9.24

In another way, though, the Replicator initiative is a radical departure from business as usual in the Department of Defense. It is meant to accelerate the invention of military technology in order to change the way the United States fights wars and practices deterrence. Replicator, Hicks declared, would “field attritable autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands in multiple domains within the next eighteen to twenty-four months.” As she envisions it, there will be “constellations” of these systems “flung into space, scores at a time”; pods of small, solar-propelled boats outfitted with sensors, trawling the ocean and relaying real-time intelligence; and “flocks” of aerial drones, some conducting surveillance and others carrying weapons. Instead of concentrating Defense Department resources on exorbitantly expensive and complicated equipment, which would have to be operational for decades to justify the cost, Replicator aims to deploy equipment with a much shorter shelf life, allowing for constant reinvention of technologies.

No matter how slick and stylized you make it, and no matter what your experience ultimately is, your resume is just a handy little cheat sheet you’re going to need for different reasons. Applying for a job on an employer’s website amounts to transcribing everything — top to bottom, line by line, everything—from your resume over to their application form. Yep, that’s right: you have to re-type everything on your resume nearly every single time. I don’t know about you, but when you do that once or twice in a row, I’m sure as hell not in a French-accent mood.

This boy, orphaned and mutilated on a savage morning in 1382, would by 1405 become the second most powerful man in the world’s largest and most advanced nation, the commanding Admiral of the Western Seas who strides through the Ming scroll photocopy that sits on my desk as I write. He would become the greatest seafarer in the 5,000-year annals of China.

Frog season in Louisiana runs year-round, with the exception of April and May, when it closes to allow the amphibians to breed undisturbed. While it’s possible to catch frogs all year, Jody says late winter and early fall are best. Late winter is good because the lilies haven’t greened up yet and it’s easy to spot the frogs. Late summer and early fall are good because the water in the Atchafalaya Basin falls, concentrating the frogs. Ideally, you want days that are warm but not too warm, followed by nights that are cool but not too cool. “Frogs feed on the crawfish under the lilies right after dusk,” Jody explains. “When they’re full, they float to the surface and kind of lie there.” Today we had a daytime high in the mid-eighties, which should drop to the mid-sixties after dark. Jody reckons we should have excellent frogging. A friend of his caught more than two hundred the other night and sold them for two dollars apiece.

As companies grow and as they go public, a consolidation of this information happens. Still, engineers still have access to business data for their organization that helps guide their decision making.
At traditional companies, much of this does not exist. Engineers get the spec, and the higher ups will know why something is decided – at least, that’s the idea.

Overall, the results from both empirical strategies suggest that tea was associated with larger declines in mortality rates in areas that had worse water quality to begin with. To provide further support for the mechanism behind these relationships, namely, boiled water, I use cause-specific death data from London to show that higher tea imports curbed deaths from water-borne diseases such as dysentery, but did not significantly affect deaths that were not directly linked to water quality . Thus, the totality of the results point to the importance of tea, and in particular the boiling of water, in reducing mortality rates across England during this important period in economic development.

According to Appelbaum: “Many journalists who have worked on the Snowden archive know significantly more than they have revealed in public. It is in this sense that the Snowden archive has almost completely failed to create change: many of the backdoors and sabotage unknown to us before 2013 is still unknown to us today.”

That’s because the Universal Product Code (UPC) — the barcode used on every product in grocery and retail stores all over the globe — changed everything 50 years ago. Barcodes are scanned billions of times each day, and award-winning engineer Paul McEnroe, who spent more than two decades in leadership roles at IBM, assembled and led the team that transformed the technology from an idea into the reality that endures.

Months after Ángel García Padrón fixed a German journalist’s MacBook Pro in his small Havana repair shop, she sent him an email. García Padrón had mended her waterlogged laptop after her home in Cuba flooded, but when the journalist took it to an official Apple Store in Berlin, the authorized repair person had expressed disbelief, saying there was no trace of any water damage at all. “Then my Cuban repairman must be a magician,” she recounted telling the Apple worker. García Padrón is used to conjuring these sorts of tricks on a daily basis — the skills required to deal with Apple products in Cuba require a special sort of magic.

Investigations suggest that, in some fields, at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up, warn some researchers. They urge stronger scrutiny.

Over the past 40 years of American politics, college-educated white voters have defected from the Republican Party, while the white working class has become a reliable source of Republican support. I study the issue basis of this realignment. To do so, I generate over-time estimates of public opinion on four broad issue domains from 1984 to 2020 and develop a theoretical framework to understand how issue attitudes translate into electoral coalitions. Using this framework, I find that both economic and cultural issues have contributed to the observed realignment. College-educated white voters have become increasingly liberal on economic issues since the mid-2000s; college- educated voters now express more liberal views than working class voters on every issue domain. Over the same time period, cultural issues have become more important for the voting decisions of the working class. The increasing weight placed on non-economic issues means that the conservative cultural attitudes of white working class voters translate to Republican support at a higher rate than in the past. Together, these findings suggest a nuanced role for economic and cultural issues in structuring political coalitions. Educational realignment has deep roots across issue domains, suggesting that the new coalitions are likely to be stable into the foreseeable future

SpaceX launched its 67th rocket of the year on Tuesday night, a staggering total for the company and its workhorse booster, the Falcon 9. At this pace, a clip of one launch every four days, the company is likely to launch 90 or more rockets during this calendar year. This Starlink satellite launch was notable for a couple of other reasons. It marked the first time SpaceX has reused a Falcon 9 first stage 17 times. This booster, serial number 1058, had previously flown 11 previous Starlink missions along with GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, and Transporter-6.

