At the very least be sparse and difficult to guess.

Our current SSNs were never meant to be used as identification, so they made them easy to create and easy to guess.

By “prosecutors”, I wondered if it was just some political commentator who was a prosecutor. Nope. It’s the prosecutors for this case in one of their filings:

The prosecution outlined the threat in a filing late Wednesday on a procedural matter in federal court in Manhattan, where they plan to try to convince a jury that Mangione deserves death. No federal trial date has been set.

In their filing Wednesday, prosecutors wrote that Mangione poses a continuing danger in part because he seeks to influence others.

“Simply put, the defendant hoped to normalize the use of violence to achieve ideological or political objectives,” they said. “Since the murder, certain quarters of the public — who openly identify as acolytes of the defendant — have increasingly begun to view violence as an acceptable, or even necessary, substitute for reasoned political disagreement.”

They’re saying that he deserves to die not because of his actions, but because of what he represents. (I guess in their eyes, there is no such thing as a martyr.)

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in April that she was directing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for “an act of political violence” and a “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America.”

So, they’re being ordered by Pam Bondi to seek the death penalty. Pam Bondi, who was appointed by Trump, and who appears to be trying her best to suppress evidence about Trump’s past of raping children.

So, really, what do these prosecutors represent?

I know that if I was a prosecutor, and I was in some trolley problem situation where I had two cases, one where a person killed a CEO, and one where a person raped a child, and I was forced to prosecute only one and let the other go, I’d prosecute the child rapist without any hesitation.

Really? I thought it had a lot of problems. Weird editor’s notes in a bunch of places that add nothing. An intro that is too long.

Some of the arguments were just plain wrong. For example, the argument that it’s obvious that the internet is good for ordering books is an argument from incredulity. And on top of that, people did argue exactly what he’s saying they wouldn’t argue. I remember. I was there.

Most of the general advice is good, and I agree with the premise of the article, but it didn’t strike me as one of the best blogs ever.

In a world where they can force half the country to get implants, I don’t think they need to worry about justifying their actions. They’d just deport the people straight away or put them in death camps.

This research uses a direct computer interface to the brain, a BCI.

Due to the invasiveness of the procedure, I don’t imagine the current administration would find much use for it. Their strongarm and propaganda methods are working well enough for their evil plans.

I don’t remember it being explained in the movie either.

One thing I think, and I’m not saying that you think otherwise, is that movies are way better when they don’t explain everything. In real life, we don’t always get explanations, and there’s stuff going on all the time that we have no explanation for.

So, the lack of explanation in a movie, as long as it’s not distracting, actually adds to the feeling of authenticity, in my opinion. Movies where everything is explained and nothing is hidden about the characters… it just makes everything feel flat and childish.

Honestly, cryptocurrency is an example. Some cryptocurrencies don’t have mining and so aren’t all that bad, and there is a use case for it, even if most of what we see today is hype.

Another example might be something like a way of proving something happened before a certain time. Like how people can send themselves sealed letters in the mail, and claim that the postmark proves that it was sealed before that date. If you put cryptographic signatures only into a public blockchain, that could be used as evidence that the document existed at that time.

This type of instant ramen is the example that economics professors use of an inferior good.

inferior goods are those goods the demand for which falls with increase in income of the consumer

At least, that was the example that my professor used when I went to college. I suspect that a lot of cheap instant ramen is eaten on college campuses even to this day.

So, the point is that you’re stating what I think is the right way of looking at this. A big part of the reason people buy this is that they aren’t making much money, so naturally, they’d want to buy the cheaper one, as well.

I was wondering what the deal was with the human smuggling, and here’s what I found:

The alleged conspiracy spanned nearly a decade and involved the domestic transport of thousands of noncitizens from Mexico and Central America, including some children, in exchange for thousands of dollars, according to the indictment.

Abrego Garcia is alleged to have participated in more than 100 such trips, according to the indictment. Among those allegedly transported were members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, sources familiar with the investigation said.

Note that it says “domestic transport”. So his “crime” is driving people around inside the US, despite knowing that they’re illegal immigrants. It somehow seems like a thoughtcrime to me. And by the way, it seems like he was just transporting them so they could find work.

The Wikipedia article also says that the star witness against him is the guy who hired him to do it, and that the government offered that guy immunity in exchange for his testimony.

The crime is barely a crime, and the government offered immunity to the “ringleader” (for lack of a better term), in exchange for testimony against a driver. Exactly the opposite of what is normally done.

It seems like pure malice against a guy who’s just trying to work. Maybe he’s not perfect, but Trump and his flunkies are going way out of their way to ruin him.

Unfortunately, I don’t think syllogisms are enforceable law.

Stringer noted that real officers do not wear ski masks.

the very next post is of a pig wearing what is effectively a ski mask

The logical conclusion is that that is not a real officer.

The problem with LLMs and other generative AI is that they’re not completely useless. People’s jobs are on the line much of the time, so it would really help if they were completely useless, but they’re not. Generative AI is certainly not as good as its proponents claim, and critically, when it fucks up, it can be extremely hard for a human to tell, which eats away a lot of their benefits, but they’re not completely useless. For the most basic example, give an LLM a block of text and ask it how to improve grammar or to make a point clearer, and then compare the AI generated result with the original, and take whatever parts you think the AI improved.

Everybody knows this, but we’re all pretending it’s not the case because we’re caring people who don’t want the world to be drowned in AI hallucinations, we don’t want to have the world taken over by confidence tricksters who just fake everything with AI, and we don’t want people to lose their jobs. But sometimes, we are so busy pretending that AI is completely useless that we forget that it actually isn’t completely useless. The reason they’re so dangerous is that they’re not completely useless.

