It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.

Surely not that. That would be dumb. And awful. And utterly corrupt.

Sigh.

Except it's not a concerning issue. Hantavirus doesn't spread well from human to human except when in close quarters (e.g. cruise ships). When you do the math based on the number of people on the ship, the likely R_0 would be *way* less than one out in the real world. So realistically, if they had evacuated the cruise ship after the first case, most of the people who got sick wouldn't have gotten sick, and you'd have at most maybe one or two cases in people who weren't on the ship, and that's about the realistic limit to its spread.

I don't remember the exact numbers I came up with, but it was something laughable like an R_0 of 0.15 or something.

It's a human interest story, because folks felt for the people trapped on that ship, but it was not a meaningful public health threat given the numbers involved.

It of course works to some extent. It doesn't work to an extent that it can replace a meaningful part of engineer time, though it can certainly be used for rapid prototyping and other special cases.

Most of engineers' time isn't spent writing code. It is spent reviewing code and understanding the code. When a person writes code, they are doing this while they write the code. When AI writes the code, that time is spent on the back end while reviewing the code. This is actually more mentally intensive than writing the code to begin with, because you're having to concentrate much more continuously. This means it takes longer, on average, and you're much more likely to make mistakes and miss critical errors during the review process, because you're trying to shove all of that mental effort into a much smaller amount of time. So you save a lot of time up front, and you pay back nearly all of that time at the end.

Until such time as AI can write perfect code that doesn't require human review, the review process will continue to be the bottleneck, and I'm not seeing any evidence that AI is approaching that point.

AI is great for creating demos that you're going to throw away and rewrite a dozen times. Teams that are playing with ideas for new features can potentially generate a lot more prototypes quickly by using AI. But they're saving time precisely because it's throwaway code. As soon as you're trying to use it for production code, the savings evaporate. Or at least this is what I have seen pretty consistently.

This is not to say that AI is useless for coding. When used as a glorified autocomplete engine, it can save you from a lot of tedious busywork. When used for code review, it at least has the potential to catch interesting bugs before they make it into production. And so on. But the notion that this will suddenly allow for cutting a large percentage of programmers is utterly naïve. Given their previous cuts, they've already exceeded the expected payoff from AI. So blaming this on AI savings isn't realistic.

So the real question is whether they'll be able to get their AI tech up to the quality and scalability level where they can survive on only that revenue before their social media platform craters from inadequate resourcing.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

It's the dream of sociopathic greedy billionaires everywhere. Too bad for them that it's a pipe dream.

Here's the harsh reality: AI doesn't work. You can spend days cajoling AI into doing something correctly and spend days reviewing the bad code over and over until it gets it right or you can spend days writing the code. On average, the time savings are minimal, and the cost in terms of code understanding is enormous, resulting in less and less maintainable code over time until you eventually end up having to throw the whole thing away and rewrite it from scratch at an enormous cost.

Mind you, Meta was probably at the point where their whole code base needed to be thrown away and rewritten from scratch at least five years ago, given the level of bugginess that I've seen, so maybe AI lets them extend the long tail of badly written code a bit longer before they completely implode, but that's hardly a position for other execs to aspire to.

They won't. They'll have a bumpy few months followed by mass attrition from the complete destruction of employee morale, followed by panic when they realize that they don't have enough remaining employees to keep the lights on adequately, followed by even bigger panic when they realize qualified candidates aren't even bothering to apply for their open positions.

Nobody wants to work for a dying shell of a company that laid off a third of their workers over only a couple of years. As a company, if you're not innovating and growing, you're dying. Meta is dying. Their AI is basically worst-in-class at this point, and everything else is getting shoved aside to make more money for that latest boondoggle, because their execs don't know how to recognize a sunk cost fallacy.

It would take a literal miracle to save Meta from the death spiral that this will cause. If I owned Meta stock, I'd be selling in a hurry right now, or at least selling covered calls to buy protective puts to limit my losses. Stick a fork in it. They're done.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

They drag them to school, but at that point, there's a record, and if it keeps happening, it becomes a legal problem for the parents, who have a responsibility for making sure their kids go to school.

To a school that is under-funded in part because kids aren't meeting the minimum attendance for the school to get paid.

All of those things are the responsibility of their parents. Those are adult problems for adults to solve. Kids can't realistically solve them, and can't reasonably be expected to solve them. And as soon as you let kids try to solve them, you're reinforcing the cycle of poverty by preventing them from getting the education that would enable to them to break that cycle. I'm not saying it's fair or good, just that preventing such things is better than the alternative, where we have child labor who grow up to be adults who earn minimum wage or worse.

Anyone with legal experience answer, I'm curious how a question of statute of limitations went to the jury. Is that not a decision of law? And if that was a major factor, how was that not decided first? A full trial wasn't needed to decide whether or not there was even grounds to sue.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

Will it catch the president, who has been on a rampant insider trading and market manipulation spree for his whole second term?

What about congress?

What will the SEC do when it flags top politicians? I think all of us know the answer to that question.

Context error. You weren't growing up in the '60s to know, or rather feel, how different the Beatles were at the time; not so much very early Beatles but a bit later. The only reason you feel like it is elevator music is that their music has become so pervasive, and does not rock the house down.

The Beatles could never happen now because music execs want to see immediate return, not wait for a band to come together and give the band time to really gel their song writing abilities up to snuff. And execs do not seem to want to promote bands so much as individual artists. A band involves several moving parts any one of which can destroy the band. The result is that the music produced to today is rather banal and has little soul. You have go to progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion to get the most interesting music. And that space has been steadily shrinking as youngins are rarely exposed to it.

Another issue is many musicians back then were simply better without needing a lot of pseudo effects. I do not think the Beatles were particularly good musicians but they knew how to write well once they go into their stride. If you listen to Deep Purple, or Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath, or Yes from back then, you can really see how they excelled at their instruments. Incidentally, Deep Purple is still doing gigs. Richie Blackmore is off on his traditional music kick and Jon Lord has passed on. But Don Airey is certainly an excellent keyboardist and their current guitarist Simon McBride is very capable, although I liked Steve Morse (the previous fellow who took over for Blackmore so that Blackmore could spend more time with his ego) better.

No, what serves those countries right was paying tribute to el Bunko thinking they were buying security when in effect they were only encouraging a moron who has a powerful military so that his screwups become major screwups for the entire world.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.