AI generated art is everywhere now.

Edit: The ai comment is a joke because the postman has six fingers.

No wonder they think we’re all commies. They can’t read a map.

It’s not only not a valid question, it might not even be a legal question.

I’m a hiring manager for a very large tech company in California. I cannot ask any questions about age, ethnicity, country of origin, citizenship status, veteran status, marital status, health, and so on.

HR can ask if they’re eligible to work in the US, and I can ask whether they have the skills and talents I need for the position, but it’s tightly limited.

It still crops up all the time. There are decades worth of studies showing how having a non-white looking name or having age indicators present in work history or graduation dates influence reviewers to reject applications they’d otherwise accept.

The font and kerning is so bad it makes me want to send whoever designed this to a North Korean re-education camp, but for graphic design.

Seventeen is also easier to fit into lyrics. Dancing Queen by ABBA. Sexy + 17 by the Stray Cats (although the song was about ditching high school classes). At Seventeen by Janis Ian (who was singing about herself at 17). Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meatloaf (again about both being high schoolers, but he’s a bit of a creep anyway).

I might be giving my age away here.

I thought it was Spicer in the bush.

It has nothing to do with Islam in particular and everything to do with religious conservatism.

I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

In the books, Isildur turned invisible by putting on the ring, and dove into a river to escape a band of orcs. The ring, under its own will, slipped from his finger and he was spotted by orcish archers, who killed him.

I’ve always thought that the “invisibility” aspect of the ring was that it shifted the wearer into the shadow realm. The Nine were invisible without their cloaks, but were visible when the ring was worn. It also made the wearer more visible to Sauron, iirc.

If that’s the case, then the power granted by the ring might mean that magic users (such as Gandalf or Galadriel) would more easily draw on power from the other realm into this one.

Here’s the thing. You said a “jackdaw is a crow.” Is it in the same family? Yes. No one’s arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be “specific” like you said, then you shouldn’t either. They’re not the same thing. If you’re saying “crow family” you’re referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people “call the black ones crows?” Let’s get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It’s not one or the other, that’s not how taxonomy works. They’re both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that’s not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you’d call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?

I respect Daryl Davis enormously and I think in many ways he shows us the best of who we can be.

At the same time, the criticism I heard from (I believe) the person who was an NAACP executive was that Mr. Davis works against racism in retail mode, while organizations like the NAACP work in wholesale mode. It’s good to reach out a hand and change a mind, but these movements - the racists, misogynists, and LGBT-phobic - are recruiting thousands and tens of thousands. They can and should be humanized, but the real battles are being fought in the courts, the halls of government, and the media. I admire him and think he deserves to be elevated and we’d all be the better for it, but there’s a very real fight to be had in addition to reaching out a hand and doing a one at a time conversion.

I haven’t been able to find a good answer to that either.

One of the speculations that I’ve heard kicked around is that they were trying to do something that would light a fuse, but there was no follow up. Hamas isn’t a bunch of student rebels out of Les Miserables, throwing caution to the wind but not having done the actual groundwork. It was a small attack that happened to have what I suspect was a far larger impact than they imagined. They obviously were doing prep work for the attack itself, if the stories we’re reading are to be believed, but it was a modest-sized incursion without coordination with either the West Bank or Lebanon assets. I think it was a terrorist attack - and I am not someone who throws that word around lightly - but I don’t think that they thought it was going to be this big of a hit.

I think it’s analogous to 9/11 where OBL wasn’t expecting the whole towers falling thing, and while trying to provoke a response, the US over-response exceeded his expectations. I don’t know if Hamas will survive this as an organization, but it’s really affected the global perception of Israel.

You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.

I personally think it’s fantastic when, every Dec 25th, the world comes together to celebrate Isaac Newton’s birthday.

I’m just spitballing here, but I’ve done this kind of thing.

1. Establish a program where any defecting Russian soldier will receive a bonus of $20k USD and a work visa in one of a list of countries.
2. Defecting with military equipment increases the bonus based on the combat and the intelligence value of the equipment. 30-some years ago, I believe we were offering $1M to anyone defecting with one of the new MIGs. I think we got a couple out of that program.
3. Defection bonus can also scale with rank and intelligence value of the soldier. Defecting general? $1M. Defecting colonel? $250k. More money for info, and you can land a job as a “consultant” with western intelligence. Maybe throw in a condo.
4. The Russians are quite famous for punishing or executing innocent family members in revenge for such actions. They will have difficulty doing so if the number of defectors are in the thousands to tens of thousands, but the initial people will likely be those who have less of a concern there.
5. Expend funding for in-country intelligence assets to construct an Underground Railroad for defectors. Assign an initial $5B USD to develop networks in major cities to smuggle the families of defectors out of the country with arrangements made for visas etc.

If you were to sit down with a spreadsheet right now, you could come up with a rough estimate for the cost of eliminating one Russian asset - soldier, tank, air defense system, whatever. A program like the above would reassign those costs, with the additional benefit of saving the lives of Ukrainian troops and civilians (because it’s non-combat attrition) and having a potentially cascading effect (the more people that quit, the more others are likely to quit since it reduces both manpower and morale).

I don’t think it’s a big deal yet (although morale is a big deal), but it possibly could be.

I’m not sure how many confirmed instances there were, but when Stalin wanted you gone, he not only killed you, but he photoshopped you out of all of your pictures. You were quite literally disappeared.

He who controls the past controls the future.

He who controls the present controls the past.

They need to be investigated as a criminal organization.