Yeah, if they care so much, why don’t they just ask the superintelligent AI for an answer?

Another chance for me to point out some inconsistencies and plot holes in this episode. Well, at least this episode wasn’t as terrifyingly bad as the previous two episodes.

First, I think they’ve been glossing this over, but I had always thought that the people in the other world don’t really speak Japanese, and that Hakkon’s assembling of Japanese words was just supposed to be translation. You know, like how in English, they pretend like he’s assembling English words, the original Japanese material is pretending like the original source is some other language and it’s been translated into and pretending to be Japanese.

But that’s thrown out the window by having them watch an actual Manzai in Japanese. There’s really no explanation for this except that they actually speak Japanese in that world. So, somehow they literally speak Japanese, but they invented their own writing system and can’t even recognize any Japanese characters. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Also, if everybody speaks Japanese, and he has access to manzai in Japanese, it seems like all of his communication problems are over. He can just use the manzai to assemble whatever he wants to say, right? But I’m guessing they’ll never bring up this manzai stuff again, except when dealing with that director.

Up until this point, only the first two stratums were shown as having anything other than the most basic amenities. Now, on the 6th or 7th stratum, there’s just this random blacksmith. It’s not too odd to imagine an eccentric and talented blacksmith going to a place that was hard to get to, but then you’d expect him to be making legendary weapons or something. You wouldn’t expect him to trade one item in his shop for food.

The teleportation circles are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes they can be activated many times in a row. Sometimes they need a magic stone. Sometimes they just need time to recharge.

Also, the teleportation circles are starting to make less and less sense, in general. How could that mage charge the circle from the other side? Aren’t teleportation circles really just one or two way? And how did he know which stratum the other people were on? These teleportation circles are so important to the current story that you can’t really just invent that they work a different way every time you talk about them.

And lastly, Kerioyl is making less and less sense. All he did was touch Hakkon, and he made this complicated teleporter interfering spell? I thought that stuff was supposed to be difficult. And he went to all of that trouble, but it just teleported them to an unexpected stratum, barely hindering them at all, possibly helping them by sending them to a deep stratum when the early-stratum teleporters are basically out-of-commission?

The easy solution is just to make a polling place at the house of every bed-bound person.

Sorry, that’s a joke. If you want a serious answer, then I don’t think any court would allow them to take absentee ballots from bed-bound people.

I think we should make voting mandatory.

If you want to ban mail in ballots, let’s make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Because you truly, yet incorrectly, believe that mail in ballots are insecure. Not because you’re trying to suppress the votes of people who have a harder time making it to the ballot box.

If you want to prove that you’re doing it for the right reasons, instead of the absolutely wicked reasons that you appear to be doing it for, then make voting mandatory at the same time. Make sure that each American gets to the ballot box because they are easily available and quick. Make voter registration automatic and track down every citizen to make sure that their voice is heard.

Sometimes, teachers are married and their spouses can end up needing to move somewhere for their work.

In the past, it was a small benefit that teachers could find work anywhere they went.

You’re right. Think about this. On January 6, 2021, Trump was illegally inciting an insurrection. He was surrounded by Secret Service agents who are only ostensibly paid to protect him.

Secret Service agents first oath is to defend the Constitution. So, they actually had a primary duty that day, not to protect Trump, but to arrest him.

They had all sworn a solemn oath that required them to take action against Trump, but nobody did anything of the sort. In fact, they famously broke the law by not retaining the information from their phones from that day.

Since I enjoyed the first five episodes of this season, but the sixth episode was unbelievably bad, I expected this episode to also be bad. And it completely met my expectations. Maybe even exceeded them in how bad it is.

Do I think Bommy (Director Bear) could move Hakkon? Yes, I do. He’s probably exceptionally strong even for a bear. Do I think he could carry Hakkon around all day like Lamis does? I don’t know what his blessing is, if anything, but I think one of the cornerstones of this anime is that only Lamis can easily handle Hakkon, so Bommy shouldn’t be allowed to do this. And since this is the labyrinth stratum, Hakkon could have just created wheels like he did the last time he was there, so there was an easy alternative.

And Kikoyu has the ability to talk with Hakkon directly? Up until now, only Lamis seemed to understand his inner thoughts, but she was just guessing.

The point is that, with regard to Hakkon, Lamis had two unique powers in this world. One was the ability to carry him with her all the time, and the second is to understand what he is thinking. It seems unthematic that in the very first episode where Lamis is missing, her two unique Hakkon-related powers were immediately replaced by others. In one case, a superior version.

One other complaint. That part about the dirt ball not passing through the barrier doesn’t make any sense. First, maybe I’m just misremembering, but I don’t think that barrier existed before. There’s no barrier like that around the town in the clearflow lake stratum. There’s no barrier like that around the ghost town in the haunted stratum. Also, it would be inconvenient if you couldn’t bring any monster materials back from the labyrinth.

But anyways, if that barrier did exist, then it seems like Kikoyu wouldn’t have been able to take the dirt ball into the maze in the first place. The way she survives is by filling the ball with monster corpses.

That’s the video game song that gets in my head the most.

Interestingly, despite how it’s not as good of a song, I probably think about Want You Gone about as often as Still Alive. It doesn’t really come through as a song, just the phrases. “Now I only want you gone.” “You’ve got your short sad life left. […] I’ll let you get right to it.”