Smoke

Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent.

This is both funny and also an excellent summary of why Wikipedia uniquely has an incentive not to jump on the AI bandwagon. Like a bank maintaining COBOL decades after everyone else moved on, its (goal of) reputation for reliability means that there's a strong internal conservative faction opposed to introducing new disruptive features.

Every establishment candidate, worldwide, lost in 2024. There was a massive populist trend spurred by the pandemic lockdowns and subsequent economic inflation to pay for them all.

It is however not a triumph of filmmaking; it is a triumph of budget. None of the ideas or techniques were new it is simply that no one had previously thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before.

You can say the same for Star Wars though. Sometimes techniques are like actors - they aren't appreciated or able to shine until they can be supported by a big production and a director who knows how to use them. No-one praises The Godfather because they think it was Marlon Brando's first movie.

He's indicated he wants to give Trump a sentence of unconditional suspension, eg. a sentence of zero actual punishment but which nevertheless designates him a convicted felon.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, indicated that he favored a so-called unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation. He set a sentencing date of Jan. 10, and ordered Mr. Trump to appear either in person or virtually. An unconditional discharge would cement Mr. Trump’s status as a felon just weeks before his inauguration — he would be the first to carry that dubious designation into the presidency — even as it would water down the consequences for his crimes. Unlike a conditional discharge, which allows defendants to walk free if they meet certain requirements, such as maintaining employment or paying restitution, an unconditional discharge would come without strings attached.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/nyregion/trump-sentencing-hush-money-case-ny.html

I played the first one, and found it to be extremely boring but with potential. Unfortunately, playing 3 and Syndicate afterwards showed me clearly that Ubisoft smothered the potential and cranked up the boring. The worlds they've created are certainly immersive, but they're also devoid of energy. 3 has a half-Native American protage who spends five minutes in his home village and then goes off to the colonies with barely a thought spared for his home, so when it's played for drama it falls flat because we haven't seen his relationship to his family. And Syndicate's characters had might as well be carved from soap with how crude and flat they are. There's a transgendered gangster from New York who joins the Assassins' gang, and he has absolutely nothing to add for the entire game. Characters with seeming potential come in, have one side quest, and that's their lot.

Unless you think they're particularly likely to escape, I don't see the difference between death and life without parole as regards "too dangerous to set free". The unabomber died in prison serving out that very sentence.

So I don’t think he believed he gets to decide who dies. He’s never supported the death penalty afaik.

He chose to exclude the three mentioned though. So clearly he's compromising for crimes he or his base see as unforgivably evil.

Oh, it occurs from time to time. Jones will shotgun tons of contradictory predictions, then quietly drop the ones that don't work out and never shut up about the one that actually happens.

Not only that, but trust from a self contained community is not the same as safe for the general public outside of context. Imagine asking for a summary of the Gamestop shortsqueeze and getting an answer from Superstonks.

honestly, not sure I -ever- found a useful answer on Quora.

Reading them taught me one thing, Quora had/has a weirdly strong hardon for Steve Jobs and is/was all too happy to talk about anecdotes of him buying the authors' lunch or reconciling with his estranged daughter. The only time I read criticism of Apple or him was when the question specifically asked for it.

In fact, if we look at BBC as an example, they’re publicly funded and maintain high credibility and a high degree of press freedom.

Indeed, the BBC cannot be seen to give in to government pressure.

There's ways to rate limit, like increasing response time per IP address per hour to make rapid, massed requests slower and easier to handle. Taking them all down at once is an extreme move.