Moreover, even if a Republican *could* recapture the presidency, they’d be stuck with the flaming bag of dog poop that is DC’s financial position — $33T+ of debt and counting[1]. And you actually don’t want to be at the helm when this thing crashes.[2]. So, if Republicans were smart, they’d understand what areas they’re strong on, and focus there, rather than putting all their hopes on Hail Mary passes for national control.

In 1940, only five years after Dukas’s death, Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski collaborated on a short animated film starring Mickey Mouse as the mischievous apprentice who, weary of toting water buckets through his master’s underground workshop, waits until the master has retired for the night, then dons his magical cap and enchants a humble broom to do the job.

Our updated generative AI market map is below. Unlike last year’s map, we have chosen to organize this map by use case rather than by model modality. This reflects two important thrusts in the market: Generative AI’s evolution from technology hammer to actual use cases and value, and the increasingly multimodal nature of generative AI applications.

In such a state of affairs, many years ago and with much that was plainly wrong already present, the “New Coke” fiasco occurred, wherein Coke’s executives came to the brink of destroying the most valuable trademark in the world. The academically correct reaction to this immense and well-publicized fiasco would have been the sort of reaction Boeing would display if three of its new airplanes crashed in a single week. After all, product integrity is involved in each case, and the plain educational failure was immense.

“At that time (1909) the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.”

In my view, pharmaceuticals are undervalued and underinvested in because, despite high prices, pharmaceutical innovations earn only a fraction of the value that they create (Nordhaus finds that in general that innovations reap only a small share of the gains that they create). In 2014, for example, we got Harvoni a new treatment that offered a complete cure for hepatitis C (HCV) infection. In 2014, Harvoni cost over $1000 a pill and between $60,000 and $100,000 for a full treatment. In 2015 Medicaid spent more on Harvoni than on any other drug and there were calls for regulation and price controls. Studies showed, however, that even at that high price, Harvoni was value/cost-effective. Today, with more competition, there are equivalent versions of Harvoni available from Amazon for $12,869 (and 64 cents) which is still expensive but cheap for a cure for an often debilitating and sometimes life-threatening disease (and the price is less for a private insurance buyer or Medicare/Medicaid). In 2030, Harvoni will go generic and prices will fall much more.

States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.

And it’s beneficial for companies to shift computing requirements from their servers to their customers browsers: a real win for reducing their spend on infrastructure.

We looked at all lawsuits occurring against OpenAI and listed them below. In addition to the relevant detail we had a lawyer provide some commentary. This list will remain updated as an easy-to-reference location for any lawsuits against OpenAI ordered by date (oldest to newest).

For centuries grape growers in different communities passed down lore about where their grapes came from. Some governments, particularly in Europe, designated appellations—strictly circumscribed regions with rules on how and where a varietal such as burgundy, rioja or barolo was legally allowed to grow and be produced. But genetic studies to discover where vines originated thousands of years ago began in earnest only 10 or 15 years ago.

However, the studio said it decided it would be better to put the future of the company in someone else’s hands, with Goro Miyazaki believing it would be too difficult to bear the responsibility on his own, according to the press release.

On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be promptly shut down to prevent further exploitation, but by that point, the damage was already done. Malicious actors had been exfiltrating data for several months and had already collected personal information from 163 million customers.

Jack Poulson has an insider’s background, an outsider’s perspective, and unique technical expertise, making him an invaluable resource for monitoring the world of national security contracting.

It’s just a matter of time before people start to realize that we need some genuinely new ideas in the field, either new mechanisms (perhaps neurosymbolic 2), or different approaches altogether.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today announced it is beginning a rulemaking process to remove medical bills from Americans’ credit reports. The CFPB outlined proposals under consideration that would help families financially recover from medical crises, stop debt collectors from coercing people into paying bills they may not even owe, and ensure that creditors are not relying on data that is often plagued with inaccuracies and mistakes.

Despite all his technical achievements, Barroso told WIRED in 2012 that mentoring interns was “probably the thing I’m best at.” Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, who brought Barroso to Google in 2001 with interviews over crème brûlée, tweeted on Monday without naming his onetime research partner, “Sometimes close friends and colleagues leave us altogether too soon.”

Micron Technology is set to break ground on its $2.75 billion semiconductor testing and assembly plant in Gujarat’s Sanand, just three months after announcing the project. This marks the largest investment under the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), with Micron contributing $825 million, and the rest covered by subsidies. The plant is expected to be operational by late 2024.

I have been walking Austrian footpaths for decades. They form a wonderful network, and the signs are a wonder in themselves. How beautiful can a footpath be? Austria’s are amongst the best. I particularly enjoy the country’s system of footpath signs. Over the past three years here I have photographed many of them. I reproduce a selection here.

Or at least that was the case until May 2019, when the Agriculture Ministry abruptly disqualified all halal certifiers eligible to operate in the United States, except for one newly licensed company: IS EG Halal Certified. Five months later, the ministry awarded the same company exclusive certification rights in South America as well, a major source of Egypt’s imported meat.

From Nero to Sunak, leaders have always put on a show for the public. The scholar explores the notorious Roman emperor’s fondness for acting and how the stage became a metaphor for power itself

If Milley was a real patriot (or our system worked), he would have resigned in disgrace after the catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan.

