“Kash Patel denies rumors he possesses a modicum of personal integrity.”

Yeah, but this poll was from Gallup—who trusts them?

See the Silurian hypothesis:

The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment, which assesses modern science’s ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago.

The problem with matter that doesn’t interact electromagnetically is that everything else can pass right through it. (That’s why dark matter theoretically remains in halos around galaxies instead of getting incorporated into galactic discs via friction with other matter.)

If dark matter can only interact via gravity, it can only attract other matter toward it (albeit very weakly)—including both matter and antimatter. So it can’t keep matter and antimatter apart.

You’d also have no way of manipulating the dark matter itself, except through gravity.

Dark matter interacts via gravity but not electromagnetism (including light). So its particles would have no electric charge, and thus no distinct antiparticles.

If any of the polygraph operators are opposed to Patel, this would be a convenient way to get his actual loyalists fired without evidence.

I wouldn’t be surprised if forces on the ground deliberately downplayed the damage when reporting to Trump so he wouldn’t endanger them all with further escalations.

It’s ultimately also an observation about what LLMs can and can’t be, based on the structures they’re reproducing:

Languages are systems. They can most certainly have biases, but they do not and cannot have goals. Exactly the same is true for the mathematical models of language that are produced by transformers, and that power interfaces such as ChatGPT. We can blame the English language for a lot of things. But it is never going to become conscious and decide to turn us into paperclips.

Yeah—I just don’t understand how they disentangle the two if they’re both happening simultaneously.

I would have thought the volume of water retained on land by dams would be more than offset by the volume lost to melting glaciers.

But if anyone knows that already, it’s FBI staff.

The sponsor would have to be able to publicly demonstrate that the assassin was paid, though—otherwise they could claim to have paid the bounty while keeping the money, and the assassin couldn‘t protest without exposing their identity.

That’s why I’m specifically wondering about the public aspect of the bounty—it presupposes that the assassin will be publicly known and able to conduct financial transactions afterward, and that the sponsor will be able to openly make good on their promise.

I’m not asking whether there have been any previous similar bounties—I’m asking whether any of them were the primary incentive for a successful assassination.

The attempt against Rushdie failed, and the attacker claims to have had religious rather than financial motivations (and doesn’t seem to have planned to escape to collect payment in any case).

Has there ever been an assassination that was motivated by a public bounty? And did the assassin successfully collect?

Predicting with 64% accuracy how voters will respond to a potential campaign strategy would be enough to comfortably win an election.

I never used it in person, but the LFP (light field picture) format used by Lytro cameras was an interesting concept—you could change the focus, depth of field, and perspective after the image was captured.

Lion, falling behind: “I’m wasted on cross country—we cats are natural sprinters!”

A better idea would be using Medicaid recipients to replace incompetent cabinet secretaries.

Fluid construction grammar
Unscented transform
Heteroglossia
Lorenz system
Relict (biology)
Yuezhi