Blog/2024-11-08/Brown M&Ms

Van Halen famously had a rider in their 53-page contract that said:

M&Ms (Warning: Absolutely no brown ones)

— Van Halen event rider

The idea, supposedly, is that adherence to an unexpected and specific request like that will act as an indicator of compliance on the rest of the riders, specifically the ones regarding safety. In reality, the riders are separated to different subcontractors or teams (stage setup to one set, costumes to another, food to another and so on). Perhaps the top-level guy then checks everything is fine, but that seems hard to believe, and it's probably just that some rockstars have weird requests.

I noticed the override, though not its significance

The idea of these trap streets is quite popular, though, and I'm of the view that it's sound whether or not Van Halen actually used it for that purpose.

California Prop Traps

One recent occurrence that I was thrilled about was in the voting for Measure L and Measure M in San Francisco. SF has a long history of these dual propositions where one kills the other, or where both need to pass, or whatever. The former is usually retaliatory and the latter is usually because some kinds of props need 2/3rds and some need 1/2.

The dual propositions have all sorts of strange effects: people don't realize, or they read it and don't understand. One half passes but its required other half fails. Or one kills the other accidentally (based on the amount of support).

The latest in this genre are Measures L and M. L is one of the usual progressive mad-at-the-world "let's tax Uber/Lyft to fund Muni" measures. M purports to be a "let's streamline taxes" measure. It has some weird bits where the top Gross Revenue Tax (which I abhor) actually goes up over time. And then it has the magic: if it gets a single vote more than L, it kills L.

Since "In this house we believe" L is the devil we didn't look too closely at it since everything aligned. The actual clause was at the bottom of the full text of Measure M in the "Conflicting Clauses" section that read:

Section 14. Conflicting Measures. If both this ordinance and another ballot measure or measures imposing, amending, or repealing a San Francisco tax measured by gross receipts appear on the same ballot, and this ordinance obtains more votes than the other measure or measures, the other measure or measures shall be deemed to conflict with this ordinance. In such case, the provisions of this ordinance shall prevail in their entirety, and the provisions of the other measure or measures shall be null and void.

— Text of Measure M

From here, we can see that it's just to not accidentally stack propositions on top of each other in ways that they can't actually resolve the rules. It's a good idempotence mechanism and is properly engineered. It also has the good exit-clause mechanism in there for the Mayor to choose not to put it into practice if it would be risky for the finances of the city, and also an override for the Board of Supervisors to push it back into play if the Mayor does that.

Fortunately, I usually read the ballotpedia summary, the SF Chronicle Voter Guide, and this time the GrowSF guide (previously others like the SPUR guide) and they did mention that.

Many other people understood that they hadn't read it quite carefully enough:

I think there’s room for improvement when it comes to the on-ballot presentation of directly competing propositions, like D/E and L/M.

I don’t remember reading anything about a vote for M potentially killing off L. I thought I had a solid grasp of the ballot measures; clearly I didn’t, but it sounds like I wasn’t alone.

Speaking as an idiot, I’d like to see the ballots further idiot-proofed, perhaps with bolded text indicating how a proposition’s passage might affect another. This might also discourage the practice of creating propositions meant to ensure another’s failure by confusing voters, as happened with Prop E in reaction to Prop D.

— /u/ALOIsFasterThanYou (201 votes)

While an additionally last set believed that they had!

I read a lot and consider myself well informed. I didn’t know this.

— /u/turnleftnoright (72 votes)

This isn't the first time this has happened. In 2016, San Francisco had two ballot measures that were similarly linked: Proposition K (that created an additional sales tax) and Proposition J (that allocated that tax to homelessness services and Muni). Prop J allowed the Mayor to shut it down if he thought it couldn't be funded. What inevitably occurred is that Proposition J passed and Proposition K failed. Who are these people who wanted to allocate a tax but didn't want the tax? It probably was quite a lot of people, based on the fact that the best informed folks on Reddit didn't see this coming for L and M.

In truth, poor information transmission like this is a bit unfair and not quite in the keeping of the spirit of democracy, but also it does have the effect that those who put in a little bit more of work to find things are able to take better positions. It's a strange vote-scaling factor.

In my case, I posted each proposition position we took in a Slack thread with my friends for informative reasons so I can see that I averaged 1-3 min for each proposition, but 6 minutes for Prop M (the one with the idempotence clause) and 5 minutes for Prop O. Overall, I'm quite happy with both the outcome and the fact that I read enough to reach the right conclusion!

Gemini

Roshan George @arjie

Gemini is the shittiest LLM of all time. Of _all_ time. Like GPT-2 beats it.

Nov 5, 2024

As an aside, Gemini is a magical tool that is hamstrung by its creators. Neither ChatGPT nor Claude.ai can read the ballot measure text because it is a non-OCR'd PDF scan. While both can read OCR'd PDFs and both can read images, neither managed to read PDFs that only contained images of text. Gemini, on the other hand, was well-equipped to do so. However, Google appears to have destroyed its ability to actually reason about this. I can tell why. They don't want the Google brand damaged by some misinterpretation of election content or some Gemini hallucination.

But it made Gemini unable to answer anything about the document. You have to use all sorts of tricks (give me a table of contents, skip the first 20 entries in it, ...) etc.

But it does ultimately point to a couple of things:

• These AI tools are capable of a lot more
• For the moment, plaintext versions of these texts are useful for people to understand what's up