Being in a database with "dead = false" is not the same thing as being "on social security" (as in, receiving money from the program). Sure it's a starting point for investigation, but it's not by itself evidence of widespread fraud.
I'm surprised on a comment section full of software engineers this isn't more obvious. Whether or not your receive the benefit would be business logic, why would that be implemented in a data base?
You sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole... you don't have to have ID to vote, but you do have to be registered to vote (which requires ID). So in order for an illegal immigrant to vote, they would need to impersonate a registered voter (and presumably if that person did vote, it would be flagged as multiple votes under the same registration). Not impossible, but not the same as being able to just walk up and vote no questions asked.
Nope, automatic voter registration through the DMV when getting/updating a driver's license can do it, which they are allowed to have. One of the recent court cases (like within the past few weeks) involved removing people from the list of registered voters who failed to check the "I am a US citizen" box. Driver's license is what most of us use as a government ID anyway.
Automatic vs. manual doesn't seem relevant? A driver's license is an ID, so if they have that for automatic registration, then they still have an ID.
I think your point is that people can just lie about citizenship and get away with it when registering to vote, regardless of when/how it is done? Is that it?
Registering to vote has been made so easy it can be done by accident. Then months or years later when an election is coming up they'll get a voter card on the mail and think that means they can vote even though they're not legally allowed to vote.
I'm kind of incredulous at this if I'm being honest. How can you register to vote by accident? Every form I've seen a copy of asks if you're a citizen and gives you a warning about that. Do you have a copy of the form or screenshot you're referring to that makes this easy to do by accident?
I don't, but it's easy to find people who realized this happened to them, getting scared about their immigration status and/or breaking the law. And the DMV isn't the only way this can happen:
For what it's worth, I've sent a "stop" before and gotten this:
> NETWORK MSG: You replied with the word "stop" which blocks all texts sent from this number. Text back "unstop" or "start" to receive messages again.
I assumed it was from my carrier (T-Mobile in the US), but now I'm wondering, as I have gotten different replies from other numbers. Maybe it came from the sender's provider? Or is just misleading.
Funnily enough, that is especially not the case with the market Uber competes with, a.k.a taxis. The fare is pre-advertised and is based on distance/time. Transparent pricing that does not vary by customer was a very important aspect of traditional taxi services, to the point where you could see your fare change in real time as the ride progressed.
> “When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?”
> Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.
It's not so much that he knows procedures well, it appears that he has some sort of didactic memory that he has focused on this topic. He would have had to basically already memorized this fact obscure enough that a congressional scholar was tweeting for an answer.
Or he knows how to use the resources available for finding the answer to this question, which is a more useful skill than memorizing facts anyway. The embarrassing part is that congressional aides don't have the same skill. I wonder if they'll stop tagging him in questions now that they know he's just a college student from the UK. Hopefully someone recognizes his talent and hires him as a staffer (there are plenty of Brits working in US government).
I agree, how to use the resources available is an underrated skill. I find an increasing part of the value I add is in being able to find answers in our vendor’s less-than-optimal documentation and search.
I do think the subject of the article has something much deeper going on.
It is the former. The latter is not necessary: lots of those of us with ASD don't need anything close to an idetic memory to hold insane amounts of minutiae about some random topic or other if it happens to be the topic we're deeply interested in
Or perhaps really well trained AI? Until they named him I was expecting that to be the answer. That’s exactly the type of question a well trained LLM could answer, the proof is what gives it away as not AI, as most AIs I know are unable to offer up any sort of evidence to back up any claims they make bec they don’t actually know what they’re saying or why they “believe” something.
Not to mention the fact that he's been pouring through video archives to do his research, and finding the information needed for research is a big part of the work he's been doing (it's not available as readily as one would hope).
Seems like the modern definition is something along the lines of an algorithm whose behavior depends on data which was itself machine generated, rather than hand-created by a human like Eliza's rules.
I've had the "joy" of doing data corrections on production databases before. Things I've learned:
- ALWAYS do the work inside of a transaction, as he mentioned. Rollback is your friend. For final run I always do a rollback and "clean" run just to make sure nothing extra slips in.
- Start by crafting your delete/updates as SELECTS. Make sure it targets the data you want then save the SELECT to run afterwards.
- Export any data you plan to modify off to a spreadsheet and save it somewhere. This is another chance to check it's what you intended to change, it's a record of what was changed, and it can be used to revert the data if needed.
- As the author mentioned, get another pair of eyes if possible. Besides making it less likely for things to go wrong, people are more understanding.
- And it probably goes without saying, but don't just fix the data and move on. Do everything possible to track down the bug that caused the issue in the first place and fix it. This is another place where having previous data available in a spreadsheet (or even a complete database backup) can help with data mining after the fact.
Most of them (especially the cold medicines) are not just ibuprofen/acetaminophen but are a "cocktail" that will also include dextromethorphan, guaifenesin, phenylephrine, diphenhydramine, etc in different combinations/amounts depending what they are intended for. I don't personally use them but I could see how it could be useful rather than buying a bunch of individual medications.
One issue they mention is that you lose the simple greedy algorithm for making change. For example, for $0.38 it's better to give 2x$0.18 plus 2 pennies (4 coins), but many might intuitively give back a quarter, a dime, and 3 pennies (5 coins). Besides the added complexity, introducing a new coin solely to reduce the amount of change given is not effective if it is not used optimally.
0.38 should actually just be 0.40, possibly 0.35 if the seller's generous. in physical transactions nobody pays 3.1415926 dollars for anything, even if the pricing algorithm says that's what you should charge. you just round to the nearest available coinage.
And what algorithm did you use to find that? As per the comment you replied to, the greedy algorithm no longer works, and you have to exhaustively search through all possibilities of coins.
