Meanwhile, the US Global Forecasting System continues to get worse.

A new major Windows 11 release means a new guide for cleaning up the OS.

Leonard Nimoy, the actor best known for his iconic role as Spock in "Star Trek," died at age 83 on Friday.

In 2012, he reflected on his life in a commencement speech to Boston University's College of Fine Arts. He told the story of how a chance meeting with future president John F. Kennedy inspired him when he was at a low point in his career.

In the 1950s, Nimoy was struggling in Los Angeles with a wife and two kids, he said in his speech. He spent his days in auditions and his nights driving a taxi for steady income. One night he picked up Kennedy, who was a Massachusetts senator at the time, at the Bel Air Hotel.

White Tailed Deer are polyestrous, which means females can be in heat more than once per year. In the most northern reaches of the whitetail range (United States into Canada), females go into heat during November and lasts over 24-hour cycles. However, the whole whitetail mating season is from October to December.

With prevalence rates soaring in areas of Wisconsin and mountain states of Wyoming and Colorado, it’s safe to say consumption of CWD meat has happened. Bryan Richards claims “It’s very clear humans are exposed to disease associated prion protein from CWD, whether that will result in transmission of disease across the species barrier is an open question, we absolutely cannot say it will, we absolutely cannot say it won’t.” The human TSE form is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and has been contracted by humans eating cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, or mad cow disease.

Like Richards stated, we cannot rule out that CWD can be transmitted to humans, but no stories of human health issues tied to venison consumption have held up under scrutiny.

I’ve found myself wanting a less intrusive channel for ambient data. Something I can glance at in passing, without giving my full attention or opening myself up to whatever other interruptions my phone might have in store. It should be easy to check, but just as easy to ignore.

This is the device I landed on: a wifi-connected Kindle 4, mounted on the wall in a simple laser-cut acrylic frame. Once a minute, it loads a screenshot of a web page I built that shows a few different kinds of data I want easy access to: calendar events, weather, the status of packages I’ve ordered, etc.

Let’s be honest, it’s time to move on from TeamViewer for remote access. Once dominant, it’s showing its age while the open-source contenders have caught up fast. These modern alternatives are faster, more flexible, and customizable. Additionally, you won’t feel the pinch in your wallet with subscriptions and restrictive licensing terms.

The Tax Poem

Tax his land, Tax his bed, Tax the table at which he's fed.

Tax his tractor, Tax his mule, Teach him taxes are the rule.

Tax his work, Tax his pay, He works for peanuts anyway!

Tax his cow, Tax his goat, Tax his pants, Tax his coat. Tax his ties, Tax his shirt, Tax his work, Tax his dirt.

Tax his tobacco, Tax his drink, Tax him if he tries to think.

Tax his cigars, Tax his beers, If he cries tax his tears.

Tax his car, Tax his gas, Find other ways to tax his ass.

Tax all he has, Then let him know, That you won't be done till he has no dough.

When he screams and hollers, Then tax him some more, Tax him till he's good and sore.

Then tax his coffin, Tax his grave, Tax the sod in which he's laid.

Put these words Upon his tomb, 'Taxes drove me to my doom...'

When he's gone, Do not relax, Its time to apply the inheritance tax.

Trump officials are fleeing their homes in the face of left-wing threats, but The Atlantic says the problem is actually Trump’s rhetoric.

10 states across the country have enacted legislation to permanently observe daylight saving time. They are Maine, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Delaware, Colorado, Texas, and Wyoming.

However, they need congressional approval to begin observing that change.

According to The Hill, “states do have the ability to lock their clocks, current federal regulations limit their decision to year-round standard time only.”

Arizona and Hawaii are currently the only two states that observe year-round standard time.

California voters approved a measure to do away with daylight saving time in 2018, but it has not yet come into effect.

Americans are split on the issue, but support for scrapping daylight saving time is growing, meaning people prefer more light in the morning and less in the evening. //

Poll found 54% of Americans are ready to do away with the practice.

Meanwhile, just 40% say they are in favor of observing daylight saving time — the lowest level in recorded history.

A decades old consent decree has been lifted against the Republican National Committee's so-called "ballot security" measures. It's a big victory in the RNC's efforts to monitor polling activity and it's a sobering moment for activists who fear this could accelerate voter suppression — especially among minorities.

From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that’s where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data. First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home.

This isn’t unusual, by far. After all, it’s a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer’s server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers. Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

Most countries stopped testing nuclear weapons after they signed the global Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) starting from 1996. The treaty emerged amid growing concerns about human health and the environment above the ground, underground and underwater, from nuclear pollution.

The US conducted its first nuclear test in 1945. In all, the US has conducted 1,032 nuclear tests, according to the United Nations. The US last tested nuclear weapons in 1992. It signed the CTBT in 1996 but never ratified it.

The Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests, the last of them in 1990. Since the USSR’s dissolution in 1990, Russia – which inherited the former superpower’s nuclear arsenal – has not conducted any nuclear tests. In 1996, Russia signed the CTBT, ratifying it in 2000. But Putin revoked Russia’s ratification of the treaty in 2023.

China last tested nuclear weapons in 1996. //

France last tested nuclear weapons in 1996. It conducted 210 tests between 1945 and 1996.

The United Kingdom conducted 45 nuclear tests from 1952, with the last one conducted in 1991.

Since the CTBT came into effect, 10 nuclear tests have taken place.

