If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.

One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.

One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.

English definitely has rules.

It’s why you can’t say something like “girl the will boy the paid” to mean “the boy is paying the girl” and have people understand you.

Less vs fewer, though, isn’t really a rule. It’s more an 18th century style guideline some people took too seriously.

No.

There’s two types of grammar rules. There’s the real grammar rules, which you intuitively learn as a kid and don’t have to be explicitly taught.

For example, any native English speaker can tell you that there’s something off about “the iron great purple old big ball” and that it should really be “the great big old purple iron ball”, even though many aren’t even aware that English has an adjective precedence rule.

Then there’s the fake rules like “ain’t ain’t a real word”, ‘don’t split infinitives’ or “no double negatives”. Those ones are trumped up preferences, often with a classist or racist origin.

The beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ was in June of 1941, and began with the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen murduring Jews as part of Operation Barbarossa.

The commander of Einsatzkommando 3 submitted a fairly detailed report of his squad’s daily murder count by location. Through November 25th of that year, his squad alone murdered 57,338 Jewish men, 48,592 Jewish women, and 29,461 Jewish children.

Babi Yar happened on September 29th and 30th, 1941 - only about 4 months into the Final Solution. Germans put posters up in Kyiv, saying that any Jews who didn’t show up to be relocated would be shot. They took the crowd of 33k people to a ravine, herded them forwards and machine gunned them all down.

Is the Holocaust really the most apt historical comparison? Yes, the Holocaust is in the past, while this is ongoing. But the early days of the Holocaust were incredibly bloody; the massacres didn’t ramp up slowly once the killings commenced.

Two things can both be bad without being equally bad.

The war has been terrible. But do you really think it’s been as bad as Treblinka or Babi Yar?

Ish.

There’s precisely zero skill involved in e.g. roulette.

Poker, fantasy football, and horse betting though, are influenced by skill. But they’re all clearly still gambling.

The important thing in those 3 is that you’re not betting against the house. You’re betting against other players, and that you’re the smart enough to come out on top even after the house takes their cut. Unless you’re Nate Silver, though, chances are you’re not the smartest person in the room.

Better yet:

Give me $1, and I’ll roll two six-sided dice. If you roll two sixes, I give you $20.

Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.

The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

Three year olds aren’t all that smart, but they learn in a way that ChatGTP 3 and ChatGPT 4 don’t.

A 3 year old will become a 30 year old eventually, but ChatGPT 3 just kinda stays ChatGPT3 forever. LLMs can be trained offline, but we don’t really know if that converges to some theoretical optimum at some point and how far away from the best possible LLM we are.

Exactly.

AI, as a term, was coined in the mid-50s by a computer scientist, John McCarthy. Yes, that John McCarthy, the one who invented LISP and helped develop Algol 60.

It’s been a marketing buzzword for generations, born out of the initial optimism that AI tasks would end up being pretty easy to figure out. AI has primarily referred to narrow AI for decades and decades.

One low hanging fruit thing that comes to mind is that LLMs are terrible at board games like chess, checkers or go.

ChatGPT is a giant cheater.

The US and Jordan have been allies for decades, and the US has military bases in allies around the world.

This particular base is located near Syria, so it might be because of the Syrian civil war.

Also, fun fact - the king of Jordan appeared as an extra on American TV. Specifically, on Star Trek Voyager.

Oh, yeah.

If your point is that ICE car batteries have problems in the cold, so cold batteries is a problem for everyone and worse for ICE cars, that’s fair.

If your point is that ICE car batteries suck therefore EVs suck, that’s not really valid logic.