I'm going to tell you right now there is no way this passes a background check unless the companies wanted it to.

It's just like how anytime we want to put a stop to illegal immigration you just throw a few businesses that hire them in jail.

But instead we brutalize the immigrants and look the other way 99% of the time when the businesses commit the crime.

Every now and then some small business owner gets raked over the coals but never any of the big ones. It's usually some shitty little Mexican restaurant somewhere.

Meanwhile it's impossible to have sensible immigration policies, like you know we get to have H1B doctors in rural towns where nobody will work but we don't bring in a limitless supply of JavaScript programmers...

That is way too much nuance for the American voter. Let alone having a discussion of taking the increased GDP from immigration and giving it to all citizens instead of shunting it up to the top as fast as we can.

In the last 40 years the top 1% have taken about 60 trillion with a t dollars out of the economy.

The guy running from our drug wars cutting your grass isn't the problem.

Ideally, it should be a hair space (because em dashes in web fonts are borderline illegible without it), but Slashdot does not support Unicode, and   gets silently swallowed by Slashdot's HTML parser. Besides, we all know that AP style is the one true style, and it demands space.

No, an en dash is used for numerical ranges and certain compound hyphentions, not for parentheticals.

Oh yeah I agree that Putin is more dangerous than Kamala but it doesn't matter how dangerous he is as an individual if we just give Ukraine enough weapons then it's over for Russia they're going to have to back out.

However more and more it's looking like Putin has dirt on Trump involving the Epstein files and underaged girls. I don't mean girls who are like 17 and a half years old we're talking 12 and 13 year olds...

It's also extremely likely that Putin has pictures of trump in a variety of bizarre compromising positions because it's not uncommon for ultra-wealthy people to take those kind of pictures with other ultra wealthy people as a kind of dead man's switch in order to make sure nobody betrays anyone.

A while back one of the ivy League colleges had a bunch of it leak.

Russia would be finished. Jeffrey Epstein apparently expressed concern that Vladimir Putin might have a picture of Donald Trump giving Bill Clinton a blowjob.

Now I suspect that's an amusing exaggeration but the implication is that Putin absolutely has black male material on the US president. Probably pictures of him raping one of the eight women who have credibly accused him of it when they were under the age of 14.

Now with the supreme Court basically making Trump God that's not really going to change much I don't think. The Republican party is never going to remove him from office after all and the current Senate map favors the Republican party so the Democrats don't have a prayer in hell of getting a supermajority there.

still one thing I think this is going to do, Trump is absolutely going to do everything he can to remain in office after 2028. It's going to be painfully obvious that he committed very heinous acts that can be prosecuted. And there's going to be no shortage of people that want to prosecute him for it. As president he's basically immune but is a private citizen?

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

And that is the key demographic that would likely have cable. So when they stop, and enough others stop, Cable is in even more trouble than their almost 50 percent drop.

SO and I still have cable, but it's the same thing. She watched Youtube videos, I watch Youtube videos. She keeps things like court shows on for background sound in the house. I watch science channel late at night. But really, the offerings on cable and network TV kind of stink. How many shows can we have of some hot babe banging 10 different guys, than picking one to marry, or real housewives who aren't, or sassy African women fighting with each other? So they're spiraling, and catering to a strange demographic.

The problem with the stable coin is they aren't stable. It's basically a bank but without regulation.

You give them your money and they agree that they will hold on to it. That's a bank.

Multiple stable coin providers have been caught giving out the underlying assets when they're not supposed to. Often by taking extremely high risk bets with the money.

Because they aren't Banks you don't have any recourse when they do that and because they aren't Banks you aren't insured and because they aren't Banks there are reams and reams of regulations and paperwork they do not have to file with anyone so they can hide things on their books a bank can only dream of.

It's something that a functional civilization would nip in the bud by applying the same banking regulations but more and more we are a failed state.

Sports packages get really expensive really fast and often don't have all the games you want to watch. I'm not a sports fan but for those that are sometimes if you want to watch certain games the aren't in your area especially you're just going to have to pay for a package.

Sports streaming can be a bit of a mess and can often cost as much or more than cable.

I'll go with NHTSA and NASA over the "Barr Group" ambulance chasers, thank you. Barr found that it's possible if you get like a cosmic ray to flip just the right bit you could stick the throttle on (but still not make it overpower the brakes). NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases. In not a single actual case that they investigated did they find that it wasn't well explained by either stuck pedals or pedal misapplication (mainly the latter).

Could you please make no em dashes the default so that the 1% of us who actually know how to use em dashes correctly — professional writers and language nerds and so on — don't keep getting accused of using ChatGPT?

Thanks,
The aforementioned

Oh hi, I remember chatting with you earlier :) Sorry to hear about your back. If you're ever planning on visiting Iceland, drop me a line, I can make recommendations. :)

There's some fascinating new work on "inverse-vaccines". In the same way that antigens can be flagged as "foreign", they can also be flagged as "non-foreign" by attaching N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) to them. The liver recognizes that tag and uses it to suppress immune activation against that antigen.

That's not the goal of a vaccine against a dormant virus (destroying B-cells), it's about developing a more capable immune reaction against the virus itself. See for example the shingles vaccine (targets dormant VZV, aka shingles / chickenpox). With a strong immune recognition of the virus, as soon as it tries to reactivate, it's immediately targeted, preventing it from becoming problematic.

Dormant viruses use a combination of (A) techniques to suppress immune recognition of them, and (B) low / no reproduction until your body's immune recognition of them has weakened. Vaccines help deal with both issues.

(BTW, if you're getting up there in age and haven't gotten your shingles vaccine, do so. It's one of the "rougher" vaccines, IMHO (both on my initial and followup doses I had "flu symptoms" for a day, when I normally have no reaction at all to vaccines), but that's *way* better than getting shingles)