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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Maybe. I think it’s more likely that she truly believed that her milquetoast approach was actually the safer option. I’m not even sure Harris was exceptionally cowardly.

    Many other people would likely have folded and taken that “safe” option.

    The problem is that we needed someone who went well beyond just “not cowardice”. We needed an actual hero. We needed a candidate who was willing to boldly face down big money interests, even when it seemed unwise and hopeless. Harris definitely wasn’t that hero.


  • Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with “de-duping” as a database operation either.

    The main components would probably be:

    1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
    2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that’s where existing duplicates would get removed)
    3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn’t valid any more.
    4. Decide when you’re going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

    There’s a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on “de-duped” databases.


  • The Democratic party, as it stands, is dead and the Greens are stillborn.

    There’s nothing but hopes and prayers to support the idea that the Greens will ever get anywhere in the US. They have neither a policy platform nor any individuals who inspire broad support.

    It is absolutely possible to take over parties from within though. We’ve seen it happen twice with the Republicans. They tried, and failed, to keep the Tea Party from taking over. Then they tried, and failed, to keep Trump from taking over.

    History suggests we have a better chance getting AOC to take over and clean house with the Democrats than we do waiting for the Greens to make any headway.





  • It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

    “De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

    It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

    It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

    A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.







  • It’s more like if played a song on Guitar Hero enough to be able to pick up a guitar and convince a guitarist that you know the song.

    Code from ChatGPT (and other LLMs) doesn’t usually work on the first try. You need to go fix and add code just to get it to compile. If you actually want it to do whatever your professor is asking you for, you need to understand the code well enough to edit it.

    It’s easy to try for yourself. You can go find some simple programming challenges online and see if you can get ChatGPT to solve a bunch of them for you without having to dive in and learn the code.