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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • You hear the one about the COBOL programer? In 1999 many people were worried about a bug with dates that could crash their systems. Unfortunately, a lot of really important systems were still using the outdated COBOL programing language. A search was done to find someone who could fix these systems. The last programmer who knew COBOL was found and they made a lot of money fixing up these systems. So much money that, once they received a cancer diagnosis, they cyrogenically froze themselves hoping that a cure for their disease would be found in the future. The programmer is awoken one day in a lab filled with high tech robotics. A person who is seemingly half machine themseves stands before them. The programmer asks “Have you found a cure for my disease?”. The person replies “We have cured all diseases. You are the COBOL programmer, correct?” “That’s right” “Great! It is the year 9999 and we have a problem we need your help with.”






  • I tried to keep the example simple since this is ELI5. If you take the number of electors a state has a divide it by the states population, you’ll get its electors per capita.

    28 electors for 19 million people equals 1.47 electors per million people for New York.

    30 electors for 22 million people equals 1.36 electors per million people for Florida

    Idaho gets 4 electors for 2 million people equals 2 electors per million.

    Since it’s the number of electors sent to Washington that decide who gets to be president, sending more electors per capita means a state has more influence on the outcome.

    50% of Americans live in just 9 states. The other 50% live in the remaining 41 states. If the 9 states all voted one way, and the 41 other states voted the other, the popular vote would be 50/50, but the electoral college results would be a landslide victory for whoever won in 41 states.

    The main reason someone becomes president while losing the popular vote is because they won the electors from a bunch of the smaller states. Smaller states are less populated and more rural. Rural people tend to vote conservative since they benefit less from progressive policies and prefer tradition. Conservatives therefore have an edge due to the electoral college. There were 4 presidents that won without the popular vote. All of them were Republican. Given there have only been 59 elections in American history, that’s a 6.8% chance the loser of the popular vote wins.


  • In America, the people don’t elect the president. The states send electors to Washington and all the electors form the “electoral college”. It is this electoral college that elects the president. To make it a bit democratic, each state holds a vote to see who the residents of the state want as president. The electors that state sends to Washington will be told who they should elect based on who the residents of the state voted for.

    A simple example. Imagine the US only has two states: New York and Florida.

    New York has 19 million residents and gets to send 28 electors to the electoral college. Florida has 22 million residents gets to send 30 electors to the electoral college.

    All 19 million residents of New York vote for Kang. New York sends 28 electors and tell them they should elect Kang. In Florida, the vote is split. 12 million vote for Kodos and 10 million vote for Kang. Since more people voted for Kodos, Florida sends 30 electors and tells them to elect Kodos.

    The popular vote is 29 million votes for Kang and 12 million votes for Kodos. The electoral college votes are 30 votes for Kodos and 28 votes for Kang. Kodos wins even though 70% of Americans voted for Kang.


  • I had to create an account on a government website. The website didn’t list a character limit so I used a password manager to generate a 32 character password. My account was created but I couldn’t log in. I used the “forgot my password” option and I received an email of my password in plain text. I also noticed why I couldn’t log in. The password was truncated to just 20 characters. Brilliant website! Tax dollars at work!



  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.catoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlPure evil
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    7 months ago

    Everything is 0s and 1s to a computer. What a pattern of 0s and 1s encodes is decided by people–often arbitrarily. Over the years there have been attempts to standardize encodings but, for legacy reasons, older encodings are still valid.

    The 0s and 1s that encode ’ in UTF-8 (a standardized encoding) are the same 0s and 1s that encode ’ in CP-1252 (a legacy encoding).

    The � symbol is shown when the 0s and 1s don’t encode anything of meaning.