“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

Thank you. That looks plausible and should keep the mental wolves at bay, LOL.

Okay, somebody here has to know of have better image searching skills than I do. What is the Visor prop? It’s clearly not a spray-painted hair clip like (the inspiration for) Geordi’s, but it doesn’t look bespoke, more like some sort of removable support rib from… something. Grrr.

I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.

I think there’s something about the parasitic nature of it, taking over an otherwise healthy ear of corn. We tend to think of our edible fungi as growing out of the dirt like a plant, or a fallen tree, or at worst sort of calmy sitting on top of whatever it is using for its own food. THe fact that this has invaded kernels makes them very bad corn kernels and triggers something instinctive. Corn smut is one of those “the first person to try this was in a bad spot” kind of foods.

Legitimate? Basically none. Illegitimate? First, lazily fixing a fuckup on putting up strings of Christmas lights where you can’t daisy chain them properly, with bonus points for the likeliehood of needing to break off the grounding pin. Second, injecting power from a generator into a single circuit of your house if the power is out.

In one sense, you could argue conductors are conductors and if you think through every eventuality you can mitigate risk, but on the other, if you find you’re in a situation where one of these seems useful, you are not the type of person thinks through every eventuality.

That’s a pretty slimy technicality.

Cue the James Joyce letters in 3… 2… 1… ({}).

Trump on immigrants in late 2023: “They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Kobach just last month on the Coldwater case: “It still effectively takes the vote away or cancels the vote of a U.S. citizen.”

Most town residents voted for these men. Whether they realize it or not, they’re getting what they wanted. On Election Day, they chose cruelty.

The worst part of this is that the actual guy getting deported should be the reason these yahoos see the light, but instead they just want to be special and not have their preferred “illegals” suffer the consequences they have brought down on so many others. Consequences are for the big city where the brown people are all evil and lazy drug-selling job-stealers, not Coldwater where the one brown guy is a sweetheart who makes sure to vote how his friends do. He seems like a genuinely decent, if utterly dim, person who’s simply never known anything except this shitkicker town actually being fairly nice to him, and indeed if you “know your place” and don’t present an economic threat or make them feel insecure about either of those first two things, many MAGAs will be perfectly pleasant to you.

She was his special education teacher in school [apparently he was very far behind and had poor English skills in a school that had no proper ESL program, and he was not a uniquely talented intellect who could overcome that]. This mess actually started, she said, when she took Ceballos and her other special education students to the Comanche County clerk’s office on a field trip. And there, she said, she actually played a role — which she now regrets — to get him mistakenly registered as a Kansas voter…

“That’s right,” Dennis Swayze said. “I was the one who drove him to Wichita when he was still a kid, to get him that first green card. He saw those words, ‘permanent resident,’ and thought that made him a citizen, and that was not true. So I partly blame myself. We should have brought this up and said it wasn’t enough. But there’s others who also should have been more on the ball. Where was the county clerk when he raised his hand about registering? The clerk should have asked too.”

[from the other article] After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.

Then the guy’s lawyer is giving everyone false hope, talking about how he didn’t have intent to break the law. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter. There are two cliches you’ll hear from Lawyer TV: “You have to have intent,” and “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” They are not in contradiction, though it turns on lawyer hairsplitting. If you push a button that says “free candy” and it instead shoots an investment banker in the face, you haven’t committed a crime, assuming the “button” wasn’t suspiciously trigger-shaped or anything. If someone tells you that it’s not murder to shoot an investment banker in the face, you still go to jail for murder if you shoot an investment banker in the face, because regardless of what you know about the law, you intended to shoot an investment banker in the face. You have other defenses, like entrapment, but that isn’t nearly as easy to claim as people like to think, and getting back to this story, it has to go way beyond somebody else being stupid and herp-derping your illegal voter registration because a white guy was with you.

I think the Kansas Reflector writer actually summed it up very well:

As sure as if every Republican voter of Coldwater lined up to cast a stone at Ceballos, their choices at the ballot box in 2024 and 2022 had the same traumatic effect. They did this to their friend. They did this to their mayor. They did this to their beloved town fixture. And until they figure this out, our country and our state is not going to get better.

I have it on good authority that the Starbucks protein coffee gives you the double-shits.

And everyone else in the room clapped, I presume?

A lot of things are possible when you have a population that is deeply socialized to believe completely in the cause, and/or has few viable economic options, and/or is literally compelled to do the work. We also have a lot of survivorship bias as the we only see the stuff that was done so well as to stand the test of time. In the early days of Egyptology for example, they would sometimes realize (or learn from the locals because the locals knew best) that the big heap of rubble over there in the desert was actually a pyramid where somebody half-assed it with mud bricks instead of the giant limestone slabs from Giza.

Absolutely. Without “uncanceling,” the Acolyte, they need to find a way to get him back for a project. What an utter waste if they don’t. The physicality for the role and choregraphy was perfect, and he “sold” the Dark Side without an appeal to raw coercive power at a political scale, and it worked better than maybe any other approach I can recall. Even the comedic timing and “dude from Jacksonville” vibes (Go Jags!) slotted in perfectly for the (super telegraphed) reveal and the interactions with Osha and Sol. I also liked that Sol brought a lot of humanity and Qui-Gon energy despite Lee Jung-jae’s awkward line readings (the reasons for which I completely understand), and Jecki was good.

I went into that show fully ready to embrace everything about it and almost preemptively give it the grace I knew certain toxic fans wouldn’t, and I still couldn’t love it, though it has its moments and it’s not awful TV. The structure is awkward, the mystery unappealing and self-important, many of the performances unengaging, and frankly despite all the money they blew it often looks cheap. They also killed two out of the three characters I liked the best. Easy targets like the singing and the fire in space and the chubby lightsaber hilts were just people fixating on unimportant shit because they didn’t like the show but lack the ability to say why, or some of them are ashamed to say why. The whole thing needed another couple of passes through the editing process and maybe some hard discussions about why making the entire show look like Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge is not a good use of the budget.

Got a lot of sticktuitiveness.

I don’t think I should go against the grain here.

Excellent! And just so I don’t send you off on a wild goose chase, “Electron” is not the app’s name, just the platform (a browser wrapper, basically) that VIA uses for its desktop app. It’ll be on VIA’s github page, if not their main page. Glad you got it all squared away though. That’s a truly silly default keymap for what I understand is a super nice keyboard.

Only if they get James Gunn to do it, and only if they can find something eye-shaped to graphically pierce.

belaboring every little plot point to connect up to four

That would be one of the “new ones” I was thinking of, and they didn’t even do it well. Leia remembers her real mother, explicitly in the script, so Lucas just says, “nah… it’d feel cooler if she died in childbirth.” Make the nerds hand-wave something about the Force until I can rewrite and re-film Ep6.

Should’ve been with prejudice, as they were so clearly malicious prosecutions.

I believe those motions are still pending.