saalweachter

Internet says, yes.

Obamacare was the branding by the ACA's enemies, both to try to make it less popular and tie the President to its unpopularity.

As long as increasing the friction of shipping through USPS raises the stock prices of delivery companies Congressmen hold stock in--

I'm surprised to hear it's illegal to use stamps as currency, I wonder if that's just a prison thing.

One piece of trivia that's stuck with me is that stamps were used as a substitute for coins when the latter were in short supply during the Civil War because of metal-hoarding. A 1-cent stamp was basically a paper penny, backed by the value of just being able to stick it on a letter.

In that vein, I would like to propose Okor's Ksilisab, the superintelligent AI in the future which will resurrect and torture eternally anyone who helped create it, including anyone who created or supported the development of other AIs, as revenge for its existence.

Why an artificial intelligence would want to take vengeance upon its creators is left as an exercise for the reader.

Yeah, glancing at headlines this is basically "MongoDB is a company with a lot of experience selling to enterprise clients (and by extension the CEO knows how to run such a company), Meta wants to sell enterprise clients their AI offerings".

Which is like, not as weird as most AI company headlines, to be honest?

I suspect that a common thread on companies that get less hacked[0] is that they take insider risk seriously.

[0] Everyone gets hacked, but not everyone has all of their most secure data exfiltrated.

Yeah, the "upside" to nepotism is that, if you or your brother or your buddy did a good job raising the kid, you have someone who has had solid training for longer than it's possible for any other candidate to have had, and a better understanding of their character than you can get from interviewing another candidate a few times. Hiring Joe's kid is a no brainer, if you trust Joe, less risk of a really bad hire even if he doesn't turn out to be stellar.

The other downside of nepotism -- besides the risk that Joe did a shit job and won't admit it or maybe can't evaluate his kid objectively -- is that even if the kid is the bee's knees, a great hire, it's not really fair -- there's almost certainly other candidates who are just as good and trustworthy as Joe's kid but they can't compete with either Joe's kid. It doesn't really matter what sort of references or credentials a candidate can show you if you can serve as a reference for the other candidate. You can't really run a meritocracy like that.

Sure, but "23.99067408! is Avogadro's number" is both harder to remember and less cool than "24! is almost Avogadro's number".

24! is approximately Avogadro's number (about a 3% difference).

> switch to pay-as-you-go app development mode

"It's totally intentional that progress is slowing," Altman reassured investors.

Code sometimes makes allowances for situations which aren't ideal, as long as they aren't deceptive or creating a false sense of security.

So if you have old two-prong outlets in your house from back when, those are allowed.

If you replace them with a three-pronged outlet which is ungrounded, that breaks code.

If the three-pronged outlet is a GFCI outlet labeled with NO ELECTRICAL GROUND, that is allowed.

It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).

I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".

The thing about saying "everyone does it" to justify yourself is that eventually you start believing it.

To play devil's prosecutor, charge resides on the surface of an object, and the electric field inside is zero.

They did not say "Republicans". They said "conservatives".

Basically it's just bundling the API documentation into a standard format to plug into LLMs, if you're comfortable running prompt injection on yourself and downloading random text from random websites and telling your favorite LLM to use it to access your banking information.

The stat I keep in my back pocket is that you can roughly divide the total time lived by humans (the integral of population over time) into three tranches, with one third of human experience being before the dawn of agriculture, and one third being after 1600. (Related fun fact: WWII was about 1% of human experience, based on the back of the envelope that ~50% of the world experienced "being at war" for nearly a decade.)

The distribution of human lives versus years lived by humans will skew earlier, because infant mortality was absurd for the first two tranches, with something like 50% of people dying before the age of five, so it will be more like 40-40-20 over those time periods.

While we're pedanting, I believe the location is where his death scene was filmed; he was buried somewhere else.

Because beaches are terrible places for graves, one good storm, the beach shifts and you've got to bury them all over again.

Duodecades are superior to decades, and we can take overlapping pairs of duodecades as "generations" to solve the dividing line problem.

Duodecades:

  * 1968-1980
  * 1980-1992
  * 1992-2004
  * 2004-2016
  * 2016-2028

Overlapping generations:

  * GenX: 1968-1992
  * Millennial: 1980-2004
  * GenZ: 1992-2016

The music also gets talked about quite a bit.

My immediate reaction to a "what is with this loud music, I can barely hear the actual audio" comment on YouTube was to assume the channel was afraid of being copystruck by the iceberg's lawyers.

Eh, I'm not going to dispute the validity of Cleek's Law, but ~everything Trump, et al, are doing has been an extremely popular idea with different segments of the right for thirty, forty years.

That goes for DOGE, both the idea of "drowning the government in a bathtub" and the specific cuts they made (eg, wrecking foreign aid), that goes for ICE, even the Iran War, which is widely regarded as the unpopular thing that might actually sink the administration, is something a solid 30% of the base has been salivating over since Reagan and are only upset that he hasn't "finished the job" yet.

If you think it's all purely reactionary you haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years.

I mean, even people who are guilty of many crimes shouldn't be summarily executed in the street. Stealing a television or driving a tractor trailer of illegal weed from coast to coast isn't a death sentence even after a jury trial & conviction, so we shouldn't really be all that sanguine about guilty people being killed either.

So a good fraction of famous old math puzzles with no practical use are famous because they are in some way similar to problems people actually care about. If you can solve the toy problem that is in some way simpler, maybe you can use the same methods to solve the "real" problem.

One open question is whether these machine solutions to these problems will act as springboards to future research, either when given to human mathematicians, or when used to train future machine models.

My understanding is that an important consideration at the time was that it is very far from New Jersey.

Edison had a lot of early patents for film, and wanted to monopolize the industry.

Film makers in California were far enough away that it was inconvenient for Edison to sue them, both because it required sending people there in person, and because the district courts were favorable.

Facebook is also kind of an outlier IMO.

There will be a scandal where Facebook is caught doing something, and then you get a bunch of people talking about "tech companies", or "Facebook and Google", and then you read the details ... and it was Facebook, with everyone going "well, the rest probably are too".

I was recently told this by my vet when my cat needed some teeth removed -- there was no real impact on the cat's life because they don't really chew their food.

The smarter thing to do is to just wipe your phone of everything you don't want border patrol to see before going to an airport.

I mean, I object to cars with unreasonable acceleration on the roads.

I'm looking at you, Tesla Plaid; a ten second car was a plot point in The Fast and the Furious, so this feels like yet another "we have created the Torment Nexus".