Vote By Mail Should Be Standard

Something I feel like I take for granted a bit is just how good my state handles everything election wise. And it’s politics in general, for the most part. I mean, like everywhere it’s full of nuts in the rural areas, but overall, it’s traditionally just been a “safe” state.

One thing that I love that is newer is vote by mail. This started back in 2020 because of COVID of course. I mean, maybe it was an option before, but it was made extremely easy in the 2020 election. Previously, like many others, I would go down to my local polling place, often at like 6:30 in the morning before there was a line and before work, fill out a sheet, stick it in a machine, and vote. I tried to vote every year, at least in November, but not always in things like Primaries.

One option when they started the initial vote-by-mail push, was basically, “sign me up for every future election”.

And this has been sooooo nice. I get ballots for every election, even off-year and off-month elections. I have no excuse not to vote at all now, the only real previous excuse being, “I didn’t know there even was an election.” Which feels like an excuse often counted on by some folks with unpopular asshole-type views on issues. It’s less of a problem for my state because we run things properly and fairly. But occasionally I see news stories about some sort of shitty law that pushes some conspiracy tier referendum or whatever but it’s on the odd year early April election that like 4 people normally show up for, instead of on the ballot during a year divisible by 4 (Presidential elections), when many many people vote and can weigh in on the idea.

That’s just one reason to push ballots out to every eligible voter.

And they really should just go out to every eligible voter. Because so many people don’t vote, and they really should. I can only imagine part of the reason is the inconvenience of actually going and doing it. Or maybe people are simply unable due to disability or other health reasons. They don’t know that these options are available, so just, provide it for them automatically.

Another likely hang-up is the whole “I don’t know who to vote for” problem. I already know who I am (and am not) voting for, so I sent my ballot back the day after I received it. I didn’t have to though, I could have held on to it and spent over a month researching every name on the ballot to make sure I vote for the right people.

I did do this as well. Ballots often have a lot fo local offices, and very often have these “Should this judge remain in office” questions. How many people can even name one judge, let alone know if they are a decent judge or a decent person. With the at-home mail-in voting, I could easily look up every judge on the ballot and decide if I thought they should keep their job or not. I had one candidate that is a piece of shit Nazi quoter and should not be in office at all, but they are running unopposed, so I went looking for possible write-in candidates for that office.

It also takes all of the time pressure off. I’m not awake at 6:30am standing in a little booth in a room full of strangers trying to fill out the sheet so I can go back home and finish getting ready for work. I have all day, all week, all month. It’s even better than making election day a National Holiday, which some have suggested. It already really should be a week-long affair, but why not just make it simple and last a month with mail-in ballots.

Of course, there are a myriad of reasons why this isn’t happening everywhere. You can’t have a media spectacle horse race if it isn’t all focused on a single day. Another major factor is that if everyone actually voted, there are some parties in this country that would never win elections at all without pulling up from their myriad of incredibly shitty stances on various issues. There is probably some potential for more actual voter fraud, if you send ballots to every eligible voter, how do you know that particular voter filled them out and not their abusive spouse or parent? How do you know they aren’t a mostly comatose 99-year-old and their kid used their ballot? That sort of thing.

Duolingo’s Music and Math Courses

Man, talk about both exciting and frustrating all at once. Duolingo launched both a Math and Music course recently, but it was iOS only, initially, and I use Android. It would come eventually though, and it apparently has, and I missed it, or at least, missed the announcement, if there was one. I have been periodically checking and they were not there until fairly recently.

I don’t really have a lot of need or interest in the Math course, but I wasn’t in a good place to try out the music course, so I started off on the Math one for a bit. I am already great at math, I mean, seriously, I have probably done more math than most people have, between school and hobbies and work. But hey, why not.

From what I have done, it’s, kind of weird? It’s all pretty basic Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and fractions so far. But there are often these blocks instead of actual numbers. Which I kind of get is intended to encourage counting, but some of the presentation on the groupings isn’t as consistent as it could be. Plus it just, feels like adding an extra counting step to slow you down. And no, I am not individually counting blocks, I used to count as a job, I can count groups very quickly. Which is also why I noticed the occasional inconsistency that almost felt like it was done purposely as a trip.

Maybe it was.

The real fun part though is that, it’s smart enough to recognize “goofy answers”. Like it has a block of squares to shade, 3/5ths or something. You can shade a random assortment of the 100 squares, just so long as it’s 60 total shaded. Or if it gives you an open ended question like “2/6+1/6”. Sure, you could put 3/6, or 1/2, but it will also take 3987/7974.

But enough math nonsense, my real interest is in the Music course. I really want to learn music, it was one of my “Decade resolutions” in 2020. To be done by 2030. I have really been looking forward to the music course.

And I like it. Even if so far it’s just banging out C, D, and E on the scales. It’s that repetition I want so I can better read sheet music.

But oh my God it’s frustrating as hell to actually do.

And not because it’s hard, but because there is a lot of weird lag and stutter. Every few courses you do a song snipped using notes you know, and so many times I miss a few because it… Just… rand… om… ly… stop…s and… stu… tt…ers…. As it slides along.

At the bare minimum, it’s distracting.

I don’t honestly understand WHY either. I would blame processing power, but I have a decent enough phone that can do other rhythm based games, just fine, often at a much much faster BPM.

I feel like part of the problem is the weird “holding” it sometimes asks for on notes. Like if I could just tap the notes to the beat, everything would run fine, but it often requires these half beat holds, which only exacerbates the stuttering issue since it causes more stutter, and means you can’t just move on and get the next note and try to compensate for the stutter.

It’s just really frustrating. I doubt I go very far in the course as is, as much as I really want to.

Keyboard Jiggler with Python and Raspberry Pi

So I did a pretty simple but amusing little project recently, a bit on a whim. Let’s say, I have a few games that it would be useful to just, let idle for experience or whatever. The problem is, that these games also have built-in idle deterrence. Your character falls asleep, or you just time out of the game after five or ten minutes.

I initially start off trying to use AutoHotkey, a program that basically does what I wanted here, you program it to press keys at certain intervals, basically just a simple keep-alive movement every couple of minutes.

It turns out, at least one of these games detects Autohotkey as a cheat, and won’t launch when it’s running.

I got to thinking, I could probably program one of my Arduino boards to emulate a keyboard. And sure enough, there are libraries for this very task. Then I discovered that, the keyboard library does not work on my old Uno boards. But I found an alternative route with my Raspberry Pi Pico that I picked up a few years ago. The Pico could probably do what I needed as well.

After some digging online, I found plenty of guides on how to build a full-sized Keyboard using GPIO pins on the Pico, but nothing quite exactly what I needed, but there was enough Python Code available, I could figure it out pretty easily by stripping apart some full keyboard code. Instead, I just started with a simpler macro button keyboard script. Most of the scripts I came across have code to detect and save a button press, then send the command using the Python Keyboard library. I just stripped all that out and put it on a timer loop with some simple, regular input. A set of repeated w presses, follow d by repeat d presses of a, s, and d.

Essentially, “walk in a little square loop.”

Step one was to set up Circuit Pi on the Pi Pico, which is detailed here, though only the initial setup is needed.

The test using Notepad worked perfectly, aside from one annoying issue, I could not easily edit the code while the device was plugged in, because the test loop would spit out wwwaaasssddd every 5 seconds.

After some careful quick timing, I adjusted that out to every 300 seconds (5 minutes).

It was time to test things out. Before work, I set the game running and the keyboard Jiggler working. When I came back later it was working just fine.

But there were some issues, one of which I could mostly address.

Firstly, the thing just runs, forever. It doesn’t really need to, I only need it going for around 3-4 hours. I added a counter variable to the script that would count how many runs through the loop had occured, and if it was more than a set amount, it would break the loop, which would stop the scripted movement and idle out of the game.

The other two issues are less easy to solve.

One, I had a thought that I could remote to my PC and swap games halfway through the day (at lunch). Except when you leave Remote Desktop, it locks the remote PC. Meaning the game loses focus and the keyboard Jiggler stops working. It’s literally a hardware device that pretends to be a keyboard.

