You are out of date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle

"After adjusting for demographics, in 2024, Mississippi was the nation’s #1 state in Reading as well as in Mathematics. The state was the state whose students’ performance increased the most from 2013 until 2022, despite the Covid-19 pandemic which contributed to depressed scores nationwide.[10]

Even without any adjustments for demographics, Mississippi ranks ninth in fourth-grade literacy. African-Americans in Mississippi outperform African-Americans in 47 of the other 49 states in reading; Mississippi’s Hispanic students actually lead the nation for their demographic in reading (and second place in math)."

The universe can’t be a simulation, the framerate is way too good.

Days before the Queen of England died, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? (Literally no, but I sure could speculate).

The “leadership” of the Democrat party sits to the right of several disparate further left factions. Because they don’t embrace any specific leftward direction, they are juggling half baked compromises instead of leading anywhere. Bold policies that would be approved of by one further left group are opposed by others, so they can’t go left without losing support somewhere. Staying where they are makes them moderately disagreeable for every one of the factions that can support and vote for them, so they are unpopular across the board. They are all but trapped not far enough to the right to contend for Republican votes, and not far enough left to propose anything truly different.

I see the candidacy of further left individuals (mostly at the local level for now, but this will move fast if the “leadership” collapses further) as the first serious mechanism to break this stalemate. Popular figures from city or state government aim for national positions frequently, so expect anyone standing out with how well they run things at the local level to make that pivot.

A similar thing is at play on the right. Christian fundamentalists, war hawk neoconservatives, the alt right, the would-be fascists, select business interests, nationalists, libertarians, and others are constantly battling over policy. At this moment about 70% of them are trying to ride Trump’s popularity and apparent effectiveness at making changes to get whatever is most important to them done before it’s too late. If the Republicans gain seats in 2026, that surface level unity will become even more significant, but once Trump is out of the picture, infighting is all but certain to resume on the right, and we’ll see weaker, “keep everyone happy” politicians take center stage again.

If both those processes play out with the right timing, we may get a true leftist running against a Jeb tier Republican in 2028 or 2032.

“AAA” gaming began as a reference to the “AAA” creditworthiness rating, meaning (essentially) “certain to repay the loan” // “certain to earn more than the development costs” (contrarespectively). AAA gaming has always been about the safe bet, the easy money, and the tailored to mass market design.

High budget games can only have so much ROI, so there’s kind of implicitly a limit on how much risk is tolerable for investors/publishers. Meanwhile, a game that costs a few million (or even less) could be the next big success, and rake in a massive sum - enough to justify its own budget in addition to many failed attempts to craft a star.

Even more risky is indie gaming, where the cost of development is provided by crazy people that want to produce “fun”, and gain money as some kind of (important) side effect. That’s where you get the wild “no one (in the know) would expect this to work” ideas, and most of them do fail, just as expected. The ones that are good enough to make it are by nature surprisingly good - indeed, this surprise is why publishers won’t go after the same concept under most conditions.

Are you perhaps thinking of someone else? As far as I’m aware, Schrödinger is only well known for work in particle physics, quantum mechanics, and related physics fields.

I flew to an industry event on a Southwest flight full of many people roughly my age, who worked my job, or related jobs. Deplaning was extremely fast once the door opened.

Maybe part of that is everyone being able bodied, and traveling without children, but I also didn’t see anyone that waited to get their items in order until the last minute, anyone that had to travel towards the back of the plane to get their carry on, or anyone who halfway entered the aisle, blocking it just enough that people couldn’t move past - which are all things I have seen on most other flights I’ve taken.

Trees are obviously made up by Canadians to disguise where maple syrup Really comes from.

Everything following this post, including your comment and mine is also part of a quotation spoken by a very confused talking horse, who was attempting to quote Socrates, but didn’t quite get it right." - A confused talking horse

What, you just go through life not daring people to try it? His long hair says: “See what happens. I dare you.”

I’m bragging when I say this: A decade ago, I rewrote an indecipherable mess of code into an elegant and transparent procedure, nestled comfortably inside every sanity/insanity check I could think of for the situation. Today, that code (aside from an update for a vulnerable dependency) is still running just the way I wrote it.

Releases should be fast and rare.

My Geiger counter is beeping occasionally, even though I’m hiding in my basement. Is… Is this the end?

He only believes in the first 22 words of the first amendment. If you want to speak about what he has done, or (far worse) gather with others that share your beliefs to speak extra loud… straight to jail.

I’d rather focus on ripping cars out of cities, promoting mixed use zoning areas, removing regulations on food service (which is the reason small American food vendors need food trucks, instead of “street food” like the rest of the world.

The disjointed, car based, child hating society we have is a big problem.

What we have done is invented massive, automatic, no holds barred pattern recognition machines. LLMs use detected patterns in text to respond to questions. Image recognition is pattern recognition, with some of those patterns named things (like “cat”, or “book”). Image generation is a little different, but basically just flips the image recognition on its head, and edits images to look more like the patterns that it was taught to recognize.

This can all do some cool stuff. There are some very helpful outcomes. It’s also (automatically, ruthlessly, and unknowingly) internalizing biases, preferences, attitudes and behaviors from the billion plus humans on the internet, and perpetuating them in all sorts of ways, some of which we don’t even know to look for.

This makes its potential applications in medicine rather terrifying. Do thousands of doctors all think women are lying about their symptoms? Well, now your AI does too. Do thousands of doctors suggest more expensive treatments for some groups, and less expensive for others? AI can find that pattern.

This is also true in law (I know there’s supposed to be no systemic bias in our court systems, but AI can find those patterns, too), engineering (any guesses how human engineers change their safety practices based on the area a bridge or dam will be installed in? AI will find out for us), etc, etc.

The thing that makes AI bad for some use cases is that it never knows which patterns it is supposed to find, and which ones it isn’t supposed to find. Until we have better tools to tell it not to notice some of these things, and to scrub away a lot of the randomness that’s left behind inside popular models, there’s severe constraints on what it should be doing.

I’m a Senior Computer Software Developer Programming Engineer, or SCSDPE (which is pronounced Skuzz-Deep), and I will be irreparably miffed if you get it wrong.

For your convenience, I also accept “that guy that sits weirdly close to the water fountain”, “hey”, and “paid keyboard user”.

Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.

He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.

I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.