orca Security said this creates a “significant security loophole when administrators decide to bind this group with overly permissive roles.”
Orca Security noted that Google considers this to be “intended behavior” because in the end, this is an assigned permission vulnerability that can be prevented by the user. Customers are responsible for the access controls they configure.
The researchers backed Google’s assessment that organizations should “take responsibility and not deploy their assets and permissions in a way that carries security risks and vulnerabilities.”
Yeah, PEBKAC
Weekly reminder that “trickle down economics” was always meant as a criticism. Coined by Will Rogers
This election was lost four and six years ago, not this year. They [Republicans] didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.
That’s not true. If you’re intentionally logged in to a website, sure, but tracking without an account requires action on the part of your browser, assuming you’re using a VPN. Cookies, ad-IDs, user agent, preferred language, etc. is all information that the browser can decide if it provides or not.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to. That’s a Big Data problem, but we’ve gotten very very good at searches. Bing, for instance, conducts a web search on each prompt in order to give you a citation for what it says, which is pretty close to what I’m suggesting.
As far as comparing to see if the text is too similar, I’m not suggesting a simple comparison or even an Expert Machine; I believe that’s something that can be trained. GANs already have a discriminator that’s essentially measuring how close to generated content is to “truth.” This is extremely similar to that.
I completely agree that categorizing input training data by whether or not it is copyrighted is not easy, but it is possible, and I think something that could be legislated. The AI you would have as a result would inherently not be as good as it is in the current unregulated form, but that’s not necessarily a worse situation given the controversies.
On top of that, one of the common defenses for AI is that it is learning from material just as humans do, but humans also can differentiate between copyrighted and public works. For the defense to be properly analogous, it would make sense to me that it would need some notion of that as well.
I know it inherently seems like a bad idea to fix an AI problem with more AI, but it seems applicable to me here. I believe it should be technically feasible to incorporate into the model something which checks if the result is too similar to source content as part of the regression.
My gut would be that this would, at least in the short term, make responses worse on the whole, so would probably require legal action or pressure to have it implemented.
Haven’t digital price tags been used for decades? I’m sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago