There’s a pickup truck in my neighborhood sporting a gigantic custom bumper sticker / sign railing against socialism and communism. The owner drives his truck, on public roads, to the municipal community center, which is where I’ve seen it parked.

It’s a good thing that guy doesn’t have any capacity for self-reflection, I guess, because he’d probably die of embarrassment.

“The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code—a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no ‘warn the user first’ preamble,” Batllet wrote.

“Maximally destructive,” to merely remove itself from the project? That barely even rises to the level of “destructive” at all, never mind “maximally.”

30 years old and he’s got a roommate? Sure, lots of honest, hardworking, ordinary people find themselves stuck in this position. But there are some special reasons why it should be especially embarrassing for a pro-regime organizer.

There’s no mention of how old his victim was. There’s no mention of how old his previous victim was.

There was a previous victim. He founded a group with the arguably misogynistic aim of electing our dear leader, then he made national news by assaulting his girlfriend, and then he was able to find another woman willing to give him a chance. God dammit.

We’ve been calling the good stuff “machine learning” since forever, and we’ve overwhelmingly been calling the new generative stuff “AI,” however inadvisable that may be. If we can just stop insisting that machine learning is AI, actually, we’ll have no trouble of this kind. This is an unforced error, it’s just muddying the waters for no benefit at all.

it has initial utility with a bad trade-off

It’s not that I disagree, but this is your own personal judgement for your own situation. Not everyone is in your situation and not everyone would agree with your judgement if they were. I’m glad you’ve quit smoking, I’m happy you’re sharing your experience, but generalizing your experiences to “everyone” is dicey.

I’ve never heard “stress relief” as a reason for smoking. I have heard that it can improve concentration and stave off hunger. And that it is a pleasure, pure and simple. There are people living in situations where those benefits may be more valuable than they might be to you and me. The highest rates of smoking are in the third world, for example.

You could look at the popularity of smoking and think either “There must be an appeal here that I’m just not seeing” or “Billions of people are just feckless idiots, I guess.”

I’ve never been a smoker. But experience has taught me that when I have that second impulse, I’ve always been wrong.

I’m not sure you can really draw a clean bright line between a “technology” and a “practice.”

I think you could call the American practice of slavery – which required a network of infrastructure, culture, agricultural conditions and market opportunities, and government policies – a “technology.” As surely as the Internet is, anyway.

Even before there was an atomic weapon, the utility, the effectiveness, of atomic weapons was never in doubt.

“AI” isn’t like that.

Like everything else, podcasts were better back in the good old days before they were cool.

But but but that’s not going to turn any billionaires into trillionaires, now is it? Honestly.

The lawsuit [doesn’t] show “that entity property owners vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the preferred candidates of natural persons…”

This is “no harm no foul,” except it’s a judge and he’s actually making this argument seriously.

“Persons” don’t vote. Citizens do.

You cannot just stand there at the hibachi grill and look at your watch

Please, please, please.

“Chronometer.”

You know what they say about a man with big … certificates.

Don’t you judge me, stranger

I’m only a stranger until you read my manifesto on the Oxford comma

“Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant”

“If I heard it in church, it can’t be bad, it can’t be wrong.”

I’ve been avoiding bromated flour in my household for years and I was really surprised to learn that any sort of bakery was still using it in the 21st century.

King Arthur Flour doesn’t use bromate, and, not surprisingly, has a position on the question. But they are fair about the advantages, too:

Potassium bromate, commonly referred to as simply “bromate,” is a slow-acting oxidizer, contributing its functionality throughout the mixing, fermentation and proofing stages, with important residual action during the early stages of baking. Azodicarbonamide (ADA), potassium and calcium iodate, and calcium peroxide are rapid-acting oxidizers, while ascorbic acid (vitamin C) works at intermediate rates, but all release their activity in mixing and proofing. Bromate, when applied within the prescribed limits (15-30ppm), is completely used up during the bake leaving no trace in the finished product.

That style of food you don’t care for is a style that other people grew up with and think of as “the good old days.” There are food styles you do like that exist in precisely the reverse situation. That’s all perfectly normal.

Solution to being caught making bribes: More, bigger bribes. This is our glorious gilded future, I guess.