Famously used by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow. The notion of obtaining a distribution of random rocket attacks blew my young mind and prompted a life-long interest in the sturdy of statistics.
"Secret Service agents rushed President Donald Trump to a White House bunker on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.
"Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which was designed for use in emergencies like terrorist attacks, according to a Republican close to the White House who was not authorized to publicly discuss private matters and spoke on condition of anonymity. The account was confirmed by an administration official who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The abrupt decision by the agents underscored the rattled mood inside the White House, where the chants from protesters in Lafayette Park could be heard all weekend and Secret Service agents and law enforcement officers struggled to contain the crowds."
As near as I can find, some 6 people were arrested for this violent protest by the Secret Service, and some 16 by DC police. Is is vanishingly difficult to find if anyone was subsequently charged and convicted for this event, which was without parallel, at least in my lifetime. This followed the events of May 30, 2020, when the Church of St. John's Episcopal In Lafayette Square, across from the White House, was sent on fire. To date it seems that no one has been arrested or charged for this destruction.
So they didn't even attempt to enter the building and they certainly didn't attempt to overthrow election results? I just cant see how you think these are the same category of event with respect to political impact.
They burned the church and tried to break into the White House forcing an evacuation of the president! The 1/6 riot, by contrast, was by turns both violent and civil, but no one was armed and attempting "to overthrow the election results". In fact the Trump plan of continuous debate over the merits of the election was thwarted by the riot. It was diametrically opposed to his interests and ended up favoring the Democrats. Many questions still linger over the identities of major participants, including the "pipe bomber" and the "scaffold commander", whom the FBI unaccountably never identified. Note that the 1/6 participants were relentlessly tracked by the state for years by some 6000 FBI agents and tried in DC courts, unlike the 2020 rioters aiming to storm the White House.
A fair point. Amidst the nationalistic preening over DeepSeek, the question of what the unintended consequences of an all-out AI arms race are lies fallow. Apart from everything else, it is tantamount to an information war, with competitions versions of the human past vying for supremacy.
Is it "veiled racism" to point out how China continues to wield the great firewall that effectively blocks most internet users from outside news and entertainment while Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan et al. do not? The basic world view in China of 天下 -- the universal dominion of China. Hence the general unpopularity of China in Vietnam, South Korea, and japan.
I don't think it's veiled at all, to bring up these things every time there is a success in China.
I agree that the CCP's view of the world and population control is negative. But don't let that poison your opinion of all Chinese people. We're all people on Earth, and we need to be forging bonds with our intelligent and good-hearted international kin that break down the walls that those in power create to keep themselves there.
I've lived and roamed across much of China, studied in Taiwan and South Korea, and know Japan and Hong Kong well. Many Chinese are indeed great, but in the end the Chinese tendency to game every possible system, make clever use of naive 老外 to advance themselves, and just shamelessly appropriate IP ("hey, they did it too in the 18th century, and remember the Opium War!") has massively turned me off China generally. Not to mention the 50,000 RMB bounty now offered in China for reporting a "foreign spy".
The recent TV drama 赤热 (English title: Silicon Wave, available with subtitles on youtube) shows the whole China nationalist tech narrative in vivid relief, including "veiled racism" against Americans, e.g. the depiction of the Chinese protagonist's American mentor at UC Berkeley.
And just look at the history and career of Li Kaifu and the cavalier way he has treated all the benefits he received in the US turned into promoting the glorious 祖国. Foolish 老外 indeed.
No, it's still rolling out globally, and has a growing group of owners, particularly using AVP for productivity applications after the recent system software update allowing ultrawide screen sharing of mac screens. See /r/visionpro on reddit for developer chatter and the latest developments.
Perhaps around 400K sold? Production to date is said to be limited by Sony. The AVP is very much alive, especially with the recent system software update allowing ultrawide viewing of mac screens. See the reddit group /r/visionpro for lively discussion of the latest developments.
Not sure about this. There have been multiple Congressional hearings that produced continuing nuggets of information, provoking yet more speculation.
And in the past 24 hours ABC had a rather shocking interview with the local police revealing that: "The local SWAT team assigned to help protect former President Donald Trump on July 13 had not had any contact with the Secret Service agents in charge of security before a would-be assassin opened fire, those officers told ABC News. . . . We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service members whenever they arrived, and that never happened," said Jason Woods, lead sharpshooter on the SWAT team in Beaver County, Pennsylvania."
This report seems sure to fuel further rounds of speculation concerning the abnormal security arrangements.
Gives power to the permanent committee staff members and lobbyists who have institutional memory and social networks. No legislator could possibly understand all the nuances of policy with such short limits. Four terms, say, as a Senator and eight as a House member would be more practical.
Exactly this. California has enacted term limits and it hasn’t gone well.
Lobbyists run everything because the politicians are all too new. It also completely disincentivizes long-term thinking because the system guarantees they will be out of office by the time the chickens come home to roost.
I heard an interview from a state rep in Florida complaining about term limits, something like "your first term is like your Freshman year, you don't know anything, your second is like your Sophomore year, etc" and her point was that you can't get anything done without being able to serve at least 6 years or so.
I think that's kind of bogus. If you can't figure out how to be an effective politician in your first term then you don't deserve to be elected for a second!
I heard AOC talk about this and it does make sense. There's just a lot to learn about how things actually get done and only so much time in the day. It's not as simple as "Write bill, pass bill, job done". You have to figure out who are the people who actually have power in an agency, what their priorities are, how to word the bills so they will actually achieve what you want, etc. There's a lot to it.
I disagree with POTUS term limits. If the citizenry want someone to stay in office, like we did for FDR, we shouldn't be forced to pick someone else.
Furthermore, having term limits on just one branch of government decreases the power of that branch without decreasing the power of the other branches creating a new balance of power (or imbalance).
Imagine having to vote for someone other than FDR in the 1940 election. Germany had swallowed most of Europe that year. I couldn't imagine being forced to vote for President Wendell Willkie or James Farley to lead us into war because the guy I want can't serve due to term limits.
And, on a related note for education, AI is quickly obviating the need to master and plumb the depths of foreign languages. Dating myself, doubtless, but as an undergraduate, it was an unalloyed joy to study ancient Greek and read Plato and Euripides in the original, however haltingly. And later Korean, Japanese, and Chinese beckoned providing a lifetime of rich understanding of life outside the confines of English.
For Americans, at least, perhaps ours is the last generation that will seek rewire our understanding of reality through linguistic hacking.
AI will always be far better at languages than I'll ever be and I expect it to get much better very quickly. But I'm still learning my partner's language and don't think I'll stop any time soon. I think it's interesting and fun in and of itself. It's also a great scaffold for learning about another culture and learning to respect and understand folks from different walks of life.
Presuming that those languages exist within OpenAI's training dataset. Try to have a conversation in Rinconada with ChatGPT; my last attempt led to its admission that it had no proficiency in this language. You will have to find a native speaker, and their numbers are dwindling as Tagalog and English are being favored in education - the latter thanks to American linguistic imperialism.
The AI does not circumscribe all of reality; not all of reality is captured on the internet.
The shift in the US from the 1980s to banning forced retirement age has only added to the trend toward accruing and maintaining status through navigating an established, and increasingly sclerotic, hierarchy. The quest for lifelong tenure has become increasingly and necessarily political as the length of future job security has extended into one's 80s.
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