Modern Buildings in London was authored by the outspoken architectural critic and broadcaster Ian Nairn, a man who’d made headlines nearly a decade earlier after coining the term “subtopia” to describe the degraded state of Britain’s built environment. Its publisher was London Transport, and reflecting something of the flavour of those times, copies were actually sold from automatic vending machines in selected stations.

The Accord Hybrid is jumping out of the cake but it’s Tesla’s party now.

9.17

He gets a 39% approval rating which is lower than his predecessors at this stage. But in addition, 58% say that they are worse off than they were before Biden became president. 22% say they are better off. A whopping 73% say that Biden should NOT run again, including up to 65% of Democrats. So what does this mean? Let’s pick it apart and make some predictions.

According to two sources familiar with the company’s manifest, however, it does appear that Blue Origin is finally getting ready to fly the New Shepard launch system again. The company’s tentative plans call for an uncrewed test flight to occur in early October. If all goes well, Blue Origin is then planning its first crewed mission since August 4, 2022, to take place in mid-February of next year.

Patrick also experiences a lot of new things outside of his actual activity. Through the close cooperation with the Chinese colleagues, he quickly got an impression and a better understanding of the Chinese culture and way of life. “Hospitality is a central value in Chinese society. Invitations to dinner are very common and they are an expression of appreciation and respect for the guests,” he tells of his experiences. Food is much more than just the satisfaction of hunger. It is a social event where family and friends come together and spend time together. Chinese cuisine is known for its versatility, its variety of tastes and its refined preparation methods. The regional diversity is reflected in a wide range of flavors and specialties. “In the Chinese language, in addition to the words that describe the taste of a dish, there is also an expression of the feeling that a dish or the consistency of a dish evokes in the mouth,” Patrick illustrates the extremely high importance of food culture.

A few days ago, SpaceX launched its 63rd mission of 2023 – and the company has already topped last year’s record of 61 missions while flying at a blistering average of a launch every four days. Beyond the U.S. rocket market, SpaceX leads the world in both launches and spacecraft mass delivered to orbit each quarter. The company alone keeps the U.S. ahead of China, the next closest geopolitical competitor, in satellite and astronaut launches.

In 1952, the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed.

“If we continue to limit what can be built on most of the land in Madison, we will only continue the creep of high rises into neighborhoods or the exodus of home buyers into neighboring cities,” said resident Josh Olson.

Oracle is working to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards,” she said.

This presents a problem. Because the mainstream press still needs powerful people—quite literally, in the case of the Post, as it’s owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, who is no fonder of difficult stories about his companies than any other billionaire.

Permissionless II opener from @ErikVoorhees that got an entire crypto conference on their feet.

“You smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest and then you merchandise it and then you write it and they’ll say, see, it’s reported in the press that this, this, this and this, so they have that validation that the press reported the smear and then it’s called a wrap-up smear. Now I am going to merchandise the press’ report on the smear that we made. It’s a tactic”

Pirates are taking over the Oakland Estuary Marinas. Yes, pirates. And local and federal authorities says it’s getting so bad – the U.S. Coast Guard is deploying help to patrol the area. “Boat owners attacked by pirates,” said Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. “There are no excuses for that.”

Tesla’s current process to build its popular Model Y SUV already involves a unique use of massive, ultra-high pressure presses that can mold both the front and rear parts of the vehicle. Tesla calls this process “gigacasting,” which some experts say is already highly efficient and cost-effective compared to other automakers’ factories. But now Tesla is looking to up the ante.

However, WHOIS records don’t necessarily include geolocation information for allocated networks. Furthermore, organizations that own networks can use those networks in any geographical location they end up choosing. Even worse, those organizations can assign networks to any third-party organization or lease IP blocks to other entities. Therefore, it is inherently tricky to geolocate IP addresses and thus geolocation is often not accurate.

https://x.com/theevuniverse/status/1702589119614902640?s=12

I also made a few small quality of life improvement: using the browser’s language to suggest the user’s country, focusing on the right fields when moving between form stages, and a few other niceties. It’s subtle, but it adds up to a nice user experience.

A history of school choice

Matt Barnum:

Milton Friedman keeps alive his economic argument, which was for every kid regardless of income to have a voucher. Harvard professor Christopher Jenks has an idea of targeted vouchers for low-income children, as a tool of empowerment. There’s a small, sort of failed effort by the federal government in California to try out vouchers. 

There was a pretty solid push from a number of quarters in the ’60s and ’70s to provide some kind of government aid to religious schools, especially Catholic schools, because they were struggling during that time period. That didn’t end up going anywhere meaningful. 

In the ’80s, President Reagan was an advocate for vouchers. That also didn’t really go anywhere. Then the first modern school voucher program happens in Milwaukee in 1990. That’s when you start to see the beginning of this latest era.

Your book has many characters, but to me if there was a main character, it was Polly Williams. Can you describe her and her role in the school choice movement?

Polly Williams was a Black Democratic legislator in Wisconsin. She was kind of a contrarian. Probably the best explanation for her would be that she was a Black nationalist. She was very interested in education in Milwaukee, and she was very concerned that Black students were not being well served by the Milwaukee school district. She tried legislatively to do a number of different proposals to help Black students in Milwaukee. She was shot down at just about every turn, and so became kind of frustrated with Democrats, with her own party, and willing to look at alternatives.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

9.10

BMW AG is unveiling a fully electric platform for its Mini brand as the automaker looks to leverage its popular three-door hatchback to compete with a range of smaller Chinese battery-powered vehicles pushing into Europe. The new generation of the Mini Cooper EV will be on display at next week’s IAA car show in Munich, after BMW’s partner Great Wall Motor Co. helped develop the new all-electric underpinnings and will produce the car in China for import to Europe.

