Because of how the demographics are. The electoral college favors Republicans, and the popular vote favors Democrats.

A Democratic victory is expected to involve urban votes in typically contentious states, and urban votes take longer to count due to higher volume and more voters per polling location.

If the Republican candidate is getting enough votes from the quick to count low population density areas to win, it unfortunately means that the slow to count areas don’t really matter in terms of what the outcome is.

Some are random and have no disadvantage, so they stick around. Others have an advantage that may or may not still be relevant.

High melanin levels help with bright equatorial sun. Low melanin levels help with vitamin D synthesis in areas where there’s less sun.

Curly African hair is better at protecting the scalp from the sun and heat. There’s less hair follicles overall, allowing for better airflow and the tight curls keep the hair away from the scalp allowing it to cool better. This also meant less sweating, which made it easier to remain hydrated and clean.
Straighter hair tends to be more dense, and to do a better job keeping you warm.

A lot of the other traits are random, or in genes connected to the general melanin genes, since evolution is unlikely to specifically target just the melanin levels of skin, and not the overall melanin level.

Some traits are also a result of sexual selection. Peacocks have large, vibrant plumage because it helps them attract a mate. Some human characteristics are the same. We essentially selectively bred ourselves based on the whim of aesthetics.

Finally, much of what we consider racial differences between people are social constructs.
That’s not to say that the differences aren’t real, but that the racial division is a relatively arbitrary line.
For example, I’m nearly a foot taller than my wife. My ancestors wandered up from Africa, landed in Scandinavia and then drifted to Scotland and southern England before coming to the Americas and getting mixed up in the Canadian fur trade in the 1600s. My wife’s ancestors stopped in Germany before coming to the Americas in the late 1800s.
Our children are not considered mixed race because our skin is the same color, even though the actual lineage is pretty distinct.

We decided that skin color is a race marker, but not things like “height”, “toe and finger length”, or things like that.
Except for where we did, like when European colonizers relatively arbitrarily decided that different traits were racial markers amongst the colonized, like nose shape and chin thickness.

All that to say, much of what we consider obvious racial differences that stand out are only such because we decided to pay attention to them. Other perfectly visible variations are just normal individual variations.

You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.

For the most part it’s not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
It’s an engine for producing text that’s most like the text it’s seen before, or for telling you what text it’s seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
This is kinda nifty and I’ve actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

I’ve seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn’t doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as “wrong”.

What county is that? That sounds like the type of discrepancy that you don’t hear about often.

I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.

If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.

You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.

You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.

The exact specifics vary based on the state, but it’s roughly the same in each of them.
You track the voter, ballot, collection and counting.

Voter A issued ballot 3. Ballot 3 collected Ballot 3 counted.

The counting phase involves removing the tracking number from the ballot before removing a cover that keeps the vote private.

You can’t slip an extra ballot into the box because then the totals don’t add up, and you know where in the process the discrepancy occurred.
Making sure there are multiple eyes on issuing and counting means it’s hard to create or count a fake ballot.
When not observed by multiple people, the containers are locked with multiple locks with keys held by different people.

It’s why most voter fraud is a voter going to multiple valid voting locations to vote multiple times. Once the tabulations begin, you see you counted the number collected, collected the number issued, and that you issued one ballot to each voter except one, who got three.

Usually about 15 to 20 seconds. I’ve been known to check my phone while standing to pee, it really just depends on what I’m doing It’s not like I’m doing a lot on my phone while peeing.

if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

If a sweatshop didn’t provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn’t work there.

The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn’t make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.

Oh, certainly. But common language has a term for high latency already, it’s just not speed related. Everyone knows about a laggy connection on a phone or video call.

Fun fact: TCP has some implicit design considerations around the maximum cost of packet retransmission on a viable link that only works on roughly local planetary scale.
When NASA started to get out to Mars with the space Internet, they needed to tweak tcp to fit retransmission being proportionally much more expensive and let connections live longer before being “broken”.

When talking communication, most people think of the speed with which a unit quantity of information is transmitted, not the latency of that transmission.
Referring to bandwidth as the speed of a communication system is pretty normal, even for people who know how to use the term bandwidth.

Yes, to a degree. A VPN protects you from an attacker on the same WiFi network as you and that’s about it.

Most assaults on your privacy don’t happen like that, and for the most part the attacks that do happen like that are stopped by the website using https and proper modern security.
The benefit of the VPN is that it puts some of that protection under your control, but only as far as your VPN provider.

