In the article, the main “woke distractions” are celebrity gossip and reprinted AP articles. I know for MAGA, “woke” mostly just means things they don’t like, but this is making that true to the point of self-parody. I suppose rain on a golfing day, the sound of fingernails on chalkboards, and hangovers will be “woke” soon enough.

Trump. Donald Trump specifically finds this attractive. I also think he personally gets off on the fact that women would put themselves through significant and painful elective surgery just to try to look good for men generally, and especially when it’s for him specifically.

I’m inclined to give AskHistorians a pass. There is no community on Reddit that tries as hard as they do to moderate their way around the limitations of the platform and its management.

The verified posters tend to be millennial academics with masters or PhD’s in history or closely related fields, and they take the name of the community seriously. You are there to ask a historian a question, and if none answers, then so be it.

And I agree, pushing past the obvious dog whistle to go somewhere the data doesn’t lead is a way to weaken what should be a self-evidently powerful argument that the Trumpers are embracing ever-more-openly fascist positions on, well, everything.

But we can only vote in one party’s primary for any given election cycle, including runoffs, so it serves as a defacto registration.

No, but they do track which primary we choose to vote in, which locks you in for any runoffs and serves as a defacto party registration until the next primary.

Ahh, so that’s what the generative AI is for!

Very little has been tested yet, but the general thinking is that there’s probably no longer any generation cap, except for babies born since the new change went into effect a couple of weeks ago. The real trick is in proving it. From what I have read, the Canadian bureaucracy that processes these has usually asked for primary documentation, so actual birth certificates or centrally maintained religious records, and only once those have been exhaustively searched and the relevant local offices throw up their hands (via an official “we tried” letter) will they consider things like census forms and border-crossing logs.

Maybe, lord knows he’ll have his price, but dude legitimately hates wind power because “it’s ugly.” Sometimes our particular burgeoning dystopia reminds me most of the Twilight Zone with the omnipotent and petulant child.

I mean, other than being racist shitbags, fine, I guess? Wresting isn’t really my thing, but I can respect it as a kind of cooperative dance and storytelling exercise. Still, being a big guy with a personal trainer and a built-in or built-up audience is sort of what pro wrestling is for.

If he can’t get the choreography down, though, he won’t last long there either. It’s not a sport, but it is a challenging physical activity that a lot of the performers take seriously, including making sure they don’t hurt each other because of any lack of skill.

I was poking around some boxing posts on the other link-aggregator site, and a lot of folks were noting that the ring seemed to be larger than usual, allowing Paul to last longer simply by running away like a Monty Python knight, and that his opponent was likely a bit past his prime and out of practice, and finally that the ref was letting Paul do some “anti-boxing” hijinks that they normally stop sooner. They were also speculating that Netflix was only willing to pay up if Paul fought a legitimate boxer, though, and everything up until now had been somewhere between pro-wrestling fixed and watching the top-pyramid amateurs at your local pay-to-play indoor soccer/football park.

All that, and the asshat still ends up as a hilarious meme. Small win, but gotta take 'em when they come.

plasma gun

One of the first “aha” design moments I ever got was the Doom plasma gun. There was a kid’s toy version of the American M-60 Light Machine gun that I had. The back half was pretty cool on its own, the typical thumper machanism to make noise, but it also had secondary triggers in the stock and a little gear that would advance a belt of soft plastic ammo. Didn’t do anything except move, but the effect was cool.

The front actually came off, and was a pretty decent quality suction-dart shooter. However, if you turned it around and used the the mating surface as the “muzzle…” BOOM! (or “ZAP” I guess… lol) Doom plasma gun, down to the exact number of ridges.

“I’m telling you Molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem I threw a Molotov cocktail and Boom! Right away, I had a different problem.”

Yup! And honestly, most illegal things you might do accidentally are not spur of the moment situations, and frankly even in an imperfect system you’re unlikely to get the book thrown at you right away. There are abuses, of course, and stamping them out is an absolutely laudable goal, but if you want to set up a business, or think you’ve discovered a novel financial instrument, or (hypothetically of course) wanted to train an LLM algorithm on the totality of an absolutely vast corpus of information without the rights-holders’ consent, then if you can’t be arsed to get legal clarity in advance I have less sympathy for you and you’ve earned your consequences.

Ain’t no torque on a Dremel. Gotta find the hammer drill.

Trump is a resident of Florida, and the BBC does business in Florida via the website, BBCNews, Britbox licensing, etc. The complaint even talks about gray-market VPN viewing of iPlayer. Jurisdiction isn’t really the issue. Establishing any actual harm at all will be the issue, to say nothing of “billions” of dollars worth of it from some splicing that is honestly editorial shading at worst. He is super pissed off in that speech, issues way more shaded threats than calls to peaceful actions, and pardoned the people who killed or injured multiple Capitol Police. Proving that the 10 or twenty people in Florida who actually saw the thing is worth anything to a plaintiff who won the fucking election is going to be an incredibly tall order for any half-way conscientious judge or jury.

It’s typical Trump “lawfare,” complete with breathless nonsense adjectives in the complaint to make the diaper baby anger-happy when he reads it. Only the sheer awfulness and expense of American litigation makes it even conceivable that the BBC will eventually settle, and if they do it will probably be right before discovery after they exhaust any motions to dismiss and other procedural tactics.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

Thank you. That looks plausible and should keep the mental wolves at bay, LOL.

Okay, somebody here has to know of have better image searching skills than I do. What is the Visor prop? It’s clearly not a spray-painted hair clip like (the inspiration for) Geordi’s, but it doesn’t look bespoke, more like some sort of removable support rib from… something. Grrr.

I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.