A common malicious functionality is to snoop on the user. This page records clearly established cases of proprietary software that spies on or tracks users. Manufacturers even refuse to say whether they snoop on users for the state.

Hidden in plain sight across the way from the Harris Ranch Supercharger’s main stations, behind a Shell station, is a small diesel plant that has helped power Tesla’s footprint.

Honda’s wordsmiths offer “rugged and sophisticated” to describe the stylists’ intent—like freeze-dried Chateaubriand.

Under the CAB, any changes in fares required its consent. Fares were set that virtually guaranteed labor costs would be covered. With new route authority often taking years to wind through the CAB’s bureaucracy for approval or disapproval, US carriers were well insulated from free-market competition. Those airlines that did fail were subject to mergers with stronger carriers, which needed access to the failing carrier’s routes, planes, and facilities in order to grow. The complete shutdown of a failing carrier was a rarity. Under deregulation, failing carriers were allowed to fail. Other airlines might buy assets, such as slots, gates, and planes, but the freedom to move into new markets was unfettered. Buying international routes still required government approval, however. With freedom, and in some cases, stupidity, management’s ability to cut fares below costs in a desperate effort to generate cash meant the underlying cost structures had to change. And labor’s cushy, decades-long ability to hold management hostage came under attack.

Cable TV has become too expensive for consumers and providers, Charter Communications said in an 11-page presentation to investors on Friday, adding that cord-cutters and rising fees are contributing to a “vicious video cycle.”

Then the pandemic wiped out this beloved sector. Today, trucks are back on the National Mall serving hot dogs for tourists. But the gourmet operations dishing up barbecue, Thai, Indonesian, Salvadoran and soul food are still missing downtown. There is perhaps no better vital sign of how D.C.’s recovery is going than the story of specialty food trucks. They follow the people. And they adapt fast. Many are operating again — in the suburbs. Instead of serving office workers lunch, many have found lucrative gigs dishing out dinner at weddings, block parties and other events. Instead of parking downtown, they’re hanging out at housing developments in Arlington, Alexandria and Bethesda, according to an analysis of Roaming Hunger data on where trucks are located.

FINRA is a nominally private non-profit corporation that regulates the securities brokerage industry subject to oversight by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But it wields vast legislative, executive, and adjudicatory powers over more than 600,000 individual brokers and thousands of broker-dealer firms nationwide. In a typical year FINRA bars hundreds of brokers from the securities industry and imposes tens of millions of dollars in aggregate fines against industry participants. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia concluded that FINRA is not a “state actor”—leaving the regulator unbound by most constitutional restraints when it investigates, prosecutes, and punishes alleged wrongdoers. That conclusion unwittingly confirmed, however, that FINRA violates both Article II of the Constitution, which prohibits empowering private law enforcement without close Executive Branch supervision, and the “private nondelegation doctrine,” a vital judicial principle that reserves binding federal power for the federal government alone to wield.

Will their upheaval succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

“You look at the existing financial system, then you look at what’s been built outside the existing financial system by crypto, and the crypto version is better,” Lewis said.

Bankman-Fried’s other turns onstage at the conference were similarly mindless. He stumbled through an interview with the former British prime minister Tony Blair and Clinton, who at one point extended a fatherly hand of support. He exchanged banalities about charity with Gisele Bündchen, with whom he’d posed for an FTX ad campaign that ran in Vogue and GQ, and platitudes about leadership with her husband, Tom Brady. “Does it ever get boring to win so much?” a moderator asked. “I get a little desensitized,” Bankman-Fried said. “I never get tired of winning,” Brady said.

Our investigation found that a consumer signing system crash in April of 2021 resulted in a snapshot of the crashed process (“crash dump”). The crash dumps, which redact sensitive information, should not include the signing key. In this case, a race condition allowed the key to be present in the crash dump (this issue has been corrected). The key material’s presence in the crash dump was not detected by our systems (this issue has been corrected).

People constantly using First Premises as arguments who do so compellingly basically establish cults. If you don’t believe we have cults within the photographic community, you’re not paying attention. Try asking someone “who makes the best lenses?” and see what happens. As a broad question, that can’t be answered, yet I see many trying to claim they have the answer.

Underlining how far Michelin has come from its roots in French fine dining, the inspectors raved about AJ’s Pit Bar-B-Q in Denver, where “cornbread leans inventive, and trust us when we say that you want the custard-stuffed version”. guide.michelin.com

Andreas Raptopoulos, chief executive of Matternet, a dronemaker that supplies UPS, said the exemption would allow a pilot at the company’s remote operations centre in Kentucky to fly drones in Florida.

By 1972 vending machines were the main channel of selling canned coffee, but most vending machines only had one mode: cold. Pokka collaborated with a vending machine manufacturer to build a “hot-and-cold” vending machine which could sell both hot and cold beverages simultaneously.

‘If they can extract the lithium in a very low energy intensive way, or in a process that does not consume much acid, then this can be economically very significant,’ says Borst. ‘The US would have its own supply of lithium and industries would be less scared about supply shortages.’

