The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.

Oh, it’s fantasy

I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.

As other people have said, it would be way worse to have him him assassinated. If it’s looking like he’s going to lose, I could see the people who want the US unstable to prefer assassinating him instead.

This country has horrific systemic racism, and that might very will have instigated this scenario.

On the other hand, if there’s a guy prowling between the houses of my neighborhood, even if he’s in uniform, I’m going to call the police to make sure it’s legit, and I’m going to describe him as best I can, including skin color.

It’s a valid point, but it’s kind of like saying it’s great that the restaurant you’ve started going to has such a small menu compared to the old one because you’re not eating as much.

Loathsome, misogynistic convicted felon? Yeah, about right, though at 72 he’s a bit young.

He’s got some weird things about fathering children. That story about him wanting to donate his sperm to Mars settlers was just too bizarre.

So if a group of guys came to your neighbors house and told the family that they’re going to move into it with them, you wouldn’t be for removing them, even if that meant a fight? It would be better to just let them move in because that way no one gets hurt?

And if they successfully move into your neighbor’s house, they might have eyes on your house next.

Russia is trying to take over Ukraine, a sovereign country, by force, and other countries are trying to help Ukraine fight Russia. Yes, people on both sides are dying. Ukrainians apparently overwhelmingly believe it’s worth the fight.

It’s really infuriating. Every time he’s asked a question, and she gets a rebuttal, he just starts rebutting her rebuttal and they just let him. And half the time what he’s says has nothing to do with the question that was asked. They cut Kamala off pretty much every time.

The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.

But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.

I’ve always told my family I like to build up “cart karma.” You get karma by bringing a cart in with you from the parking lot, or returning the one you use after. You lose karma by leaving your cart in the parking lot. Even if I’m going in for a single item, I’ll take a cart in from the parking lot with me and leave it in the rack by the store.

I don’t really care about cart karma, it’s just a way of saying that it seems like the nice thing to do.

Crazy: guy has a puppy off leash in a yard without a fence and is mad when it runs into the street.

“Watch for the voter fraud because we win without voter fraud,” Trump said. “We win so easily. Hopefully, we’re going to win anyway. But we want to keep it down."

Yeah, this is just him doing more to set up January 6 Part 2.

It’s kind of amazing how upfront they are about it

The Republican response is literally that they’re going to defund the IRS. If there weren’t 100 other things demonstrating that the Republican party serves the ultra rich, and not the people, it would be astonishing.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.

That’s bullshit. Democrats all over the place are saying this is likely to be a close election and people really need to get out and vote to beat Trump.

The only sense it’s true that Democrats are taking about it being rigged are that actual, known attempts to rig it, like the fake electors scheme and the storming of the capital, along with the grotesque gerrymandering, all of which is verifiable.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.