Does this sound like the administration was just passively letting companies know they might want to take a look at something?

"Humphrey sent a copy of the email to Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), former Deputy
Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy, on the email and asked if “we can keep
an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.” The email read, “Hey folks-Wanted to flag the
below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP.... On February 6, 2021, Flaherty requested Twitter to remove a parody account
linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter. The
request stated, “Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” and
“Please remove this account immediately... On May 5, 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“Psaki”) publicly
began pushing Facebook and other social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 misinformation.
At a White House Press Conference, Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media
platforms of the threat of “legal consequences” if they do not censor misinformation more
aggressively.... The next day, Flaherty followed up with another email to Facebook and chastised Facebook
for not catching various COVID-19 misinformation. Flaherty demanded more information about
Facebook’s efforts to demote borderline content.... Things apparently became tense between the White House and Facebook after that,
culminating in Flaherty’s July 15, 2021 email to Facebook, in which Flaherty stated: “Are you
guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”"

We are talking about the people who can investigate you, raid your office (who's to say who gets shot if that doesn't go well), send you to jail for life, decide to quash your business deals or pass unfavorable policy, etc. Where's "the evidence they were threatened with something"? Idk, where's the evidence that the guy who walked into a gas station and asked for a $100 from the register while tapping his holstered side arm was threatening the cashier? Just a polite request. Never mind if they definitely could do something about it and are getting increasingly angry with you for not complying, per above.

False. The judge states (pg. 93),
"The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the meritson their claim that the United States Government, through the White House and numerous federal agencies, pressured and encouraged social-media companies to suppress free speech. Defendants used meetings and communications with social-media companies to pressure those companies to take down, reduce, and suppress the free speech of American citizens.

You can make the observation that this a preliminary ruling the government has infringed on our First Amendment rights but not that it doesn't rule the government has infringed on our First Amendment rights - which it does.

Also false. From the decision, the government is prohibited from
"(1) meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging,
pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content
containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms;
3
(2) specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding
such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for
removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
(3) urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media
companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content
containing protected free speech;
(4) emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any
kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for
removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
(5) collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working
with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or
any like project or group for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any
manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media
companies containing protected free speech;
(6) threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to
remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech;
(7) taking any action such as urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any
manner social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content protected
by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution;
(8) following up with social-media companies to determine whether the social-media
companies removed, deleted, suppressed, or reduced previous social-media postings containing
protected free speech;
(9) requesting content reports from social-media companies detailing actions taken to
remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content containing protected free speech; and
(10) notifying social-media companies to Be on The Lookout (“BOLO”) for postings
containing protected free speech."

Tl;dr: the evidence shows the government infringed on free speech and, to avoid further harm, they are ordered to stop doing so. There is more process to go through before issuing the final ruling, but the judge expects to find against the government.

It's ridiculous to claim Biden is simply acting on delegated authority when he vetoed a bill passed by the House and Senate to block his student loan plan.

So the same congress whose borrowed authority he would allegedly be acting under says he can't do it. But he insists he will anyway. That's no longer delegation, that is just a power grab.

A present legal right, certainly. But not a moral right. To me it feels somewhat unethical for Google to (a) purchase youtube (b) use their financial resources to subsidize it into becoming essentially the default video viewing platform (c) once they have captured all the content and users turn around and put onerous burdens on users to drive profit, when those users never would have given their patronage to youtube initially if the same policies had been in place. You can probably point to other video hosting startups that failed precisely because their ad supported models had to compete with google's initial low/ad-free model they subsidized with their massive cash flow from other sources.

Why not? People here were big on "net neutrality" which did exactly that - limit companies' ability to treat users differently depending on their usage. Could just as well say you have to serve people content regardless of how they consume your ads. Or could require entities that make money off user-contributed content give those users more control over how that content is served. Or investigate google for anti-competitive practices.

Not going to break down if those ideas are good or bad, but the notion tech companies can just always do what they want and we have to accept it isn't true, and starts to fail horribly once a few big players seize the market.

Does gutting the first amendment really need to be Plan A?

There are a million other ways to mitigate situations like this. If you want to pass a law that says "you must stop unnecessarily contacting someone who makes an official complaint about it" I am 99.9% confident that will stand up to SCOTUS inspection just fine.

It's making a moral evaluation of the content of personal expression that puts a law in bad stead when it comes to free speech protections. But (to the extent you don't run afoul of any other guaranteed rights) you're going to be fine to pass laws regarding behavior.