In 1998, India and Pakistan conducted two nuclear tests each. India and Pakistan have never signed the CTBT.

According to the UN, North Korea has conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017. It conducted two tests in 2016. North Korea has also not signed the CTBT.

Nine states have nuclear arms, including the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

For decades, Israel has maintained nuclear ambiguity, also known as “opacity”. It has never publicly confirmed or denied the presence of its nuclear weapons programme.

Weddings at Notre-Dame are exceedingly rare because the cathedral is not a parish church and does not normally conduct sacraments for individual couples.

As the seat of the Archbishop of Paris and a national monument, it serves primarily as a site for major religious and state ceremonies — Masses, funerals and national commemorations — rather than private events.

Only the archbishop can authorize a wedding there, and such dispensations have been granted just a handful of times in its 860-year history.

Lorentz, who hand-cut oak beams using 13th-century tools and methods, had asked the archbishop earlier this year for permission to wed in the cathedral he helped save.

“It’s the happiest day of my life,” Lorentz told reporters.

“I want to share my love — our love — with the whole world, with everyone who needs it.”

Not getting off “Scott” free.

An Alabama police force playfully exacted revenge against a group of high schoolers who had covered their department headquarters — along with the rest of the town — with toilet paper as part of an elaborate senior prank.

Heflin Police Chief Ross McGlaughn vowed to get back on the Class of 2026 when the students launched their overnight TP attack across the small Alabama city.

The ScriptureEarth.org website is managed by SIL Global. SIL’s service with ethnolinguistic minority communities is motivated by the belief that all people are created in the image of God, and that languages and cultures are part of the richness of God's creation.

The purpose of this site is to provide access to Scripture products for the languages of the world. Individual copyright and licensing information is indicated on each product by its contributing organization.

Enter the domain name or IP address of the NTP server you want to measure.

Data from PMM, Percona's open source database management tool, shows that 58 percent of MySQL and MariaDB (a MySQL fork) instances are running MySQL 8.0, while 18.8 percent are running 5.7, which went out of support in 2023.

While users might put off database migration because of the disruption involved, they should be aware that the upgrade from MySQL 8.0 to 8.4 – the most recent stable version – is not nearly so onerous as the upgrade from 5.7 to 8.0. "It was a very big and painful jump," Zaitsev told us.

Fred Duck Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
13y
6,614
Nate Anderson said:
But those who value both thought and expression will see the AI “easy button” for the false promise that it is and will continue to do the hard work of engaging with ideas, including their own, in a way that no computer can do for them.
Some people liken LLM to typewriters. They say that just as with typewriters, instead of labouriously hand writing messages out, the end result is what's important and this new technology helps distill that as quickly as possible.

However, typewriters dispense with the metadata of handwriting. Emotion can be displayed differently in handwriting, all of which is lost when merely presenting the text of the message. More crucially, in the modern LLM case, the ideas presented aren't even those of the submitter but they claim the ideas are close enough that they should be treated as such, which is a load of dingos' kidneys.

People will try to justify LLM by citing people with poor communication skills or physical disabilities which limit their ability to craft messages quickly and easily. However, communication is a skill and vanishingly few people are born knowing how to communicate perfectly. Everyone needs to put some work into skills to improve them and it boggles the mind that so few people realise that's what coursework is: practice for when you need to do something to accomplish a real goal, not simply marks for a course.

Unfortunately, modern life is at odds with thinking. We're constantly being bombarded by information, adverts, entertainment, news, comments from random internet yahoos, etc. So many messages come to us crafted to sway our opinions and shape our thoughts yet in the modern age, we tend to silo ourselves, content to seeking out echo chambers to self-validate our "vibes" instead of engaging with other ideas to see if they're sound or not.

Some people claim LLM are, as with calculators, something that are simply going to be with us so fighting them is meaningless. This skirts the issue that a calculator won't automatically generate answers for multistep procedures whereas an LLM will.

Perhaps what needs to be done is explain to the youth what exactly is expected of them. We put so much emphasis on finding the right answers but do we ever stop to emphasise it's the journey, not the destination that's of greater importance? As a young person, I don't believe anyone ever told me directly.

I imagine such a concept is too difficult for many to grasp but I still feel we should try. As the old saying goes, you can lead a duck to bread but you can't make him eat.

AI can be an amazing tool that can assist with coding, web searches, data mining, and textual summation—but I’m old enough to wonder just what the heck you’re doing at college if you don’t want to process arguments on your own (i.e., think and read critically) or even to write your own “personal reflections” (i.e., organize and express your deepest thoughts, memories, and feelings). Outsource these tasks often enough and you will fail to develop them.

I recently wrote a book on Friedrich Nietzsche and how his madcap, aphoristic, abrasive, humorous, and provocative philosophizing can help us think better and live better in a technological age. The idea of simply reading AI “summaries” of his work—useful though this may be for some purposes—makes me sad, as the desiccated summation style of ChatGPT isn’t remotely the same as encountering a novel and complex human mind expressing itself wildly in thought and writing.

And that’s assuming ChatGPT hasn’t hallucinated anything.

So good luck, students and professors both. I trust we will eventually muddle our way through the current moment. Those who want an education only for its “credentials”—not a new phenomenon—have never had an easier time of it, and they will head off into the world to vibe code their way through life. More power to them.

But those who value both thought and expression will see the AI “easy button” for the false promise that it is and will continue to do the hard work of engaging with ideas, including their own, in a way that no computer can do for them.