You don't need AI to identify competitive districts. There are 435 congressional districts. About 400 of them are solidly for one party or another, through a mix of gerrymandering and genuine voter preference. That leaves 35 that probably could go either way (including my own) *, with another 30 or so that *could* flip for the right candidate

There, I've saved you $millions on doing "AI" research, just by 1) being an informed citizen, who 2) hears about this situation through a variety of news outlets pouring over polling and trends, and who in turn 3) get some of their information from the thousands of think tanks and PACs that spend every day looking at this stuff.

* competitive districts: AZ-01, AZ-06, CA-13, CA-22, CA-45, CA-48, CO-08, FL-23, IA-01, IA-03, MI-07, MI-08, MI-10, NC-01, NE-02, NJ-07, NJ-09, NM-02, NV-03, NY-03, NY-04, NY-17, NY-19, OH-01, OH-09, OH-13, PA-07, PA-08, PA-10, TX-28, TX-34, VA-01, VA-02, VA-07, WA-03, WI-03

US 'not in favor' of doing one damn thing, least of all acknowledging there's even a problem.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!

They can, and do do that, already.

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.

Because your DNS failing over doesnt fail the lookups IN THE DNS over all your other services in another zone. You have to actually UPDATE THE DNS. Thats what this change does.

An LLM doesn't have a "system clock" any more than your brain does. Do you know anything at all about how LLMs work?

If an LLM made a decision to "check it's system clock" for the time, then it is no different than it calling out to a web service to do the same. It is a RAG-enabled external tool use. That is all it is.

I am saying that the question is irrelevant, just like a lot of pontificating about AGI is.

An LLM needing to use an external tool to check the time, is irrelevant as to how intelligent it is. Humans also need to use tools to check the time.

It's a stupid thing to even discuss.

The problem is that if you're running your primary DNS on Route53 in US-EAST and US-EAST goes down, you're currently fucked.

The real solution isn't this - it is decoupling DNS from AWS. You should not rely on your DNS and core infrastructure from the same vendor. Makes zero sense.

There is no reason your entire operation should be consolidated into one vendor's infrastructure in one region. It is just foolish to do this.

Use a different company like Cloudflare* for DNS. Use their native tooling to be able to automatically fail-over to another AWS region when your primary region dies.

Note that this requires cross-region replication to be set up, which is expensive so it only makes sense to do this when you are a mega enterprise.

* Yes I realize Cloudflare also went down recently. But the benefit of the DNS protocol is you can host it at multiple providers simultaneously. Nothing stops you from using Cloudflare *and* AWS both for DNS.

Humans are notoriously horrible at measuring the passage of time. Ever heard of the expression "a watched pot never boils" or "time flies when you're having fun"? Where do you think those expressions come from?

If I took away your watch/phone and all external tools and asked you to be able to tell me what time it was a few hours from now, do you think you would succeed within even a 30 minute margin of error?

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)