Even if you entirely agree with the summary, it feels belittling reading it that the author doesn't trust you to reach the right conclusions without heavy-handed guidance in every sentence.

Note the use of the words "only" and "outliers" and "appear", and then scare quotes around "low confidence". All words designed to let you know you need to disregard whatever is being referred to.

The DOE is $50 billion dollar/yr department that covers national laboratories that do clearance work and brimming with PhDs, the FBI is probably the word's biggest and most sophisticated law enforcement agency, with tens of thousands of personnel. It focuses on domestic intelligence but also has dozens of field foreign field offices.

But the dismissive language lets you know they are basically just country bumpkins not suave enough to keep up with the crowd.

Careful not even to give the director a name. But then who the director is isn't important. What IS important is that - hey, you don't like Trump right? Cool, well here's his name appearing next to the word FBI, so you know you're not supposed to like them either.

Apparently this whole years long national intelligence investigation was to address "rumors online."

Remember in when the WHO was still saying there was "no evidence" of airborne transmission of SAR-COV-2 many months after it was already commonly accepted by the medical community that it was? What they were effectively saying was that nobody had definitely proved it as being true according to gold standard medical evidence, but it was a stupid failure of communication because everyone took it as "covid is not airborne" when the reality was there was more evidence for it being airborne than not.

This is the same sort of claim, but it is being purposely presented to as refutation of a possibility, when the reality is it just asserts there is presently no smoking gun for that possibility.

Another thing that no serious person has continued to propose. But the purpose in making multiple references to it here is with the specific intent of conflating this with a conventional lab escape, so that the very strong evidence against the first case can, in the confusion, be taken as a repudiation of the entirely plausible second case.

Another stupid rhetorical trick. "While X is suggested, Y is the actual truth" is the pattern you are already supposed to be thinking in by having just read these two words.

You're also supposed to forgot about the first evidence presented (researches who worked at the research laboratory came down covid with symptoms at the start of the pandemic) and have moved out to a different thought (no one was hospitalized with covid symptoms) and also hopefully have gotten lost in the confusing morass of "other diseases" "could have been" "consistent with" etc.

Also, I guess no need to mention the whole reason a lot of this evidence has to be couched with "but we can't 100% know for sure" is because China's government specifically suppressed and prevented timely investigation. Which is itself a fairly decent piece of (yes, non-conclusive) evidence that can be tallied on the lab-leak side of the discussion.

While expectations may well be overstated, I don't see that humans on Mechanical Turk taking shortcuts is an example of a fundamental limitation. You can literally just pay people more.

The point of generative models for person X to be able to get instant answers to their dozen questions. But the human-reinforcement part of building the underlying model can be PhDs taking their time to carefully curate responses. Even now ChatGPT is running on years old data.

The measurements were performed in tiny "houses" which were sealed to the outside. House 1 and House 2 (~100 m^2 in size), which produced the greatest results, had bedrooms immediately adjacent to the kitchen. The oven was left on for 1.5 hours. The most egregious emitting gas ovens were ~2 times the median emission (so what you should actually expect to get is ~ 1/2 the worst case the article reports).

Excerpts from the paper:

So I guess it is possible that someone could experience these levels if they live in a tiny apartment, close all windows, turn off any heating/cooling, make something that takes > hour to cook, has one of the least efficient ovens, and continues to keeps their apartment sealed for the next 8 hours.

There is also no precisely quantifiable risk here. Benzene is a carcinogen and it's believed more exposure is increasing your risk of developing cancer, but no one could tell you from this study that you are x% more likely to develop cancer because you cook twice a week on a gas stove. You are also likely exposed to benzene from other sources as well such as gasoline, wildfires, car exhaust, general air pollution, glues, paints, and detergents.

The main take away should be that good ventilation while cooking is an easy precaution to minimize risk if you are cooking with gas or propane. Which was already a good idea for the CO/CO2. I would say very little reason to worry otherwise, at least based on this study.

The story you weave is entirely fictional.

Basic research funding has ballooned since the 50s, with a continual increase in federal funding, and a sharp increase in private funding since the 80s.

Research funding overall has vastly increased and largely due to industry investment.

Just in our present topic of fusion there are dozens of private companies investing billions to make it viable.

It was an extremely mild if critical comment. To suggest it shouldn't even be permitted in the discussion I can only assume it trampled on sacred tenets you hold dear. But I think the employees themselves and most people on slashdot can shrug it off just fine.

