It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].
That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.
"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.
There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA.
An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.
The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).
Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.
The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.
If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA
> A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience.
Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.
Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.
It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.
They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.
Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.
> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
> We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male.
> Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
> Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance.
> But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon.
> But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
>Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no.
>I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal.
Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.)
>We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.
> > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
> Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here.
> > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
> We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter.
> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.
>"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.
This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly).
So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places).
So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election.
>We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix.
>A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too.
More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?
I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).
I think the point is it smells like a hack, just like "think extra hard and I'll tip you $200" was a few years ago. It increases benchmarks a few points now but what's the point in standardizing all this if it'll be obsolete next year?
A +6 jump on a 0.6B model is actually more impressive than a +2 jump on a 100B model. It proves that 'intelligence' isn't just parameter count; it is context relevance. You are proving that a lightweight model with a cheat sheet beats a giant with amnesia. This is the death of the 'bigger is better' dogma
Which is essentially the bitter lesson that Richard Sutton talks about?
Standards have to start somewhere to gain traction and proliferate themselves for longer than that.
Plus, as has been mentioned multiple times here, standard skills are a lot more about different harnesses being able to consistently load skills into the context window in a programmatic way. Not every AI workload is a local coding agent.
Code, talk, who cares. Show me the product. If it works and is useful I will incorporate it into my life. Ultimately no one cares how the sausage is made.
Uhh I kinda care? And some people do too? People have given software social permission so far. I have a feeling that it’s about to change. Engineers are thinking too narrowly about the effects of LLM assisted coding. They only see the shiny bits that benefit them.
I had a similar experience with running, including terrible shin splints that took me out for weeks at a time.
I went to a "run clinic" where they observed my gait. I'm paraphrasing here since this was many years ago, but basically they said that my stride was slightly too large and that my knees were behind my feet during the foot strike. My cadence was around 150-155 steps per minute and they suggested increasing it to 170-180, basically meaning my steps would be smaller but more frequent.
I downloaded a metronome app on my phone and set it to 172 to make sure that I maintained the proper rhythm while running. Worked immediately and I never had shin splints again.
Is there a way to measure the entropy of a piece of software?
Is entropy increasing or decreasing the longer agents work on a code base? If it's decreasing, no matter how slowly, theoretically you could just say "ok, start over and write version 2 using what you've learned on version 1." And eventually, $XX million dollars and YY months of churning later, you'd get something pretty slick. And then future models would just further reduce X and Y. Right?
In thermodynamics, ultimately you need to input work to remove entropy from a system (e.g. by cooling surroundings). Humans do the same for software.
I am an avid user of LLMs but I have not seen them remove entropy, not even once. They only add. It’s all on the verge of tech debt and it takes substantial human effort to keep entropy increases in check. Anyone can add 100 lines, but it takes genuine skill to do it 10 (and I don’t mean code golf).
And to truly remove entropy (cut useless tests, cut useless features, DRY up, find genuine abstractions, talk to PM to avoid building more crap, …) you still need humans. LLM built systems eventually collapse under their own chaos.
> The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop.
That's what you're missing -- the key point is, you don't review and comprehend the output! Instead, you run the program and then issue prompts like this (example from simonw): "fix in and get it to compile" [0]. And I'm not ragging on this at all, this is the future of software development.
It's a bit like the argument with self driving cars though. They may be safer overall, but there's a big difference in how responsibility for errors is attributed. If a human is not a decision maker in the production of the code, where does responsibility for errors propagate to?
I feel like software engineers are taking a lot of license with the idea that if something bad happens, they will just be able to say "oh the AI did it" and no personal responsibility or liability will attribute. But if they personally looked at the code and their name is underneath it signing off the merge request acknowledging responsibility for it - we have a very different dynamic.
Just like artists have to re-conceptualise the value of what they do around the creative part of the process, software engineers have to rethink what their value proposition is. And I'm seeing a large part of it is, you are going to take responsibility for the AI output. It won't surprise me if after the first few disasters happen, we see liability legislation that mandates human responsibility for AI errors. At that point I feel many of the people all in on agent driven workflows that are explicitly designed to minimise human oversight are going to find themselves with a big problem.
My personal approach is I'm building up a tool set that maximises productivity while ensuring human oversight. Not just that it occurs and is easy to do, but that documentation of it is recorded (inherently, in git).
It will be interesting to see how this all evolves.
I've commented on this before, but issuing a prompt like "Fix X" makes so many assumptions (like a "behaviorism" approach to coding) including that the bug manifests in both an externally and consistently detectable way, and that you notice it in the first place. TDD can reduce this but not eliminate it.
I do a fair amount of agentic coding, but always periodically review the code even if it's just through the internal diff tool in my IDE.
Approximately 4 months ago Sonnet 4.5 wrote this buried deep in the code while setting up a state machine for a 2d sprite in a relatively simple game:
// Pick exit direction (prefer current direction)
const exitLeft = this.data.direction === Direction.LEFT || Math.random() < 0.5;
I might never have even noticed the logical error but for Claude Code attaching the above misleading comment. 99.99% of true "vibe coders" would NEVER have caught this.
> Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think.
Over-reliance on calculators does make you worse at math. I (shamefully) skated through Calculus 3 by just typing everything into my TI-89. Now as an adult I have no recollection of anything I did in that class. I don't even remember how to use the TI-89, so it was basically a complete waste of my time. But I still remember the more basic calculus concepts from all the equations I solved by hand in Calc 1 and 2.
I'm not saying "calculators bad" but misusing them in the learning process is a risk.
All this is saying that more basic things are easier to remember than more complex things and without further evidence is very very limited in predictive power.
I agree, the profession is dying and will soon be dead. There is no need to understand code. LLM coding agents make all sorts of suboptimal decisions but it doesn't matter; they just keep churning until it works. Staying in the loop to read and evaluate the program line-by-line only slows the process down.
I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.
> to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function.
Trump and his entire administration admitted there would be short term pain, possibly a recession, but that it would be "worth it" to restructure the economy.
So the question is: how long does the pain last? And is the economy stronger when it's over (do we get over it)? It's been 9 months so far.
From my perspective the policy goals are very unclear since it seems like they're actively wielding tariffs both as a means to reorganize the economy and as a weapon to bully other countries. Mainly bullying. The intended effectiveness on our economy seems difficult to judge.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...
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