And every so often you still get young men trying to cleanse the temple mount by force of arms. Talk about starting a trend.

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day."

“And are you?”

“No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

We pretrain METAGENE-1, a 7-billion-parameter autoregressive transformer model […] , on a […] dataset […] sourced from a large collection of human wastewater samples,

https://metagene.ai/metagene-1-paper.pdf

Haha. Life in Australia. Amirite?

That’s a cock rooster.

As the story goes, John Steinbeck was told by one of his professors that he would become an author when pigs fly,[…]

The accurate phrase is “ad astra per ALAS porci,”[“to the stars on the wings of a pig.”] which means that Steinbeck in his snarky revenge was demonstrating far and wide that he was a bad student after all – and thanks to his famous but inaccurate imprint, countless people are running around with tattoos which actually say “to the stars through other pigs.”[“ad astra per alia porci”]

https://sluggoonthestreet.tumblr.com/post/188811241794/as-the-story-goes-john-steinbeck-was-told-by-one

Seems odd that someone from dbzer0 would be very concerned about data ownership. How come?

I don’t exactly know how Perplexity runs its service. I assume that their AI reacts to such a question by googling the name and then summarizing the results. You certainly received much less info about yourself than you could have gotten via a search engine.

See also: Forer Effect aka Barnum Effect

I checked on google maps and it wouldn’t be a problem. About 1km away, there’s a recycling station and a cemetery with lots of room.

Seriously, why are they producing all these great promo shots for him? If they had done that for someone like Bernie Sanders, the US would be in much better shape now.

(explaining the title reference)

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Turning that on is probably a GDPR violation for those in Europe.

ETA: Don’t shoot the messenger. I won’t be suing.

Gooble! Gobble!

I doubt it. There’s a good chance that we will see copycat killers. That’s a well known phenomenon, but it is not a change in society.

High-profile events can catalyze changes. Violence has been committed. A person died. That creates a sense of urgency. Americans have discovered that there is a broad consensus that something ought to be done about health care. We’ll see.

But I do not see any appetite for a societal change. Americans look at individuals, not at systemic factors. The USA has, by far, the highest incarceration rate in the world. It costs the taxpayer a lot of money to feed and house all those people, not to mention that the rest of society misses out on all the productive labor they could do. The US likes to punish individuals for perceived wrong-doing, but it does not look at systemic factors.

US society now wants more bad guy CEOs punished. That’s not a change and it will not lead to a change. People aren’t even thinking about how the law could be changed to punish these bad guys, or what they personally could do alone or by collective action. They are waiting for heroes.

Americans want V (for Vendetta) to save them while they watch the show. Many think that Elon Musk is Ironman. That’s part of the malaise.

People want individuals to take care of things and so individuals need the power to do so. Well, billionaires are people who have been given the power to take care of business (excuse the pun). And if they don’t do it right, it’s because they are greedy or have some other individual flaw.

Probably nothing, but that depends on your definition. Let’s look at the technicalities.

You have a number of crypto transactions that are bundled together into a block. Then you compute a hash - a checksum - for this block. If the data changes, then the checksum no longer matches. The trick that makes it a chain is to include the checksum of the previous block in the next block.

If someone manipulates the transaction history, they need to recalculate the checksum to match. But then they also need to change the following block and recalculate its checksum and so on.

This is a pruned down version of a Merkle Tree, which was thought up ~50 years ago. It doesn’t have to be a chain. You can allow a block to have more than 1 succeeding block; making a fork. Blockchains are one use of that data structure. Wikipedia lists some others. Git, for example, also uses this.

The bitcoin maker knew to use this trick when he needed it. When Torvalds wrote git a few years before that, he also knew to use it.

When you ask about Blockchain specifically rather than Merkle Trees, you greatly limit what can be done with it. So there aren’t a lot of uses left. Most people would say that a Blockchain is more than just a limited Merkle Tree. When you add in those features, you make it even more specific to the original application. So you are probably left with just crypto.

At least it’s not slacking off anymore.

That gives 30% to Steam though. Better use Itch.io as linked on the github page.

https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry

The insistence on electoral districts.

You get that across the English-speaking world, though. The really weird thing is that even people who see the problem want to keep the districts and argue for non-solutions like ranked-choice voting.

Centuries ago, it made sense. Communities chose one of their own to argue for their interests in front of the king. Which communities had the privilege? Obviously that’s up to the king to decide. Before modern communication tech, it also made sense that communities would be defined by geography.

Little of that makes sense anymore. When their candidate loses, people don’t feel like the 2nd best guy is representing them. They feel disenfranchised.

It used to be, in the US, that minorities - specifically African Americans - were denied representation. Today, census data is used to draw districts dominated by minority ethnic groups so that they can send one of their own to congress. This might not be a good thing, because candidates elsewhere do not have to appeal to these minorities or take their interests into account. Minorities that are not geographically concentrated - eg LGBTQ - cannot gain representation that way.

The process is entirely top-down and undemocratic. Of course, it is gamed.

Aside from that, the mere fact that representation is geography based influences which issues dominate. The more likely you are to move before the next election, the less your interests matter. That goes for both parties. But you can also see a pronounced urban/rural divide in party preference. Rural vs urban determines interests and opinions in very basic ways. Say, guns: High-population density makes them a dangerous threat and not much else. In the country, they are a tool for hunting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU8VPQsTqFU

Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.

But we have also run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying on ship’s peanut.

So in order to obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and…er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.