A VPN is about as much protection from most cyber attacks as a gun is.

They’re not a security tool, they’re a networking tool. They let you do some network stuff securely, and done correctly they can protect from some things, but the point of them is “this looks like a small, simple LAN, but it’s not”.

It’s much easier to package and sell network tools than security tools, and they’re much more accepted by users, since security tools have a tendency to say “no” a lot, particularly when you might be doing something dumb,and users hate being told no, particularly when they’re doing something dumb.

The RSV vaccine is even being used in the wild! Certain high risk demographics can get it during RSV season. And not rare high risk either, women beyond a certain point in pregnancy and older people.

Depends on the vendor for the specifics. In general, they don’t protect against an attacker who has gained persistent privileged access to the machine, only against theft.
Since the key either can’t leave the tpm or is useless without it (some tpms have one key that it can never return, and will generate a new key and return it encrypted with it’s internal key. This means you get protection but don’t need to worry about storage on the chip), the attacker needs to remain undetected on the server as long as they want to use it, which is difficult for anyone less sophisticated than an advanced persistent threat.

The Apple system, to its credit, does a degree of user and application validation to use the keys. Generally good for security, but it makes it so if you want to share a key between users you probably won’t be using the secure enclave.

Most of the trust checks end up being the tpm proving itself to the remote service that’s checking the service. For example, when you use your phones biometrics to log into a website, part of that handshake is the tpm on the phone proving that it’s made by a company to a spec validated by the standards to be secure in the way it’s claiming.

Package signing is used to make sure you only get packages from sources you trust.
Every Linux distro does it and it’s why if you add a new source for packages you get asked to accept a key signature.

For a long time, the keys used for signing were just files on disk, and you protected them by protecting the server they were on, but they were technically able to be stolen and used to sign malicious packages.

Some advanced in chip design and cost reductions later, we now have what is often called a “secure enclave”, “trusted platform module”, or a general provider for a non-exportable key.
It’s a little chip that holds or manages a cryptographic key such that it can’t (or is exceptionally difficult) to get the signing key off the chip or extract it, making it nearly impossible to steal the key without actually physically stealing the server, which is much easier to prevent by putting it in a room with doors, and impossible to do without detection, making a forged package vastly less likely.

There are services that exist that provide the infrastructure needed to do this, but they cost money and it takes time and money to build it into your system in a way that’s reliable and doesn’t lock you to a vendor if you ever need to switch for whatever reason.

So I believe this is valve picking up the bill to move archs package infrastructure security up to the top tier.
It was fine before, but that upgrade is expensive for a volunteer and donation based project and cheap for a high profile company that might legitimately be worried about their use of arch on physical hardware increasing the threat interest.

Eeeh, I still think diving into the weeds of the technical is the wrong way to approach it. Their argument is that training isn’t copyright violation, not that sufficient training dilutes the violation.

Even if trained only on one source, it’s quite unlikely that it would generate copyright infringing output. It would be vastly less intelligible, likely to the point of overtly garbled words and sentences lacking much in the way of grammar.

If what they’re doing is technically an infringement or how it works is entirely aside from a discussion on if it should be infringement or permitted.

Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.

I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.

As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.

You can certainly argue that “downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training” should be treated differently from “downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder”, but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.

Personally, I think it’s a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can’t copy it and share the copy with others.

So, you’re correct that active emergencies take priority.

That being said, in essentially every place that has 911, both numbers connect to the same place and the only real difference is pick-up order and default response.
It’s the emergency number not simply because it’s only for emergencies but because it’s the number that’s the same everywhere that you need to know in the event of an emergency.

It should be used in any situation where it should be dealt with by someone now, and that someone isn’t you. Finding a serious crime has occurred is an emergency, even if the perpetrator is gone and the situation is stable.
A dead person, particularly a potential murder, generally needs to be handled quickly.

It’s also usually better to err on the side of 911, just in case it is an emergency that really needs the fancy features 911 often gives, like location lookups.

So that’s what third party cookies are. What this does is make it so that when you go to example.com and you get a Google cookie, that cookie is only associated with example.com, and your random.org Google cookie will be specific to that site.

A site will be able to use Google to track how you use their site, which is a fine and valid thing, but they or Google don’t get to see how you use a different site. (Google doesn’t actually share specifics, but they can see stuff like “behavior on one site led to sale on the other”)