*an administration that imprisons and expels foreign students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy is unlikely to stop with foreign students or, for that matter, with pro-Palestinian advocacy. Trump’s student roundup has already progressed from visa holders to legal permanent residents, and administration officials have said they intend to come after naturalized citizens as well. And the argument the administration is advancing to justify the cancellation of students’ visas — that the students’ advocacy undermines US foreign policy — could as easily be made with respect to those who advocate in support of any other cause the Trump administration happens to disfavor.*

Ken Roth: *There can be no "Israel exception" for free speech*, and the case of Mahmoud Khalil illustrates this.

1800 members of the US National Academies have published an open letter calling on the US government to stop attacking science.

Starmer offered to reduce British taxes on digital "services" in general in exchange for lower US tariffs on UK exports. (We can presume that this includes digital dis-services as well as true digital services.)

This offer was foolish in two ways, which become obvious when we note that the biggest threat to society, is taxing business too little, and that the T-usk regime is a part of that threat.

1. The deal would increase the power of companies that have too much power already, thus making them an even bigger threat.
2. To offer an enemy a lasting concession, in exchange for not attacking you just now, is a bad bargain, thus a change for the worse.

NYU canceled a talk by Joanne Liu, former head of Doctors Without Borders, for reporting on casualties in Gaza and on the persecutor's cuts to US foreign aid.

I have not seen the slides, but this seems like a very stretched instance of the "Israel exception".

Can anyone find NYU's allegedly "clear" guidelines? Have they been posted anywhere?

US citizens: call on Congress to ban members of Congress from having financial interests in companies that do business with the Pentagon.

Contrast this with the bill to stop them from buying or selling stocks. The two operate in the same area, but they are different enough to be complementary.

If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

US citizens: call on Congress to block funds for the Donald Deportation Derby and fund medicine and Social Security instead.

If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

US citizens: call on Hegseth to resign immediately.

*Hegseth should go to jail for war plan leaks, according to Hegseth.*

If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

So that's going great.

Previously.

One of you could save me a whole lot of swearing if you would send me a patch that makes XScreenSaver 6.09 configured "--with-record-animation" compile without warning when linked against the ffmpeg 7.1 libraries rather than 4.x. (sample_fmts, supported_samplerates, ch_layouts are now deprecated and if there's a porting guide, I have not found it.)

Future generations thank you in advance.

*Trump administration at "war" with mRNA technology: scientists alarmed vaccine skeptics could kill research.*

mRNA vaccines are the target of persistent disinformation along many fronts. Some disinformation exaggerates the significance of side effects that happen a small fraction of the time and generally cause no permanent harm. Others harp on thousands of people go had serious side effects but neglect to compare those with the millions of lives the vaccines saved.

*Trump administration at "war" with mRNA technology: scientists alarmed vaccine skeptics could kill research.*

mRNA vaccines are the target of persistent disinformation along many fronts. Some disinformation exaggerates the significance of side effects that happen a small fraction of the time and generally cause no permanent harm. Others harp on thousands of people go had serious side effects but neglect to compare those with the millions of lives the vaccines saved.

< 

i

Kingfish

I want to go to there

Tall Slut No Panties.

Tall Satanist No Panties.

Oh wow, oh wow wow wow...

Tall Slut No Panties was no mere coincidence, I am re-watching Bitch in Apt. 23 for gummy theater, and...

S2E2, little blonde girl goes to the movies with her co-worker from the coffee shop, and, as you know, the show is set in New York City.

Well, this, my friend, is the Paramount Theater in Oakland.

Waaaaaaat

It's like a 3 second establishing shot, and they cut immediately to the interior of the fake, tv show movie theater, but the eagle eye of The Old Professor caught it.

Thank you for your service.

I'm sure whatever 2nd unit director was in charge of gathering stock footage just googled "big ass old art deco theater."

At least it wasn't San Francouver.

Brookouver? Mancouver? Vanbronx?

Right??

It's like that "Always Be My Maybe" movie with Ali Wong where she's walking through "San Francisco" Chinatown, and the streets are pristine clean and as wide as a six lane highway.

Yes just like Kung Fu!"

Oh yes, I recall.

So apparently that show did 3 seasons!

Whaaaaat

I did not keep watching just to see Trans Bay Tube 2 on Mission like in DS9.

Bell Riots, Baby.

2024 you failed us.

Also the Irish Reunification.

Again I say it all went wrong with that weasel that fell into the Large Hadron Collider. That killed Bowie, and all else followed.

The John Wick timeline. Bill and Ted failed.

My cat just ran into my office to LOUDLY announce that she just took the world's biggest, nastiest, smelliest shit. If she'd waited 5 more seconds for the stank to get here, the announcement would have been completely unnecessary.

IM POOPIN

I have to go deal with this... This is RJ Owens level.

Wait, shit, remind me of the Ted Wick theory

Oh, Ted's Dad was going to send him to military school (FORESHADOWING) if he failed his history test. If that happened, Wyld Stallyns would never happen, and as we all know, it was the music of Wyld Stallyns, and "Be Excellent To Each Other" that brought about 1000 years of peace and prosperity.

BUT THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN..

Ted failed his test, Wyld Stallyns didn't save mankind, and Ted returned from military school as JOHN WICK...

That is solid. Dude that is solid.

