Pretty sure whatever he died from came from bats. Or hamsters

1. 'She', not 'he', AIUI. I can assure you from personal experience that anatomically Russians are indistinguishable in all important respects from other humans.
2. Or more likely marnosets. The commonest vector for plague in this region is the mamoset. I'm not even sure hamsters are found within several thousands km of this area.
3. The disease has a long history in this area. A recent article : "Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586... Nature Vol654 697, 18 June 2026
     "Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years)."

We're all the descendents of the people who for whatever genetic reason survived the plagues in the past and thats why plaque hasn't reoccured as an epidemic since the middle ages.

Except - that was our (mostly) ancestors acquiring a degree of immunity to a strain of the bacterium circulating 250 and more years ago.

It's fairly unlikely that current wild-type strains are the same strain.

Bacteria do evolve in the wild, you know. (Everything evolves in the wild.)

Now they can do to Babylon 5 what they did to Star Trek.

Oh yeah. We are partying now.

And what does the language matter anyway when you can now type in pseudocode into Copilot and ask it to form perfect equivalent code in any language?

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”

To be fair, I think most people are just token predictors.

Come on - we've seen the advertising Miami put out to the rest of the world. There is no transformation necessary.

How is OpenAI morally right?!?

Best case for OpenAI is that they heard rumours that a researcher was closing in on a NS breakthrough using a specific method, so they instantly set a team on the problem giving them with a massive amount of resources. Their internal team then specifically guided the model to use the same very specific direction the researchers was using, something they (nor the model) would ever have known to do without the rumours. A detail that OpenAI conveniently left out of the narrative.

And that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that because the researcher was using ChatGPT to work on drafts of the paper and those drafts ended up in the training data for the model. So rather than discovering anything the agents just implemented / finished off the work they already had access to.

It's insanely sketchy. The NYU researcher is honestly being extraordinarily calm about the whole thing, typically in a situation like this people would be getting close to a fist fight.

It's not just phones. I recently switched back to FF from Vivaldi on my desktop with the death of Manifest V2, and in one day of use, It'll hit 3 GB of ram of more with 1 active tab. It's gotten very annoying

It's hilarious, the moment I saw the headline of the article I knew the US would object.

And the moment I read "By 164 votes to one" I realized that the US had attained the dubious honour of being even more of an international gong show than North Korea.

That's not how it works. Just consider how hard SpaceX has tried (and largely failed) to make Grok as reactionary as Elon Musk.

The trouble is that these LLMs act as if they're intelligent people, and it's really hard to convince intelligent people to stay inside a sandbox.

It is the God-sold (not "-given" ; TANSTAAFL) duty of all US people to pay homage to the God of consumption at all times. What do you think that million bucks in the back pocket of "No-tab Kegsbreath" was for?

That's what happens when you pay $60B for a VS code fork.

On the contrary it sounds like he did a ton to fix the supply chain.

But he fixed it for Apple Shareholders and customers, instead of Americans in general.

As a Canadian, I'm probably happier buying from China than the US at this point.

Its generally all been published -- "real published" not "self published". And a lot of it has won various notable Canadian awards. These are not he highest bars by far but it does generally reliably filter out the stuff that's actually "poorly written". Again, I think you are being too hard on it and letting cyncism color your subjective review. Sure it may not hit the new york times bestseller list (for many reasons) but its not nearly as bad as you make out.

You've had some bananas teachers in a school/district captured by bananas administration it seems. My kids have not experienced that kind of crazy. Not every teacher was great, we definitely encountered some "B Ark" people; but overall it was pretty positive and, as I've made plain, I've come away supporting a lot of the concepts of the curriculum, even if the execution needs improvement.

I will say that letting the kids pick their own books is a shitshow. They largely pick the modern equivalent of 'penny dreadfuls' (the literary equivalent of pablum) and worse they'll pick the same books every year, because that's even less work for them. Sure they should be encouraged to read a couple books of whatever they want and write about it, but forcing them through a curriculum of curated books is worth it. I'd never have read many of the local works nor international classics i was forced through in school if I'd been given a choice. I remember what i was choosing to read at the time - I might have enjoyed it more, but largely, it was NOT "better" quality.