Proud to say that in Colorado, ranked choice voting is on the ballot this year! It’s even supported by the big political names here, including the governor.

I actually had the TI-59. I remember I entered a program where you are trying to avoid a missile running on vectors and a mine that was teleporting around on a Cartesian grid, and saved that on one of the magnetic strips. And also programmed the quadratic equation on a magnetic card. It had a base it could attach to that provided power and had a thermal printer strip. That calculator also had a place to put a pre-programmed chip into it. I think I had casino games or something.

If you’re wondering how I had all that in high school, well that was what my dad thought would buy my affection when he left my mom for the secretary… Didn’t work, but I got a piece of cutting edge hardware for it.

Which is why I am happy to be a metallurgical engineer who can blacksmith…

No, there was a small slot that you would feed the magnetic card into from left to right. It had a little motor that would pull it through. I still have mine somewhere.

I think that was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, iirc

I think this is why LLMs work, and some research backs this up. Humans actually don’t create new phrases for unique situations very frequently. Much or even most of what we say is existing word chunks stuck together.

For example, look at this sentence. It communicated what I intended, but it is just a small idea conveyed with a standard text requiring no thought to generate. It could have easily been “Peregrine, with self reflection,” or something. Memes are a more obvious example of this.

At some point in that imaginary culture maybe they just abandoned the original language since they could adequately communicate using only shared story references. Whether that part is realistic for an advanced technology culture maybe requires suspension of disbelief.

For a more sophisticated take on this, there is a similar story inside of the Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe that asks some interesting questions. In that case, the language is specifically limited to ideologically-approved tracts in order to limit what the populace can think about, so as to be easier to control. However, the story told might be subversive.

Did you even read Sotomayor’ dissent? I did.

You are not considering the part where we can’t use relevant testimony or documents to prove that what the President does is illegal in the first place. The President can just say whatever illegal things they did were official acts, and all the evidence that might prove otherwise is off-limits. It relies on other people in the administration to not follow the illegal order, but of course that is a weak protection and the President can fire them or do something illegal to them without consequence too.

Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney is exactly what you are looking for.

I had this posted over my when I was at engineering college!

The Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over a political party’s nomination process. That said …

From a jury I was being considered for (sexual assault), is not that you have no opinion, it is that you think you can be objective based on the evidence.

It’s not scare quotes. Just indicating a verbatim quote from her ex.

His name will be on the ballot, but if scotus finds that he’s ineligible he can’t win the nomination here, so vote for him would be wasted. Well, it’s wasted no matter what but you know what I mean.

You can resist your dark urge too. That has a fun ending too.

After you’ve had the Ultimate Love Affair that has broken you, leaves you certain love has been poisoned in your system, then, and only then, can you be saved and uplifted by the Post-Ultimate Love Affair. - Harlan Ellison http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0072/ERBAEN0072.htm

Deleted my 8 year old account and posts just last week. Feels great man.

The guy in the photo can’t even be bothered to wear his respirator correctly.

Well to be fair to the actual journalists, a lot of those articles are published by random people with an agenda that are labeled “Contributor” as opposed to staff.

Next week on Star Trek…