I swear the cane sugar Dr. Pepper tastes different from the HFCS kind. Maybe it really is possible to differentiate 50-50 glucose-fructose from 45-55 glucose-fructose? Or maybe the corn syrup carries other flavor molecules?

Or maybe there are other differences in the recipe.

I don’t think therapists should be turning in their clients, either. Criminals deserve effective therapy as much as anyone else.

And if everyone voted, his popular vote margin would have been larger. According to the latest analysis, non-voters leaned toward Trump.

When asked how they would have voted, people eligible to vote who did not do so were fairly evenly split in their preferences: 44% said they would have supported Trump, while 40% said they would have backed Harris.

I feel SO free right now. :P

It sounds like they wanted to run someone but had trouble recruiting a candidate:

But Bloom thinks that would-be Democratic candidates were disinclined to challenge a sheriff’s office power structure that tends to be dominated by conservatives, saying, “The people that [party leadership] asked to run were scared; given how conservative law enforcement can be, they didn’t want to blow up their careers.” Unlike other states, Virginia does not require that sheriff candidates have a background in law enforcement.

And later in the article:

That no Democrat filed to run in Chesapeake does not surprise Liam Watson, director of Bluegrass PAC, a Virginia group working to fund and elect downballot Democratic candidates in rural areas of the state. Watson, who is also an elected council member in the city of Blacksburg, knows the dynamic well: His own community, Montgomery County, leans blue but has a Republican sheriff.

“The challenge is finding people who are both qualified and interested,” he told Bolts.

He and many others noted that the most obvious path to being a sheriff is to work as a sheriff’s deputy, and that there are clear disincentives to challenging an incumbent who could then make your life difficult or fire you if you lose. “Nobody wants to run against their boss,” Watson said.

I think she has to act through the Board of Police Commissioners, and I’m not sure she can fire them before their terms are up. She could definitely threaten to not re-appoint them, but I don’t know how much leverage that really buys her.

And those armored bulldozers sometimes destroyed humans along with the houses, such as the case of peace activist Rachel Corrie.

YEARS OF DOING and yet THERE ARE STILL even more TASKS TO BE DONE

This is my #1 demotivator. It doesn’t matter how many tasks I do, it will never be enough.

“If our strict measures were not accepted, then our organization could become careless and it could result in eroding the public’s trust,” he said.

They don’t think telling this guy to starve in his old age over $7 will undermine public trust? It’s undermining my trust in this official’s judgment right now!

I guess I don’t live in Kyoto so they probably don’t give a rat’s ass what I think.

I was just thinking about this. That 125% tariff on Chinese goods leaves a lot of room for profit if you can circumvent customs, and then undercut legitimate importers.

I feel like this list has some games that are too new to put on a “most influential” list. Let’s give it at least a few years to see how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 influence the industry.

On the other end, how is Rogue not on the list? The number of games calling themselves “roguelikes” or “roguelites” has been ballooning every year for the better part of a decade now, and some of its ideas have found their way into other genres, especially the use of procedurally generated level layouts.

Edit: Ohhhhh the poll methodology was to ask people to pick one game, and then they sorted them by popularity. So even though I think Rogue is definitely a top-20-most-influential game, it’s harder to argue for it being top 1. But… that makes it even crazier that KCD2 is on the list. A significant number of people voted for KCD2 as “THE most influential game of all time”? It just came out!

Ahhh that’s the part I forgot or didn’t catch, thanks!

So this isn’t the main point of the article, but near the end they mention the fan game Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. I don’t know if I’m forgetting the plot of Gaiden or what, but they say it mixes the original game with the plot of Space Jam which… is not how I’d describe it? My recollection is that it takes place in the post-apocalypse and centers around the power of Barkley’s devastating Chaos Dunk, a dunk so sick that it can nuke an entire city.

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”

deleted by creator

It’s bizarre to me that Trump, who talks like he has imperial ambitions, is dismantling the services that run the empire. I can’t tell if he’s senile and being completely puppeteered by Musk, or if he’s lucid but just actually has no idea what any of these agencies do and why it’s in his interest as president to keep them working.

Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn’t know how it will end, and therefore can’t have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I’d go further and claim it can’t really “have an opinion” about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.

“Admitting” that it’s lying only proves that it has been exposed to “admission” as a pattern in its training data.

Where are you seeing that she stepped on it? The allegation is that she pressed it with her thumb, and she doesn’t dispute that she pressed it on purpose—she was checking the firmness, which is a weird thing to do to a bun but I don’t think it’s worth chasing her down over. If you really can’t sell it with a dent in it, telling her not to come back seems like a proportionate response. But honestly if I were the owner, I’d probably just eat the dented bun and call it a wash.