It also dovetails nicely with Say Anything → Grosse Point Blank. Lloyd Dobbler did not make his kickboxing dream happen and found his calling as a sniper.

That's a good one!

"Mama Hitler sick of all of these time travelers trying to murder her baby"

In one of the Time Machine Hubbas, we did a joke where I say, "We could go back and time and kill Hitler as a baby!" And Alexa says, "Huh? Who's Hitler?" And I say, "Ohhhhhhmy gawd! Maybe we already did it!"

Boom.

Pitch meeting recently did BTTF3, It was brutal.

Ha! That was great.

"Unexpected beats are tight!"

Steam nerd: I remember seeing that movie the first time and thinking, "Those locomotives had a top speed of about 45mph."

Delivered

O

Send

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

There are two different goals of Chess AI: To figure out what is objectively the very best move in each situation, and to figure out what is, for me as a human, the best way to play in each situation. And possibly explain why. The explanations part I have no good ideas for short of doing an extraordinary amount of manual work to make a training set but the others can be done in a fairly automated manner.

(As with all AI posts everything I say here is speculative, may be wrong, and may be reinventing known techniques, but has reasonable justifications about why it might be a good idea.)

First a controversial high level opinion which saves a whole lot of computational power: There is zero reason to try to train an AI on deep evaluations of positions. Alpha-beta pruning works equally well for all evaluation algorithms. Tactics are tactics. What training should do is optimize for immediate accuracy on a zero node eval. What deep evaluation is good for is generating more accurate numbers to go into the training data. For a real engine you as want switching information to say which moves should be evaluated more deeply by the alpha-beta pruner. For that information I’m going to assume that when doing a deep alpha-beta search you can get information about how critical each branch is and that can be used as a training set. I’m going to hand wave and assume that there’s a reasonable way of making that be the output of an alpha-beta search even though I don’t know how to do it.

Switching gears for a moment, there’s something I really want but doesn’t seem to exist: An evaluation function which doesn’t say what the best move for a godlike computer program is, but one which says what’s the best practical move for me, a human being, to make in this situation. Thankfully that can be generated straightforwardly if you have the right data set. Specifically, you need a huge corpus of games played by humans and the ratings of the players involved. You then train an AI with input of the ratings of the players and the current position and it returns probability of win/loss/draw. This is something people would pay real money for access to and can be generated from an otherwise fairly worthless corpus of human games. You could even get fancy and customize it a bit to a particular player’s style if you have enough games from them, but that’s a bit tricky because each human generates very few games and you’d have to somehow relate them to other players by style to get any real signal.

Back to making not a human player but a godlike player. Let’s say you’re making something like Leela, with lots of volunteer computers running tasks to improve it. As is often the case with these sorts of things the bottleneck seems to be bandwidth. To improve a model you need to send a copy of it to all the workers, have them locally generate suggested improvements to all the weights, then send those back. That requires a complete upload and download of the model from each worker. Bandwidth costs can be reduced either by making generations take longer or by making the model smaller. My guess is that biasing more towards making the model smaller is likely to get better results due to the dramatically improved training and lower computational overhead and hence deeper searches when using it in practice.

To make suggestions on how to improve a model a worker does as follows: First, they download the last model. Then they generate a self-play game with it. After each move of the game they take the evaluation which the deeper look-ahead gave and train the no look-ahead eval against that to update their suggestions for weight updates. Once it’s time for the next generation they upload all their suggested updates to the central server which sums all the weight updates suggestions (possibly weighting them by the amount of games which went into them) and uses that for the next generation model.

This approach shows how chess is in some sense an ‘easy’ problem for AI because you don’t need training data for it. You can generate all the training data you want out of thin air on an as needed basis.

Obviously there are security issues here if any of the workers are adversarial but I’m not sure what the best way to deal with those is.

I left the tv idle while I went to the other room to play with my dog. After about a half an hour, I started hearing Kristi Noem praising Trump and telling immigrants to get out of America, over and over.

I went in to check, and caught this video looping 3 more times before it went back to the nature clips.

This TV will be out of my house by the end of the week. Fucking dystopian bullshit company.

Also Vizio: "Did we mention these unhinged fascist rants are FREE?"®™

Q: My TV started playing a video in full screen by itself. What happened?
A: Your TV launched Scenic Mode, a FREE, new feature that displays relaxing, ambient content when your TV is idle for a period of time. Scenic Mode delivers an experience that adds to the environment of your home or office.

Q: Why did I see an ad in Scenic Mode?
A: After Scenic Mode launches to full screen, you may see ads. We offer free, scenic content by supporting it with ads. These ads allow VIZIO to offer enhanced, built-in Smart TV features, 300+ live channels, and 15,000+ movies and shows at no cost through WatchFree+ while also helping keep the price of our TVs accessible and competitive.

Q: Can I turn Scenic Mode ads off?
A: No, not at this time. These ads allow VIZIO to offer enhanced, built-in Smart TV features, 300+ live channels, and 15,000+ movies and shows at no cost through WatchFree+ while also helping keep the price of our TVs accessible and competitive.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

"They're gross, they're offensive and kids on the road see them, so why wouldn't the police get a call [saying], 'That offends me. Pull it off the truck.' Because now this bill will allow it."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

And yet, because of Apple's cowardly prudishness, somehow when I type motherdkxije it is of not hello at all

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

We went to the moon. We used to be a society.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.