The 5,000-square-foot house sits on 3.3 acres with obviously gorgeous views. Le Carré’s writing room is in a detached studio building; the library features “bespoke joinery and a feature window at one end, glazed with what is believed to be part of the canopy” from a WWII fighter plane. Of course, there’s also a safe room. You can’t write that many espionage novels without getting just a little bit paranoid. Take a peek here:

“World’s Use of Pockets: Men’s Clothes Full of Them, While Women Have but Few . . . Civilization Demands Them” blared an 1899 New York Times headline. The reporter traced a startling divergence: “Man’s pockets have developed, improved, and increased with the advances of civilization. Woman is actually retrograding—losing ground and pockets.” The article joined a flurry of press coverage in the late 19th century, as women demanded “equality in pockets,” as an editorial in the Baltimore Sun put it, along with—gasp—the vote.

The very worst offender is Nissan. The Japanese car manufacturer admits in their privacy policy to collecting a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data — but doesn’t specify how. They say they can share and sell consumers’ “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties.

8.27

Open Terms Archive publicly records every version of the terms of digital services to enable democratic oversight.

Over the past five decades, the venture capital industry has become a notable force in fueling the start-up, growth, and impact of many innovative tech companies that have changed the world. Though the majority of startups do not receive funding from venture capitalists, in Silicon Valley they have invested in and helped launch and grow companies like Intel, Apple, Google and Uber, profoundly changing how billions of people live, work, and play.

Electricity maps.

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.” C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

By my count, there are currently 8,291 different vehicle license plates offered by the 50 states and the District of Columbia. States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.

The problem—whether or not you accept the premise that climate change threatens civilization—is that carbon-removal technologies are ineffective, and solar and wind power are nowhere near able to replace fossil fuel-based energy. The only way to achieve net-zero is by dramatically reducing carbon emissions, which would punish the American economy and destroy the capacity to develop technologies that might reduce the need for fossil fuels. “Think about the year 1970,” Mr. Huntsman says. “That’s the year we hit a trillion-dollar GDP, and the year Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote that great song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ A great year, right? Well today we’re emitting roughly 6,500 million metric tons of CO2. Same thing we were emitting in 1970. And look how much more electricity we’re using, and look how many more transportation and miles we’re driving. We’ve expanded the economy 30 times over, nearly, and core CO2 has stayed flat. We should be celebrating this achievement, shouldn’t we?”

Four weeks ago, I was feeling guilty for spending so much time inside playing Tears of the Kingdom, so I took it on myself to plan something for the National Day long weekend. That something turned out to be a hike from the westernmost point to the easternmost point in Luxembourg.

Archaeologists affiliated with the University of Chicago discovered the tablets in the 1930s while excavating in Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. However, the institute has resumed work in collaboration with colleagues in Iran, and the return of the tablets is part of a broadening of contacts between scholars in the two countries, said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

Garg has personally guaranteed any losses the Japanese conglomerate may suffer if it chooses to sell the debt. Meeting the terms of the guarantee could force Garg to sell his Better shares and drive down the stock price, a filing warned.

I have been on the boat – submarines are always called boats, never ships – for less than 24 hours and am writing this log at a depth of 60m. Sorry, I spoke too soon. We are just rising to periscope depth – 18m below the surface – and the tall desk on which I am typing has started to list. At least I’m not in the toilet. I joined HMS Triumph in Crete for the final week of its 10-month deployment. I had never been on a submarine before and don’t especially like confined spaces. I plan to get off at Gibraltar six days from now, though the captain warns me this may not be possible if there is fog as the launch can’t come alongside.

The origins of baklava date back to ancient times. Around the eighth century B.C.E., people in the Assyrian Empire, which spread across parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey, arranged unleavened flatbreads in layers, with chopped nuts in between, to be enjoyed during special events. Centuries later, the Ancient Greek and Roman “placenta cake” (the Latin placenta coming from the Greek word plakous, or “cheese cake,” not the unsavory afterbirth) was a dish consisting of many layers of dough, filled with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. However, the earliest versions of baklava as we know it today came around 500 years ago, during the Ottoman Empire.

It turns out that one simple message to the large and diverse Sun community is actually quite hard to craft. Even for a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip. The community includes our resellers and customers, our current and former employees, their friends and families who supported our employees on their mission to change the industry, our investors, our supply and service partners, students and educators, and even our competitors with whom we often collaborated.

I made a 800 square feet garden in San Francisco’s Mission District. Planning started in 2015 and we finally planted in January 2017. The process involved tearing up concrete, pouring a new sidewalk, hauling in clean soil, and patiently waiting for the wet season to plant.

Tiago thinks notes should be organized by actionability, and that each note should go in one and only one place in the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Conor thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking.

In the first interview since his appointment to Aria, Gur told the Financial Times that much of the agency’s success or failure would depend on its eight newly appointed programme directors who will select and fund projects. They will each have a budget of about £50mn. Aria expects to unveil the identities of the directors next month and Gur said: “They are empowered to take bold, not safe bets. We have an opportunity here to create something that could have a world-changing impact for future generations.”

What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I’ll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt.

All of these people, who spent decades sending the youth of America off to foreign lands to die for ‘democracy,’ when faced with the choice to defend it with their persons, tucked tail and ran. Bear in mind, these were the stakes they themselves outlined in subsequent accounts; Trump was trying to destroy the American government; he was trying to overturn the Constitution. Fair enough, but what did they do when faced with that threat? By their own admission they didn’t know if the country would survive Orange Hitler’s assault and they couldn’t know police would shortly restore order. According to them, they faced the greatest threat a country could face . . . and they ran away. They hid under their desks and the world watched them do it. The hero of the republic was an incompetent diversity hire cop who shot an unarmed woman in the neck. That’s it. There was no insurrection. No one was armed and no one tried to take over. That accusation is idiotic. No less pathetic than the MAGAgeddon, however, was the response, to simultaneously call it the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor and to flee in terror from their posts. Our nation faces a mortal threat and the people charged with meeting it are moral and physical cowards. Trump’s normiecon followers, people who send money to Hannity but wonder if that Matt Walsh is a little extreme, shuffled diabetically into the seat of power and walked off with trophies like Alaric in the Forum. They pushed, and the shell cracked.

