Rhaedas

Are the migrants wanting handouts he refers to the ones who are working low paying physical jobs that Americans refuse to do, sending most of that money back to their families still in their native countries? What a bunch of freeloaders. /s

Valid point. Maybe you're right. If it was one series of checks, definitely possible It's interesting how less of them got cashed as the values went down. Maybe the arms dealer and Trump are the only ones who never looked at the amounts (which maybe says a similar message).

"$275k?"

"No sir, $275."

"I'll take it!"

Spy correspondent Julius Lowenthal wanted to know just how cheap some of the city’s richest figures were. So he set up a company, called the National Refund Clearinghouse, and sent letters with checks for $1.11 enclosed, “for services that you were overcharged for.” The letters went out to 58 “well-known, well-heeled Americans,” 26 of whom promptly cashed them. Curious as to how low they might go, Lowenthal sent those 26 “nabobs” a second refund check, for $0.64. This time, 13 people cashed them.

Finally, he sent those 13 respondents a check for $0.13. This time, only two people cashed the check. One was an arms dealer. The other was Donald Trump, whom the magazine identified as a “demibillionaire casino operator and adulturer.”

I think Clinton et al. fumbled some balls in their own efforts to address the problem, probably made others worse. But it was the discarding of intelligence as if it wasn't worth at least monitoring that caused 9/11. Something may have eventually happened even with attention to the data, they were dead set on coming after the US, but in a sense we let them in when we didn't have to. I've always said, what if the gov't made the FAA mandate a closed cockpit to all airlines before then, how would that have changed things? A huge shift from just a rule change.

There is the analogy of a balloon's surface where every point moves away from its neighbor, or a better analogy of bread expanding as it is baked, since that's more three dimensions. The idea is that space is expanding at the atomic level at a certain rate, but it's so small that it takes an astronomical amount of these atomic increases to be able to measure it (we can't measure expansion at solar system scales, or even between our galaxy's stars, as gravity drowns out the effect. But space is so large that over distances like between galaxies, the light that has traveled all that way has had to travel over this expanding so much that we can see a shift in its wavelength. And overall everything is shifting red, so either we in our section of the galaxy are the center, or it's something that's common in any part of our universe. One of these is far more likely.

Republicans trying to make universal healthcare an easier sell.

Or trying to kill people. It can't be that, right?

The Clinton admin handed over a lot of info to the Bush admin, who then tossed it. Including them in the ball dropping maybe implies that the info they had wasn't convincing enough, i.e. they ignored better data that would convince the next Presidential administration? It's been a while since I've been down that rabbit hole, but I did not get the impression that whatever incompetence that existed was equally shared on both sides.

Basically, this was all ~~Bush's~~ Cheney's baby.

Reddit had simply changed for the worse after ten or so years. Some of the niche subreddits I was in were still okay and not touched by the issues (yet), but I felt that it was for the best to move to other places. The Reddit migration popularized the Fediverse idea (that had been there already), and it made sense to me to decentralize discussions to resist control. For the most part the past few years this has felt more or less like old Reddit, and even previous forums before I found Reddit, because in the end discussion areas are made up of the people posting in them, not the architecture they're on. It's the transitions between that are the hardest.

I agree on the point of solving a problem, it's just a matter of time, skill, and some luck. The biggest problem I see with AI right now is that it's marketed as something it's not. Which leads to a lot of the issues we have with "AI" aka LLMs put in places they shouldn't be. Surprisingly they do manage pretty well a lot of the time, but when they fail it's really bad. I.e., AI as sold is a remarkable illusion that wow, everyone has bought into even knowing full well it's not near perfect.

The only thing that will "fix" current AI is true AGI development that would demonstrate the huge difference. AI/LLMs might be part of the path there, I don't know. It's not the real solution though, no matter how many small countries worth of energy we burn to generate answers.

I say all this as an active casual experimenter with local LLMs. What they can do, and how they do it is amazing, but I also know what I have and it's not what I call AI, that term has been tainted again by marketers trying to cash in on ignorance.

My mother's car, a 1981 or so Dodge Aries K-car. I guess those who went to a driving school got their license from there as well? Back then we just got a short course in high school, drove a few times with the instructor, and then had to go to the DMV with our own car to do the actual test.

It took two times. The first time I had trouble starting the car (because it was a Dodge/Chrysler POS) so that instructor denied me after the third try at cranking it. Of course it rattled 17 year old me. Second time (different place, different instructor) went a lot smoother, only issue was my slamming on brakes for a red light, but that probably helped me rather than running it.

Still not as bad as pulling segments off Usenet to piece together based on faith in a description.

That's okay. Maybe you're familiar with another meme level reference, 1 of the lucky 10,000. Web rings were like the coolest thing.