The second issue, that could be easy to solve with some habit changes. I, very often, will use Firefox’s Tab Share to send tabs to either my desktop or my laptop. These are articles I want to clip and save, something I may want to buy later, notes for some projects I had done. Basically, it’s a way to send myself a reminder of something I don’t want to deal with on my phone. When I send a tab, on the remote machine, Firefox pops up and takes focus, meaning, once again, the game idle breaker stops working and it idles out.

The solution here is to just, get into the habit of only sending tabs after noon or so.

Another little improvement I added was a bit of randomization. I am not really worried about “detection,” but it’s easy to avoid by simply, adjusting the 5-minute timer to be random movement between 4 and 5 minutes, as well as randomizing what the movement is a bit.  I also added a bit of correction if the player moves too far away from the starting position.

Anyway, the script below is the completed script.

import time
import random

import board
import digitalio
import usb_hid
## Aquired from https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit\_CircuitPython\_HID
from adafruit_hid.keyboard import Keyboard
from adafruit_hid.keyboard_layout_us import KeyboardLayoutUS
from adafruit_hid.keycode import Keycode

time.sleep(1)
keyboard = Keyboard(usb_hid.devices)
keyboard_layout = KeyboardLayoutUS(keyboard)  # We're in the US :)
led = digitalio.DigitalInOut(board.LED)
led.direction = digitalio.Direction.OUTPUT
total_runs = 0
running = True
# This is the choices for keys to randomly choose from, this is standard WASD
# This could be changed to be whatever to choose from.
keyOptions = ["w","a","s","d"," "]
# "Starting position" is set to 0,0
position = [0,0]

while running:
    # Turn the LED on while doing things
    led.value = True
    
    # Randomly choose 20-50 as an amount of key presses to do
    howMany = random.randint(20, 50)

    for i in range(howMany):
        # For however many key presses, pick a random one and press it
        nextKey = random.choice(keyOptions)
        keyboard_layout.write(nextKey)
        time.sleep(1)
        # This incriments the position above from 0,0 to track how far from start.
        # This whole section could be omitted if movement can be unconstrained
        if nextKey == "w":
            position[1] +=1
        if nextKey == "s":
            position[1] -=1
        if nextKey == "a":
            position[0] +=1
        if nextKey == "d":
            position[0] -=1
        
        # If we get too far in one direction, correct it by moving back to 0.
        if position[0] >= 10:
            keyboard_layout.write(ssssssssss)
        if position[0] <= -10:
            keyboard_layout.write(aaaaaaaaaa)
        if position[1] >= 10:
            keyboard_layout.write(dddddddddd)
        if position[1] <= -10:
            keyboard_layout.write(aaaaaaaaaa)

    led.value = False
    time.sleep(0.1)
    keyboard.release_all()
    # Sleep a random number of seconds between 200 and 300 seconds
    nextSleep = random.randint(200, 300)
    time.sleep(nextSleep)

    # Incriment how many runs have been done
    total_runs = total_runs+1

    # If the total runs is too many, break the loop and essentially "stop".
    if total_runs > 48:
        running = False

AI Music and the Dead Internet Theory

A man was arrested for creating AI music and using bots to stream it, netting 10 million dollars from Spotify.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charged-with-10-million-streaming-scam-using-ai-generated-songs

A few things to note here, and some thoughts on it in general. He was doing this for a while, since 2017 according to the article, so it wasn’t like he made it in a month. Apparently, he was a music maker, he just wasn’t getting anywhere with his produced music. As he has been doing it since 2017, this predates even ChatGPT by about 5 years. He was not using the current crop of “AI” tools. My guess, he was just using a script of some kind to compile together loop tracks to mass-produce generic EDM music. Because AI is the current buzzword, this automation is being called AI by news outlets.

In the end though, the automation part is not the illegal part, it’s the scamming using bots that is the illegal part, as morally justified as it may be. Spotify is extremely popular, but Spotify doesn’t make artists any money. For example, Snoop Dogg, one of the most popular rap musicians ever, made about $45,000 for a billion plays. And a billion plays is a LOT. My favorite artist Aurora, has just under a billion plays on her most popular track, Runaway. The next most popular of her tracks is almost half that and third place is about 150 million plays.

Snoop Dogg has a LOT of plays.