The inspector of Abu Ghraib. I first learned of the tortures and other abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib late in 2003 while interviewing an ousted senior officer of the Iraqi air force. He took a dangerous seven-hour taxi ride from Baghdad to Damascus, where we met in an out-of-the-way hotel for three days. He wanted a way out of Iraq for his wife and two children, and I passed his name and contact information to various officials in Washington. One evening he brought up Abu Ghraib, about which I knew nothing, and told me that the US military, desperate to learn about the opposition in Iraq, had taken to seizing mothers and their children and jailing them there. The women were sending messages asking family members in Baghdad to come and kill them because they had been sexually abused by their American guards and interrogators.

8.20

Have you ever asked yourself what happens when you upload your PDFs to one of the many sites that offer PDF modifications on the internet? You should! We modify your PDF files in your browser, no upload required.

I first heard about the rescue of Pisces III about fifteen years ago from a ship’s captain while on a cruise around the Aeolian Islands, off the coast of Sicily. I filed it away and two years ago decided to dust the idea down and explore if it would work as, what I imagined, could be a ‘non-fiction thriller.’ What appealed to me was not only the plight of the men at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean but this international ‘Brotherhood of the Sea’—teams from Britain, Canada and America—who all came together to work on the rescue mission.

The pilot was forced to spend about two hours flying over the desert and the sea to dump around 80 tons of kerosene to enable the aircraft to land safely, prompting questions about the environmental damage caused by the Green minister’s trip.

Today, Judge Andrew Macrae reported that he and other judges on the Hong Kong Court of Appeal unanimously overruled the convictions against Hong Kong pro-democracy activists Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee, Margaret Ng, Lee Cheuk-yan, Leung Kwok-hung, Cyd Ho and Albert Ho for organising an unauthorised assembly in 2019. Their convictions for participating in an unauthorised assembly were upheld.

Developer experience is how much your (present and potential) devs want to work on a specific project. Poor developer experience is a byproduct of dissonance between perceived complexity of a project and tangible complexity of the systems and processes related to it.

The origin of this disaster is now becoming clear:  massive amounts of dry, dead fuel (mainly grass), strong downslope winds produced by strong trades interacting with local mountains, and human ignition, most probably from powerlines.

That means she explored the thousands of new food and consumer brands, picked the best ones, and helped them launch and scale their products in Whole Foods stores — a life-changing opportunity for many businesses. Also an incredible experience in data-gathering, deal flow, and network-building for a future investor. 

Last week, CNN announced the hiring of Jamaal Simmons, fresh off his role as Vice President Kamala Harris’s communications director. Her office has yet to replace Simmons, seemingly aware that CNN is taking on that job for Harris. Only two weeks prior to the Simmons hire, CNN announced that former Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfeld had been hired as an on-air commentator and contributor.

Dennis Giese taught DEFCON attendees how to secure their robot vacuums.

Chang thought the tech companies should focus on designing the microchips, and outsource the actual manufacture to a company that specialises in it. Chang suggested this to Texas Instruments over and over, but they never budged. Eventually, he was shifted sideways into a dead end role, and he quit.

Nearly 6,000 data request orders “complied with” in 2022. To ProtonMail’s credit, the organization publishes a transparency report going back to 2017. In it, we find the following statistics detailing legal orders for user data.

As a result of the crash, a large crowd gathered and multiple people began to obstruct paramedics, firefighters and police, according to MPD.

Judge interjects to reject notion that universities are ‘bastions of free speech’

Courtney McLain

Ninth Circuit Court Judge Milan Smith interjected during attorney Daniel Ortner’s remarks with a jest on the state of higher education in America, as seen in a recent clip uploaded to X.

An attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Ortner is seen presenting an oral argument defending conservative students’ free speech rights against California’s Clovis Community College.

“This court, and the Supreme Court, have repeatedly said that universities are bastions for free speech. They are important places for freedom of expression and debate …” states Ortner 

“Does it matter if that’s not true anymore?” Judge Smith jokingly interrupted.

8.13

Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.

I have followed all the steps for turning off the “login with google” popup window, but it very irritatingly still popping up! How do I make it stop? It’s REALLY ANNOYING!

So instead, we let the ultra-wealthy transfer what should have been a write-down of their private debt onto the backs of the general public. The apparatus of the Federal Reserve was used to buy huge amounts of their bad debt at face value. The monetization of this debt, euphemistically referred to as “Quantitative Easing”, has been going on ever since—to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per month. The Fed’s balance sheet expanded from approximately $4.2 trillion in late 2019, for example, to over $7.4 trillion by the end of 2020.

“I do think that some of the people are going to jump into the race at any time. But that is not my concern,” she said. “Rather than sitting on the couch, watching TV and complaining about it, I want to do something. That is the reason I am running.”

AG was very composed [during the meeting],” an employee told The Post. “He said ‘The Times faced a crossroads years ago and found ways to be innovative.’ He said: ‘We can’t be stuck in amber. We can’t keep trying to pursue this one model.’”

