I'm not conflating anything.

The attack on Iran is certainly on a scale that requires congressional authorisation

And yet there isn't one.

You seem to have an idealized view of the way your country works that you just haven't bothered to consider might be wrong. It is.

So you are making a distinction without a difference.

No, it's a very important distinction, and I'm not the one making it. It's made in US law, law that requires new law (and thus is subject to veto) to change.

You must be an American. Practicality equals hatred for you, at least when it's not aligned with your personal desires.

from circa 2016 to 2024, there was a certain insanity that the US was engaged in.

One does not trust one's national well-being to an "ally" that engages in "certain insanity", periodically or otherwise. It doesn't matter whether 50%+x of your countrymen are assholes, your education system makes you easy victims of propaganda, your political system allows a vicious minority to seize power, or some other reason.

Donald Trump didn't start any new wars. Nor did he continue any old ones because there aren't any. The last time the US started a war was four years before he was born, against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.

US governments, particularly the post-WWII ones, have consistently passed laws giving the president more and more emergency powers which, combined with a little creative wording, has given them more and more power generally. The US has changed from having a government dominated by an elected assembly with a subordinate executive to one dominated by one person with very broad power. Russia uses euphemisms for war for propaganda purposes. The US uses them to get around awkward bits in its constitution.

Most of what Donald Trump has done, not just the wars, has used emergency powers. And guess what? Repealing those laws requires passing laws, which require either presidential assent or an anti-veto super majority in congress.

What's stopping you?

Safari, and I'm sure most of the other browsers, let you set your own custom CSS, override any bit of the website's CSS or HTML, and have plugins to make all of that automatic by website.

Every major OS has at least one built in rendering engine that makes it pretty trivial to write your own browser and do WTF you want.

Nobody who changes weights ever "understands the complete model." The way you normally train them is to compute the difference between the output you're getting and the one you want, then use the chain rule to calculate what direction to nudge everything. That's gradient descent optimization.

There have been some papers looking at training optimizers that work better than the engineered ones. It sounds like these large generalist models can do that at least a bit too.

Yes, you can turn it on by editing the registry. As opposed to, you know, clicking a checkbox. Or just doing it as the default.

Yeah, editing the registry isn't a proper setting.

Because people like to create recurring events that move with their timezone, e.g. weekly stupid meeting @ 4 pm every Friday.

The solution is to define the recurring event as a generator in the local timezone in which it was created, and use it to create actual events in UTC. If the user changes their timezone they have to decide whether they want to generator to remain as it is or be translated into the new timezone.

From the summary it sounds like they did adjust the timezones but they didn't anticipate that anyone would actually change timezones. That doesn't particularly surprise me since Windows doesn't even have a setting to keep the system clock in UTC.

Yes, that's what happens when you try and dictate silly timezone things to people. Newfoundland is a small island that was an independent British dominion when timezones were formalized, and they didn't send anybody to the conference. They eventually realized they needed some standardization and picked something within a minute of St. John's solar time, which is in the extreme east. Most of Labrador, in the west, thought that was dumb and so, outside of a little chunk around the ferry landing, they don't use it.

Newfoundland itself is a holdout with their half hour timezone. They used to be fairly common but all but a few have switched forwards or backwards to align within a whole number of hours. It's been proposed in Newfoundland a few times too but the Newfies like being different. They can get away with it because the only connections to the area using NST/NDT are air, a three hundred kilometre highway with literally nothing on it, a 6-7 hour ferry and another 14-18 hour ferry that only runs in the summer.

I have one actually. Very nice.

Why stop there? You should live in a small village with no more people than you can know personally, interact with the outside world very rarely and no more than absolutely necessary and devote your life to worship.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Amish are a religious splinter group with specific beliefs, i.e. a cult.

The group sex alien suicide cults are a small minority.

While Putin seems to have made up that specific term (in Russian) the Soviet Union was fond of liberations and friendly assistance.

The US has a long history of police actions, contingency operations, interventions, incursions, expeditions, foreign internal defence (probably my favourite), targeted strikes, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation etc.