The point is, that Spotify isn’t exactly the patron saint of supporting artists, and so the fraudster in the story above may be a bit morally justified in his efforts. That’s part of why I prefer to buy music, digitally, on CDs, on Vinyl. A larger chunk goes to the artist that way, especially on Bandcamp Fridays or buying direct from the band’s website, or even direct from the band at a show.

Anyway, I am not here to try to defend the guy in the original article above, just to talk a bit about AI and the Internet. I seriously doubt he is the only one doing this. He is just the first to get caught. Or at least the first high-profile one. Especially with current tools of AI, making it easier than ever to mass-produce garbage. Heck, I am pretty sure record labels themselves use software to pump up numbers on certain artists, less for the Spotify money, but for marketing.

But this also likely pushes into other areas too. It would be easy to do similar tricks on YouTube with bots, or Kindle Unlimited, just bots turning pages in free, AI-created eBooks.

A long while ago, probably a decade now, I came across a post on 4chan’s /g/ board (/g/ = Technology) with a guide on how to set up a Blogspot blog using scraping tools, add it to a ring of other Blogspot blogs, then automated a script that would click through the blogs gathering AdSense money from Google, to the benefit of anyone involved. I am pretty sure this was a regular post too, to keep new people coming in.

It’s the same principle as the automated Spotify system above. Hell, it may even be the brainchild of the same folks.

Which is all in the end just a version of the Dead Internet Theory.


The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to intentionally manipulate the population and minimize organic human activity.

Which is probably less about “manipulating the population” and more just about extracting wealth through automated systems. Like the top level morally gray hero, it’s all a sort of, not necessarily evil activity. It’s very “Digital Robin Hood” in a way. Except instead of directly taking from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood is out making posts on 4chan on how to create automated blog systems. I mean, Google has replaced all of its systems for support and everything with bots, why shouldn’t the users replace themselves with bots as well? It’s bots all the way down!

Bots are trivially easy to build as well. One of the lessons in my 100 Days of Python class was making a bit that would play a cookie clicker game in a maximum my efficient way.

Even without using software it gets done in manual ways in the real world sometimes, for marketing purposes.  It’s all just manipulating the algorithm for money.  I guess in the end the trick is to do it in a way that it doesn’t harm the “wrong people”.  Sometimes I feel like I could be rich if I weren’t so honest because a lot of this isn’t that hard to do.

On the Doing of the Things

Long time no post, or, sort of, I have been posting on Lameazoid as part of Blaugust, but even that has sort of fallen apart completely. I wasn’t planning to do the full 31 days, then it just started happening, but then it just… wasn’t.

I think mostly I have just still been in a weird funk lately and I was sort of shaking it for posting but not really. I have also been busy off and on with life stuff. My wife and daughter have rented a shop space. My daughter is opening a vintage shop in the front half, something she has wanted to do for a while, and they will be able to run all their online sales stuff from the back and be better organized and productive with it.

The shop isn’t open but there is a website full of links for the online stuff at RTThrift.com.

The shop itself has needed a bit of clean up and work to get set up, and though they have been doing a lot of that, I still get recruited to do things like, haul hundreds of totes from storage to the shop, and sand the entire upstairs with an upright floor sander. Let me tell you, using that thing was surprisingly fun. Highly recommended.

It’s heavy as fuck though, bring a friend to lift it into the car, even if you split it into two-pieces like we discovered in time for the return trip.

There has already been a lot of interest in it through the locals in town promoting it coming and people we talked to at one of our many garage sales.

For my various hobbies I write about here instead of there, There hasn’t been much exciting going on.i have not done any code or electronics projects recently, like blogging, this whole endless funk has me slacking on learning and other things. I have been listening to a ton of music, but nothing I had any impulse to write about.

The garden is going pretty meh, both my lemon and lime trees died, and I am barely getting any peppers or cherry tomatoes. And no regular tomatoes. My basil and oregano aren’t doing great. My mint is going pretty gangbusters but I don’t really know what to do with it. I mostly planted it as a pest deterrent.

I do have a fun Kickstarter device finally shipping that I will have to write about once I receive it and get a chance to play with it some.

I will also add that it’s not really writing that I am down on, just blogging. I have been writing personal journals to Joplin pretty regularly. It’s just not stuff I intend to share.