Amazon has confirmed it now plans to launch the first two test satellites for the company’s Kuiper broadband network on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket as soon as next month, shifting the payloads off of the inaugural flight of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

“The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6,” the paper reported.  

City Brewing Co. announced Monday the beer will once again be brewed in La Crosse starting in November as part of a long-term deal with Pabst Brewing Co., which now owns the brand.  Pabst, based in San Antonio, Texas, owns multiple beer brands, including Pabst Blue Ribbon, which are made under contract by other brewers. Old Style is brewed currently in Milwaukee.

I still don’t get the draw of Whataburger, however, until late in the week, when I realize I’ve mistakenly focused on the food and not the Idea of the Food. Throughout my adventure, I invited colleagues to dine with me, but most refused, which I took as a tacit admission of distaste for the chain. Then, one day, I ask one of the bigger Whataburger partisans in our office, who declines my invitation but, in doing so, gives me a breakthrough. 

A petition has been created, calling on senators and members of Congress to block the visas needed to bring in their foreign workers …

Schmitt is coming to Tesla from Bosch, where he had a more than 25-year career in engineering and manufacturing. The doctor in physics led several factories in Germany, China, and Mexico.

The typical reasons for the Chinese government imposing an exit ban that prohibits a foreigner from leaving China is for allegedly committing a crime, allegedly owing money to a Chinese company, or being in some other sort of dispute with a Chinese company or individual.

Scotus remains a polarising figure, but his humanist detractors would be horrified to learn that here in the 21st century we are witnessing a Scotus revival. Philosophers, theologians and intellectual historians are once again taking Scotus seriously, sometimes in a spirit of admiration and sometimes with passionate derision, but seriously nonetheless. Doubtless this is due in part to the progress of the International Scotistic Commission, which has in recent years completed critical editions of two of Scotus’s monumental works of philosophical theology: Ordinatio and Lectura. As these and other works have become more accessible, Scotus scholarship has boomed. According to the Scotus scholar Tobias Hoffmann, 20 per cent of all the Scotus scholarship produced over the past 70 years was produced in the past seven years. This explosion of interest in Scotus offers as good an occasion as any for introducing this brilliant and enigmatic thinker to a new audience.

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OpenStreetMap is the largest open-source geospatial project of all time. There are 18 formally established OSM chapters and dozens more local communities, collaborating on hundreds of communication channels, in more than 50 languages, in most of the countries of the world.  The map and its data is world-recognized as an essential source of geospatial ground truth. The API is used by millions of people, and the community is motivated,  multi-talented, and culturally and geographically diverse. OSM even welcomed its first paid site stability engineer a year ago in recognition of the size and scope of the project.

Except it doesn’t. Just look at the future line-up that Fisker, an ev startup, unveiled on August 3rd. It included: a souped-up, off-road version of the Ocean, which Henrik Fisker, the carmaker’s Danish co-founder, said would be suitable for a monster-truck rally; a “supercar” with a 1,000km (600-mile) range, and a pickup truck straight out of “Yellowstone”—complete with cowboy-hat holder. Granted, there was also an affordable six-seater called Pear. But though Fisker says sustainability is one of its founding principles, it is indulging in a trait almost universal among car firms: building bigger, burlier cars, even when they are electric.

“We said sure, but how do we make fritters?” Brown said. “Farm Trails arranged for us to get together with a couple of well-known local chefs at the home of one of them, and he had a bunch of recipes. … We practiced and tasted and picked a recipe, and so that was where it originated.”

Their absurd policies have turned Seattle into a playground for anarchists and criminals, and they seem utterly unconcerned with the devastating consequences of their actions,” wrote Jessica Taylor, who joined the force in 1998 and resigned last week. “If you haven’t noticed, the criminals are running this city.” Taylor refused to fill out a standard exit form and instead submitted the 15-page letter to chief of police Adrian Diaz, who she says “has brought this department and this city to its knees,” adding that the department “has transformed into a cesspool of corruption.”

Clarion Partners last purchased the building in 2014 for $107 million. It formerly included a ground-floor Walgreens that closed in Feb. 2022.  Sixty Spear St. joins a slate of office buildings exemplifying the struggling San Francisco office market. The 13-story 180 Howard St. building, known for being the headquarters of the State Bar of California, sold for about $62 million after being expected to sell for about $85 million.

This the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the United States National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden in 2013. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, that of a security area director of the IETF, that of a human rights expert, and that of a computer science and affiliate law professor. The purpose of this memo is to provide some historical perspective, while at the same time offering a view as to what security and privacy challenges the technical community should consider. These essays do not represent a consensus view, but that of the individual authors.

But don’t just consider the implementation cost. The real cost of increased complexity – often the much larger cost – is attention.

I fixed a bug that was in production for 2 years the other day. My boss said thank you, the UX researcher that called it out two years ago and was told it was not possible to do on our end said thank you. The product manager that had tried to tackle the issue a few times but gotten nowhere with their devs said thank you. It turns out that it was one of the biggest customer complaints and for some reason it had been neglected? ignored? idk. The change was about 20 lines of code, as they usually are, but had an outsized impact on customer satisfaction ratings. Why?

Still, LTCM seemed an unlikely candidate to spark a global financial panic, managing just $4.8 billion at the beginning of 1998. But it had also “amassed an amazing $100 billion in assets, virtually all of it borrowed,” Lowenstein writes, with most of Wall Street’s and Europe’s biggest banks on the hook. What’s more, thousands of derivative contracts—“essentially side bets on market prices”—added up to more than $1 trillion in market exposure, according to Lowenstein.

