Gamer for Democracy

1 Jan 2025

You know why Justice Roberts is afraid folks are going to start ignoring SCOTUS rulings? Because he created the very environment in which that *must* happen in order to fix things.

"So.. the question is: What do we have to do to win back all these voters? Obviously, moving away from white supremacy and rapists are completely off the table, and we definitely don't want to be seen as helping any non-wealthy people..." -The Republican Party on November 4th.

It's starting to look like voters in Brazil have decided not to touch the hot stove again. I am suitably jealous!

THIS IS ME: Height: Not Age: Giving Sign: You Guilty pleasure food: Info Tattoos: To Favorite season: Steal Favorite color: My Favorite holiday: Identity

I disavow the Bruslim Motherhood.

Is there an app that converts Zacharias to Scaramuccis or vice versa?

Ditka was a good coach, but calling him "legendary" is stretching it.

I think people like Senator Eric Schmitt and others are at some point going to have to ask themselves, "Is it worth it? It is worth embarrassing myself like this to make this man happy?"

In the NFL, a personal foul penalty shouldn't be offsettable if it's the second penalty.

NFL Officiating is such garbage.

Bi Visibility Pros: * Greater social awareness and acceptance * People don't keep running into Bi people Bi Visibility Cons: * Allied spies can no longer conceal themselves from enemies by generating an attraction to both sexes * We can see Krysten Sinema at all times

A friendly reminder to my bisexual friends on Bi Visibility Day that people with partial or complete vision loss in one eye have impaired sexuality depth perception, so be sure to remind them that you go both ways!

To celebrate Bi Visibility Day, let us commemorate the great Benjamin Franklin! Without whose invention we wouldn't be able to see bisexuals.

16 Sept

Hey, all this shit you hate? Yeah, we're totally going to end that after the midterms. Also, that's when we'll start doing the stuff you like.

14 Sept

Wow that guy looks *just like* Mitch McConnell.

4 Sept

However many Senate pickups the Dems think they need, they have to add one to that number...

4 Sept

Skips a meeting with Vets to go on Fox News? Fetterman really *is* a Republican in disguise!

A (very brief) explanation of LLM watermarking 🧵

Text randomly hitting all of the words green is 1 out of a number higher than the number of atoms in the universe. So this is a pretty reliable method if done correctly.

It's important that this is done only in high entropy cases. It's in these situations where the generated text could plausibly go in a number of directions. The system "rigging" the vote, so to speak, by forcing a subset of words to not be picked - it won't adversely affect the quality of text.

A (very brief) explanation of LLM watermarking 🧵

And only by that fingerprinting system - it appears random otherwise. Later on when the generated text is run through the fingerprint checker, it is able to replay this process as it parses the text, marking the words red and green, and comparing how many are green vs. red.

The odds of a human or another LLM being able to generate text with a high ratio of green to red is astronomically low. Sure, there's a chance that a single given word has a 50% chance of matching one of the green ones. But what about 1000 words in pages of text?

A (very brief) explanation of LLM watermarking 🧵

It's these high entropy cases that fingerprinting takes advantage of. The reason why is because the fingerprinting system can come in and "rig" the election of what the next word will be.

It will take half the words in the word probability distribution and mark them "red", that is, make them completely ineligible to be selected. The rest are marked "green" and can be chosen. Importantly, this exact red/green distribution is repeatable by the fingerprinting system later.

A (very brief) explanation of LLM watermarking 🧵

*(I'm using "words" to keep the examples simple, but in actuality, the system will output tokens, which can be words, parts of words, punctuation, etc.)

However, sometimes the distribution is less lopsided: "I believe in..." God 10% Jesus 10% Santa 10% fate 9% etc etc VERY contrived example and in reality, the numbers are probably nothing like this. But there are a number of plausible next words. This is called a high entropy.

A (very brief) explanation of LLM watermarking 🧵

LLMs are just auto-complete on steroids. It generates the next word* by taking a long stretch of the previous text and running it through the model. The model outputs a set of probabilities of what the next word will be.

For example, if the existing text is "The capital of France is", you might get a list that looks like: Paris - 98% beautiful - 1% not - 0.5% etc. Then it randomly picks one of the words, weighted by the percentages. So in this contrived example, there's a 98% chance of getting "Paris".

27 Aug

The house is on fire! Remodel the kitchen later.

27 Aug

I wrote a story a while back about a freak probabilistic event where a large portion of the world's population starts dying off randomly, and the first sign that it was happening was a proliferation of celebrity deaths. Now I'm freaking out a little..

26 Aug

They say things happen in threes. But take heart, fellow fans of Dolly and Tim Curry - there *is* another 80-year-old celebrity in not-so-great health, and he is far, *far* less beloved...

24 Aug

Is there a way a New York City mayor could also be a Chicago mayor? Just asking for 2.7 million friends.

15 Aug

Can you imagine how awesome it would have been if they hadn't revealed that Downey Jr. was playing Dr. Doom?

nytimes.comThis A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in NatureScientists trained artificial intelligence on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes. Sixteen of them were viable, yielding new viruses.

7 Aug

"HI CAROL!!"

Chris Hayes@chrislhayes.bsky.social

Oh, so *this* is how the writers are gonna bring together the A story and B story for the finale! Very cool. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/s...

Wanted: A security-focused mobile OS (like GrapheneOS) that supports a way of locking the phone in such a way that requires *physical access* to something at home to unlock it. This way a traveler re-entering the United States could put their phone in this mode before going through checkpoints.

I am an unabashed progressive realpolitik evangelist. Vote your morals in the primary. Don't fuck around in the general.

We found out in 2000. We found out in 2016. We found out in 2024. I'd prefer to never find out again.

"Hey, remember that time the Democratic party completely overhauled their leadership, platform, and strategy because people sat out in the general election?" said no one, ever.

When you withhold your vote in the general (or vote third party), you send a message to BOTH parties. You're telling one that they're not good enough to win your vote. You're telling the other they're not awful enough yet for you to vote against them.

Look at that, Ted Lasso takes place in the Tarantino-verse!

23 July

Why do mortgage companies keep sending "Oh hai you could lower your rate" mails/emails when they know full fucking well that rates haven't gone down?!

14 July

So right now, ICE is acting like it can legally murder anyone in a vehicle if they should "He's coming right for us!!" beforehand.

12 July

Now, South Carolina's governor will have to appoint someone to fill Lindsey Graham's seat until 2027, when SC voters find someone even worse to replace him.

12 July

Lindsey Graham is talking to his good friend Mitch McConnell..

8 July

I spoke with my good friend Mitch McConnell this morning. He looked quite restful, but then started whispering, "Marc. Kill me. Please kill me." I asked him if being one of our Senators is really so bad, and he said "I've never been your Senator, Marc." I think he should keep being a Senator.