7.30

Posted on by

Elections rarely end the way people expect them when they start. In spring 2015, everyone expected the presidential showdown to be Bush vs Clinton 3: Rise of the Megadonors. Donald Trump’s rise as a serious candidate and victory surprised everyone (especially me), showing outsiders can influence the byzantine swamp of DC. Earlier this year the general consensus expected 2024 to repeat established themes with Trump vs Biden 2: Geriatric Wars. Ron Desantis looked as though he would overtake Trump but started flaming out in March, beginning with his flip-flop on Ukraine.

It is important to note, however, that while a location like Kosovo may provide added protection, it is not a guarantee against censorship or attacks. Hosting content that is controversial or politically sensitive always carries some level of risk, and it is important to carefully consider the potential consequences before hosting such content. In practice while some internet related laws exist in Kosovo they are not enforced by lack of competent officials (that are also underpaid, and often not paid on time at all), in fact the central government in Pristina does not even have control over its Serbian majority east where militias and the Serbian government hold a tight grip on everything, heavily armed and prepared for war at any time. Serbian authorities do not cooperate with Kosovo.

By any standard, mainframes are enormous. Today’s mainframe can have up to 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB of error-correcting RAM, and many petabytes of redundant flash-based secondary storage. They’re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptime—that’s a bit over five minutes’ worth of outage per year. A medium-sized bank may use a mainframe to run 50 or more separate financial applications and supporting processes and employ thousands of support personnel to keep things running smoothly.

There are 1,847 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S. housing 20,040 Tesla Supercharger ports, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s roughly a quarter of all DC Fast (the quickest type of EV charger) EV charging stations in the country and nearly two-thirds of all DC Fast EV charging ports.

Their stories animate the complex relationship to place: What happens when you stay, what happens when you leave, and what of the multitude of moments in between. The stories transport readers to different parts of the state, whether stretches of roaming tumbleweeds, the parking lot of a subdued strip mall, or a coastal one-light municipality. “Just empty, windblown charm. The same tiny town I remember,” Kimberly King Parsons writes in “Whiskey Sour.”

The madness of crowds aside, it is worth reflecting on what we concretely know about LLMs at this point in time and how these insights sparked the latest AI fervor. This will help put into perspective the relevance of current research efforts and the possibilities that abound.

NASA also said that two old MD-90 airframes that will be used to build the prototype have been taken out of storage at a desert airfield in Victorville, Calif., and moved to a facility in Palmdale, Calif., for conversion. Both jets were formerly operated by Delta Air Lines.

Wait, I thought Elon built a series of tremendous blowout startup businesses to earn that wealth? Isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing? Prior to Elon, Twitter was a cesspool and worked hand in hand with the US Government to kill free speech. That’s called fascism. I bet the same professor isn’t upset with the way the Washington Post and New York Times operate. I don’t think taking class with him would be all that productive. I saw an article about how the current US Presidential administration has turned the US military academies into woke factories instead of leadership factories designed to create career officers. Not really a surprise given what they have done everywhere else in the government. My friend Jeff has a piece up on how the military falls far short of goals. I liked the military better when they had the motto “when you absolutely, positively have to blow things up.” Here is an old USMA Men’s Volleyball t-shirt. Do you think they could wear it today when we are instructing cadets to refer to their parents as guardians and not “Mom and Dad” so as not to offend anyone?

We heard some frantic voices calling out that the tow line had snapped, that the vessel was adrift and headed for the rocks,” said Beaudoin, who remembers a split second of silence on board the aircraft as the news sunk in. Bonomi doesn’t recall the exact words the Sea Tow captain shouted into his radio as he watched the Privateer being swept away by the waves and current. But he said it was something to the effect of: “Coast Guard, you’ve got to do something!”

What Ponsin didn’t know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible. The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.

I am extremely concerned for you that those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your own belief, that it is in any way ‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos. It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether its the music business or yourself doing the pimping.

The data also shows that eSIM technology is finding particular appeal among dual-SIM users, and is further driving the adoption of dual-SIM usage in a number of markets where the usage was previously limited or non-existent. The latter trend is particularly visible in the U.S. and South Korea – compared to a year ago dual-SIM penetration nearly doubled in the U.S. (+89%) and more than tripled in South Korea (+217%). The eSIM + physical SIM combination has opened up the door to dual-SIM usage in these two markets – among our dual-SIM users with an eSIM-capable phone, respectively 87.3% and 89.9% had an active eSIM alongside their physical SIM in Q1 2023. Taiwan’s share stood at 51.9%, but the market has an established and widespread penetration of dual-SIM usage (17.8% of all users had dual-SIM there in the same period). Indonesia, meanwhile, while having high penetration of dual-SIM usage (57.7%), is still at a very early stage of eSIM adoption, with only 2.6% of dual-SIM users with an eSIM installed, among eSIM-capable device base in Q1 2023.

On the evening of July 19th, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Sky watchers from southern California to Arizona witnessed a magnificent exhaust plume. At the San Francisco Volcanic Field north of Flagstaff, photographer Jeremy Perez saw something extra:

I find this explanation intelligent, informed, and interesting—yet unsatisfying, in the same way and for the same reasons as I find Robert Allen’s explanation unsatisfying: I don’t believe that industrialization was so contingent on such very specific factors. When you consider the breadth of problems being solved and advances being made in so many different areas, the progress of that era looks less like a lucky break, and more like a general problem-solving ability getting applied to the challenge of human existence. (I tried to get Devereaux’s thoughts on this, but I guess he was too busy to give much of an answer.)

Willie Nelson was also on the bill that night, and seeing the way O’Connor was treated, invited her to join him in the studio the next day. The song they recorded, released on his 1993 album, Across the Borderline, was a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up.” Gabriel’s original 1986 version was inspired by the Dust Bowl–era photography of Dorothea Lange, but written and sung from the point of view of a contemporary English miner left behind by the Margaret Thatcher economy. His narrator’s despair is palpable, but he finds the resolve to carry on in a prechorus sung by his wife—in Gabriel’s case, duet partner Kate Bush—who reassures him, “Don’t give up, you’re not beaten yet . . . you still have us.”

Welcome to The Hacker’s Dictionary, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

A new study estimates ~800,000 Americans are permanently disabled or die each year from diagnostic medical errors. Concurrently, multiple reports look at ways this may be reduced, including artificial intelligence. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review the scope of the problem and prospects for improvement that are desperately needed.