Month: November 2024

I have been actively engaged with AI over the last few weeks. It’s simply incredible.

In about 45 minutes, I used Co-Pilot for Github to write a decent Hangman game in HTML and Javascript. The key is that I never referenced the code or anything technical. Instructions were simple English:

• “Make the letter choices a grid, and they get greyed out after a guess.”
• “If the players loses, show the correct word and the definition.”
• “Your hangman has four legs, bring it back down to two.”
• “That code didn’t work, I got an error message. Fix it.” etc.
  

That was eye-opening. But this… this… just press play.

This fake podcast was generated by AI (Google, Vertex AI). I simply pointed the system to www.muttrox.com, and had this five minutes later. Wow.

The future is here. My mind is blown.

Last year I posted about the National Popular Vote. This is a cool constitutional hack. State by state, a state agrees that it will gives all of its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. This only goes into effect once enough states have entered into the deal that their combined electoral votes are above 270, which means they now determine the election.

At the time I wrote that, we were at 195 electoral votes. Today we are at 209. Only 61 to go!

One of the problems with any change that effectively broadens the voting pool is that it usually favors the Democrats, because they tend to have more votes. So Republicans tend to fight these kinds of initiatives. You could say Democrats are the party of voting and democracy, but perhaps that is less a moral cause than a strategic one. At some point they become the same thing.

For the first time since 2004, the Republicans indisputably won the national vote. That means that they should be more open to the National Popular Vote than before. It’s an unusual time in American voting patterns, maybe we use that to promote some good ideas, like this one.

So — take some action. Write your state legislators.