thedailymail

The whole premise here seems awfully similar to the 'Torment Nexus' and 'face-eating leopards Party' memes

I've had permanent residency in Japan since 2001, and this new review system is significantly tougher than it was when I applied. There is a zero-tolerance approach to minor infractions (traffic violations, tax filings, national health insurance requirements), much higher fees, and an explicit income and pension requirement (the minimum annual income is actually pretty low, at something like 20,000 USD per year plus 5000 per additional family member). Had these rules applied 25 years ago, I probably would have been rejected due to a few parking or speeding tickets.

Not sure where you got the idea that crime is skyrocketing in Japan, but government crime rate statistics show a plummeting trend since the already-low 2000s, with a very minor uptick in the past 2-3 years.

https://opengov.jp/en/society/crime/

The very next sentence in the comment begins "What this research is about is the origin of plants, which are indeed one of the most important forms of life..."

This felt like a hit piece and ended up making me more sympathetic to Acemoglu (about whom I previously had no strong opinion). The critique of his paper on different forms of imperialism (extractive, constructive) was quite weak for work that has been cited 20,000+ times, and seems to have been deftly refuted by the author himself. Complaints in the latter half of the article - that his take on Trump is correct but unoriginal, and his early comments on AI did not reflect the emergence of agents - are hardly damning. If anything, I began to suspect that he must have triggered some ideological tripwire that spurred the likes of Larry Summers and Tyler Cowen to sound off.

At that level of specificity, you could just say that a meter is "about a yard".

I read and enjoyed that book out of a general interest in the history of ideas, but admit I am not able to judge the underlying mathematics. Is the "fiction" part only related to descriptions of his mathematical contributions, or are there problems with the biographical information as well?

I'm curious whether this type of goblin epidemic was seen in other language versions of ChatGPT. Did e.g. Japanese users see more yõkai turning up?

Why not the Sun?

The supplementary files in that paper—verbatim reproductions of the full texts of Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby—are pretty instructive. The research group highlighted all additions and omissions, but on most pages the differences are difficult to spot because they are only missing spaces, extra hyphens, and other typographical minutiae.

Nice concept but could use some more procedurally generated LLM content

>Trump's declaring that he'll be involved with deciding who WB-Discovery-HBO can be sold to.

This needs to be developed into a The Apprentice-style show where aspirants truckle before the king as they make their pitches.

In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane.

"There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."

Or maybe the artist was inspired by the connection of the Phrygian cap with psychedelic "liberty cap" mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata), which are distributed widely across Europe and associated with elves, fairies and various other wee folk?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybe_semilanceata

Somehow we got an inverted version of the Monty Python "I'd like to buy an argument" skit

When kids say (as one does in this essay) that AI will do the writing for them in the future anyway, so there's no point in learning to write, they have a point. But there is a second function of writing, which is to strengthen parts of the mind. Maybe in the future there will be "gyms" for developing these mental muscles in the same way we have fitness centers at a time when physical labor has become much less common in the past?

I just fell out a window and am on my way down! I sure hope I don't straddle that sawhorse when I land... Ow! My balls!!

>While these actions were not a breach of any regulation, SEBI said that the “intensity and sheer scale” of their intervention, and the rapid reversal of their trades “without any plausible economic rationale, other than the concurrent activity in and impact on their positions in the BANKNIFTY index options markets,” was manipulative.

I don't get the basis for regulatory action if they weren't in "breach of any regulation." Not a fan of financial skullduggery, but it does seem important for government agencies to play by explicit, non-arbitrary rules. (Or maybe this article just got it wrong?)

In the early days of the pandemic it was widely reported (erroneously) that tobacco smoking was protective against SARS-CoV-2. I don't know if OP was thinking along such lines, but it would be understandable if they were.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1

I don't want to be pedantic or prescriptive, but it's "imminent" not "eminent." (The wrong word got introduced upstream in this thread and was taken up by multiple commenters.)

[Opt]+[-] is for en-dash (at least on macos). For an em-dash, it's [Shift]+[Opt]+[-].

I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)

Mission drift can sometimes go in a positive direction. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, functioned primarily as a tax evasion vehicle while Hughes was alive. After his death, the HHMI was in deep trouble with the IRS and sitting on an endowment of ~$5 billion. So it appointed former NIH director Donald Fredrickson to turn it into an actual research funding organization and mend relations with the tax authorities and research community.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-11-fi-2620-s...

Oh wow - TIL! I wish I could edit or delete the above. Anyway thanks for correcting me.

Notably, Krebs just had his security clearance revoked by Trump & Co. 12 days ago for posing "risks".

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

"It has an impressive resume, being the most studied animal in the world, subject of more investigations than even the Drosophila melanogaster or common fruit fly that resides in thousands of laboratories around the world."

It would be great to have a source for this claim! Recent studies have estimated that between 10 million and 110 million (it's controversial!) lab mice are used per year in the US, representing 93–97% of all experimental animals.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-ra...

I never noticed this until scrolling through this image gallery, but the design of these ads consistently and prominently highlights the first letters of "More Doctors," which was almost certainly intended to visually reinforce the M.D. association.

Newton was public domain by Einstein's time.

Not OP, but I think the logic thread goes something like: Through taxes, we pay the government to exercise various protective functions, such as equipping the law enforcement and the military to identify and respond to existential threats. However, they completely miss or ignore bad behavior on the part of some domestic actors, such as healthcare profiteers.

I confess to still using skype w two old friends, mainly because i resisted getting a phone until a few months ago and couldn't text by SMS. But I'll be unsurprised when microsoft finally pulls the plug