It's not a 'prediction market', it's a gambling market. It's far more accurate to say 80% of gamblers were convinced Bolsanaro would win than to say there's an 80% likelihood he would win. It's not measuring likelihood as it's untethered from things that impact the actual results. Obscuring it basic gambling with the word 'prediction' doesn't change the fact that's naked gambling at the end of the day.
It's extremely inaccurate to say 80% of the gamblers were convinced because that's not how it works at all. Each bet has someone on the other side of it - 50% of the people bet on Bolsanaro and 50% against.
If you bet on 20% chances and they happen 30% of the time you make money. The payoffs are such that you win by being a better predictor than the market. I'm fine criticizing it as a gambling blight (not to mention a corruption payoff) but it is also a prediction market.
The 80% is not the proportion of people who think he would win, that's not how these things work.
Every single factor was pointing towards Bolsonaro, Polymarket was just consistent with that.
He unexpectedly won the first round of the election. His lead was expected to grow since he'd likely get most of the votes of the other candidates. 17 out of 18 polls favored Bolsonaro. Market movements indicated a strong expectation of him winning. The Brazilian Real futures are already down 10% in the last couple hours.
But that's how democracy works, I think this election will be studied many times in the future.
This is a good chance to remind people that laws can be changed. Including how pardons work by allowing Congress to override a pardon. This is all very clearly outside the bounds of the intent of the pardon power.
Most of the "loopholes" and gaps that the current administration takes advantage of are due to the thinking along the lines of "no one would stoop so low as to operate any other way." There's no way to close all the gaps, but you can certainly make an effort to narrow the number of gaps.
No ex post facto is in the constitution though. And any attempt to change the laws that can be changed by Congress would have enough lead time where POTUS could pardon just before the laws changed
While you're right in a literal sense, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that Zuckerberg can operate unabated due to his majority ownership of voting shares.
That's actually a pretty good illustration of my point. Because Facebook has many of the rights that people have (own property, enter contracts etc.) but very few of the liabilities (can't be imprisoned, rarely ever pays any fines in practice), Zuch can use it as a proxy to do a bunch of shady stuff, that he wouldn't do if he risked being held personally liable for it.
If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.
I started learning to write code when I was 11, in year 2000, out of pure curiosity of how tech works. I remember when a family friend opened up our very first computer, a Gateway desktop, to change out the modem that was no longer supported after an OS upgrade and the excitement and awe I felt seeing the boards and cables eager to know more. I got back online and immediately started learning how to build web pages.
I learned Flash and ActionScript in high school then got my first job as a developer building websites for local small businesses when I was 18 while in college. Most of those were largely custom Wordpress or PBBoard installs and configs. That was my 3rd job while I was majoring in aerospace, with no insight that programming could even be a career. It was just a fun part-time job for me.
A couple changes in major, a degree in computer science, several startups, and 19 years later here I am wondering whether I really want to stay in tech at all. The joy of solving problems using tech is just dead. My tagline on LinkedIn for a decade has been "Solving problems, sometimes with code" which is as true now as it ever was, but it's hard to reconcile what's happening now with why I got into this to begin with.
It was never about the money for me, otherwise I'd have worked at any of the big tech companies when I was getting hounded by recruiters for years. Instead, I've opted for the fun challenges at startups and getting to be closer to the customer, flexing my skills across disciplines and specialties. I'm mourning how the joy and spark are fading, but I'm also mourning what we are losing in the field. Things used to be about more than just the work, and you may think I'm naive for believing that, but it's very clearly just about the work and output now. It's soulless.
I think "slowed down" is a strange description of what happened, which is that it was cut off above a certain speed limit. As in a terminal physically traveling faster than (IIRC) 100 miles per hour would shut off.
Perhaps also worth noting that Starlink is used only for defensive purposes, specifically against "Shahed" drones, which have top speeds of 340 km/h (210 mph). Restricting the speed is effectively helping Putin/Russia murder civilians.
I've become cynical enough to expect the opposite at this point, which likely means reality will settle somewhere around the midway point.
It appears that one party has settled into reckless disregard for democratic and social norms because they can rest assured that the other party is feckless and only cares about "returning to normal" rather than holding anyone accountable or ensuring the harm can't be repeated. They're probably right.
All of this is thanks to the winners-take-all voting system which entrenches two parties and prevents any meaningful consensus to be reached at a national level. I think where the US is at now is inevitable given the voting system in place.
77 million voters voted for Trump after he'd shown them exactly who he was. I don't think you can blame the voter sentiments and information environment that leads to that outcome on the voting system.
A fragmented party system driven by Parliamentary coalition building might actually mean less accountability, since right-leaning independents and ex-Republicans disgruntled at the erosion of democratic and social norms under Trump suddenly have to worry about actual socialists being part of the alternative, and options that genuinely aren't MAGA to vote for who in practice will need to ally with MAGA
there's actually not that much that Dems can actually do to hold the Executive branch accountable unless they have a supermajority in the senate or the GOP wakes up from their cult-like stupor
the real problem is SCOTUS and their "gifts" to Trump
and yes, the DOJ under Biden failed spectacularly by not aggressively prosecuting Trump and putting him behind bars
This seems like flame bait, but I'll take the question seriously: I would rather write a Svelte application by hand than manage a React one via LLM. It's just a more intuitive framework, fewer pitfalls, cleaner reactivity, and is much more performant out of the box.
A lesson I've had to learn is that, for some people, ethics is a paycheck. It can be incomprehensible to imagine someone acting against their own paycheck as a result.
No, it’s loading the font in JS for some reason (rather than a regular @font-face) and going out of its way to break the page if that fails, rather than ignoring it as it should. `font-family: dg` is fine, it’ll fall back to the user’s default font (which will typically be serif).
As someone with a CS degree, most of the people I know with CS degrees are not very good developers. This is regardless of schools, as my anecdotal experience includes people from ivy leagues. The strongest developers I've met and worked with often come from other STEM fields or, interestingly enough, philosophy backgrounds.
Again, purely anecdotal, but it is 20 years of anecdotal experience across a very broad range of industries.
Becoming a good developer was nowhere in the curriculum at the CS program I attended, unfortunately. It still had some interesting topics. I think the profession evolved too quickly for an academic curriculum to cover anything relevant.
Nowadays I hope the CS curriculum explicitly disregards whatever the standard industry code factory meta is, since from the outside it appears to be soulless and dehumanizing. Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals?
The meta has changed in 6 months so the university is investing millions of dollars to design a new 101 course: Hit approve all day on the agent which should be taking your job any time soon.
Classical developers IME can’t properly abstract their way out of a paper bag. They’ll draw semantic boundaries everywhere but where they belong usually following tech and tradition instead of properly reasoning about it. They are generally unable to see beyond an inch of their nose and think the business comprises 75-90% software dev and don’t see how their activity is actually the tiniest insignificant wiggle in the grand scheme of things (“the suits are just there to act important”). “Don’t see further than your nose is long” they say in Dutch.
I think philosophy is an excellent match for development, certainly now with AI.
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