Most developers already have the skills for good documentation, they just don't realize it because they think they're now doing something different governed by the rules of their high school English teacher.

The purpose of internal documentation is the same as anything else hidden from customers that you still spend time building - to save you time and make your life easier. Just like with code you should
- refactor, delete dead code, Don't Repeat Yourself - documentation that can't be found might as well not have been written. It should be searchable both by text search (good keywords and proper terminology) and by navigation (highly structured, let's people find things when they don't already know they would be there). Any text they are exposed to that isn't answers their question is just slowing them down and increasing complexity. Prefer diagrams (with descriptions) to text and bullet points to paragraphs. And only put and define things in one spot. Everything else (such as user documentation) should be downstream. When you want to update the officially perceived truth of how something works, you should only have to make one change.
- avoid premature optimization - that said, deleting and organizing come after writing. Just get things down and then optimize. The proper structure will become more obvious once you see where you are repeating similar information or not using parts of the document
- automate - generated information is more reliable than manually updated information, and less work is better than more, and not being frustrated is even better still. Use monitoring, queries, and scripts to pull information rather than collecting it. Leverage integrations to point people to your documentation and get them contributing to it. Examples might be using templates for structured docs such as meeting notes or investigations, a workflow that adds support questions to your FAQ, or pulling in all the tickets from a release so that you get a list of what was implemented without having to write anything beyond the initial tickets.
- collaborate - you will not get as much done by yourself, and it will not be as high of quality without extra eyes. But also don't expect people to contribute high-quality work if what they are interacting with is garbage, and don't expect them to contribute much at all to things that aren't integrated into their day-to-day. A few people might need to pilot getting the documentation that exists organized and in a good state, just like with an ambitious refactor, but the goal is that people are actively using it so that they also are actively contributing.

If you are looking for tooling to support your efforts, maybe take a look at Slite.

.
* Almost every non-homeowner cites economic limitations as the reason they haven't purchased a homne
* Mortgage subsidies increase home ownership and increase housing prices

So yes does seem like money will go towards housing and result in increased housing prices.

You're saying people are going to expend their extra $24,000/year entirely on Snicker's Bars and cell phone contracts?

While you can indeed expect all of those prices to rise as after the COVID stimulus, you can also expect that extra money will largely wind up as savings. Generally, investing in a home is how middle-class people build equity.

What is your evidence that "Demand for housing won't rise much with UBI" and that prices will be stable? What are comparable examples that have not been inflationary?

They did. It does.

But it also gets point for destroying the target.

So it gets the most points if it stays within the parameters of what the operator asks and also destroys the target.

Since the operator didn't issue a "please don't kill me" directive and can't issue a "don't kill the target" directive after being killed, the drone is remaining compliant with every directive it receives the entire time and getting the maximum points.

No, they are in fact doing exactly what they should be doing which is identifying all the ways the system can break. That's why this is only a simulation. They didn't neglect to put in failsafes; they are identifying which failsafes will be needed.

In the US you would typically not expect not to serve any jail time at all as a copyright infringement is a civil matter between the rights holder and the infringer.

In the most extreme case I can so far find where it elevated to criminal charges, Artur Sargsyan (Sharebeast) received a 5 year prison sentence.

So an 11 sentence paroled at 5.5 in the UK considered civilized but a straight 5 year sentence in the US is considered barbaric? Interesting standard.

Solar panels exploit a quite incredible degree of inequilibrium and can run passively continuously in the sense that there is no worry about the system making much headway toward equilibrium any time soon.

But you can't have a thermodynamic process that proceeds spontaneously in both directions, and the problem is (with a system where the pieces aren't starting that far off from equilibrium) if we are relying on e.g. some chemical affinity to condense the water and collect its heat of condensation, that same affinity is just going to keep holding the condensed water indefinitely until some external input drives it off. And once the reaction surface/nanopores are saturated with water, no more water will condense. Equilibrium reached and power output over.

If this is using these porous material as 'fuel' then presumably this is more like a battery and you have to go and cook off the water, or else throw the material away and go get some more if you want to keep producing power.

Being able to see how the brain is processing stimuli as painful or not has the potential to strongly alter society's take on methods of execution/euthanasia, including for animals, and late term abortion. All those scenarios where you asserted something was done humanely but couldn't actually ask the subject about the experience after the fact.