America’s strong populist tradition and distrust of “monied interests” has produced critics from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump. Why should wealthy corporate executives and shareholders be rescued while the rest of the nation gets no relief from financial turmoil they create, they ask? “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon is said to have told President Herbert Hoover—according to Hoover, anyway—after the Crash of 1929. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.…enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

FIVE MINUTES before we boarded the plane to Africa, Al Sharpton called the group into a circle to pray. It struck me as a fine idea. Sharpton’s plan to lead a delegation of American civil-rights activists into the middle of the Liberian civil war clearly was going to require some divine support. And that was assuming we even got there. A man in the departure lounge at JFK had just finished telling me a long and disturbing story about Ghana Airways, the carrier we had chosen for the eleven-hour flight over. Apparently, much of its fleet was in Italy at the moment, impounded for debt. The rest was aging, creaky, and, given the virtually bankrupt condition of the company, spottily maintained. “Ghana Airways probably won’t even exist a month from now,” the man said. I was all for praying.

NIH Secret Third-Party Royalty Database Uncovered

The officials also wanted to know why DuPont would agree to a deal with Huafon despite earlier misadventures with Chinese partners, including intellectual-property disputes involving Sorona that prompted Chinese authorities in 2017 to raid DuPont’s Shanghai offices and demand passwords to its research network.

8.6

But it’s one thing to build a good product; it’s entirely something else to get users to try it — especially if they have to quit the easiest and most ingrained thing on the internet to do so.

Disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart. In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which the young title character, whose name means “no one,” is drawn from his bedroom into boisterous adventures in Slumberland, where walking beds, Godzilla-sized turkeys, and races through the stars were common fare. Each full-page story ended with Nemo suddenly waking up in his own bed, begging the reader to consider what might be real and what might be a dream. Film scholar Tom W. Hoffer notes that in Nemo, either

Llama 2 is the latest commercially usable openly licensed Large Language Model, released by Meta AI a few weeks ago. I just released a new plugin for my LLM utility that adds support for Llama 2 and many other llama-cpp compatible models.

Headwind #2 is that San Francisco has tried to commit suicide, including out-of-control crime, cost, complacency, chaos, and some would argue communism. A wealthy friend recently told me that the state might as well tax you 100% because anyone who’s still living here obviously doesn’t care about taxes.

 “AS THE PRICE OF MEDICAL CARE MOUNTS, health insurance has become a necessity; but insurance premiums are becoming more expensive too, while benefits dwindle as rapidly as the costs of medical treatment increase. Money aside, the consumer’s major problem is finding his way about an increasingly impersonal, fragmented, irrationally arranged set of health services.” While this could be a quote from today, it was written in The New York Review of Books in 1970, just a few years after Lyndon B. Johnson introduced federal health care insurance for the elderly and the poor. Medicare and Medicaid were necessary, but the new multibillion-dollar programs had few guardrails; doctors and hospitals saw them as guaranteed subsidies.

Through a string of unchecked acquisitions over 30 years, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS USA Holdings, and National Beef have gained control of roughly 85% of the total hog, cattle, and poultry processing market. For brevity, we’ll call these four meat processing corporations “BigAg” (or “the cartel”).

On the other hand, the long fuselage, with a fineness ratio well over 10, is not structurally optimal (too long and thin). The weight of the fuselage employed in a real aircraft is, therefore, higher than for the shorter and more optimal dual aisle fuselage.

“One thing we added that’s actually pretty unique is we created parking spaces in the shop for our road technicians’ trucks,” he says. “It keeps the trucks out of the weather, and it makes the technicians more efficient, because all their tools are right there with them in the shop.”

Before the pandemic, the vast majority of Chinese households and smaller private businesses relied on an implicit “no politics, no problem” bargain, in place since the early 1980s: the CCP ultimately controlled property rights, but as long as people stayed out of politics, the party would stay out of their economic life. This modus vivendi is found in many autocratic regimes that wish to keep their citizens satisfied and productive, and it worked beautifully for China over the past four decades.

Automation is often a solution in search of a problem. It is a choice people have made, not an inevitability and certainly not a necessity. For instance, the United States faces a scarcity of truck drivers. The American Trucking Association has estimated that in 2021 there were 80,000 fewer drivers than the total needed and that, given the age of current drivers, over a million new ones will have to be recruited in the coming decade. To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce the demand for drivers. For Bezos, such technology makes corporate financial sense; Amazon relies on low shipping costs to keep its prices down. But it does not make wider economic sense because millions of people would be happy to drive trucks in the United States—they just need to be allowed to work in the country.

All three admitted they flagrantly lied either under oath to Congress or to federal investigators. The three were never indicted for their false and perjurious testimonies.

Three decades ago, James Carville, the American political adviser, quipped about wanting to be resurrected as the bond market because “you can intimidate everyone”. Since then, the market has grown fivefold. Tighter regulations on traditional lenders resulting from the recent rash of bank failures in the US will force even more borrowers towards bonds.

Shall a penny have more weight in my heart and give me more courage than God himself, who holds heaven and earth in his power, who gives us the air we breathe and the water we drink, who makes our corn to grow and gives us all things? It is so scandalous that it cannot be uttered, that God should not amount to as much with us as a hundred guilders. Why not think that God, who has created me, will surely feed me, if he wants me to live? If he does not want this, very well, I shall be satisfied.

7.30

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.