It failed 49-50 because Sen. Alsobrooks (D-MD) didn’t vote, despite being there earlier in the day. It would have failed anyway, but it would have been useful to force Vance to break the tie. What happened?

Tbh, Israelis as a whole invite a lot of hate upon themselves by wholeheartedly supporting outright genocide. Public polling there shows a disturbingly large number of even young, secular Israelis advocate for killing everyone in Gaza, including women and children:

https://zeteo.com/p/its-not-just-netanyahu-a-lot-of-israelis

https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-have-migrated-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream-250010

That doesn’t mean every Israeli or every Jewish person is culpable or suspect, ofc. But I think it’s even more justifiable to distrust the country as a whole as it is to distrust the US electorate after re-electing Trump. Netanyahu is corrupt and bloodthirsty, but his policies still enjoy broad support from voters there.

This is one of my favorite science fiction stories for the way it deals with the question of what it would really be like to live in a perfect world (the related story “A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace” also has some interesting ideas on this front). But be warned that it contains some scenes of extremely graphic sex and violence, and the final chapter has some incredibly weird and pervy shit that just about ruins the whole thing (to the point that I think skipping it and ending in a cliffhanger is better.)

Another fantastic story in this vein is Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God,” which takes place in a world like ours except for the fact that God is objectively real and angels regularly manifest on Earth. It’s more about the psychological conflicts among people who want to have faith but can’t for various reasons, but the way Heaven is portrayed and the effect it has on people is a pivotal part. And it has one of the biggest gut-punch sentences of any story I’ve ever read.

That varmint could really draw.

Same energy.

In the long-ago mists of the 00s, Hardee’s advertised a “Six Dollar Burger” that was actually only $3.95 because six dollars for a fast food burger was obviously silly.

I was deep in the weeds of the ACA fight and this is not at all how it went down. Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority for only a few months altogether, and many in the caucus at the time were moderate red-state Democrats that didn’t support a universal system. Hell, one of them, Joe Lieberman, had actively campaigned for John McCain and was on the shortlist to be his VP!

The ACA that passed via reconciliation was the most progressive possible version of it that could have passed; lose one senator or a couple of representatives in the final vote and it would have failed to pass (and arguably destroyed Obama’s presidency in the process).

If you give a sufficiently powerful model a goal, it will do whatever it can to achieve it, including stuff you didn’t explicitly instruct or intend. There’s a reason they’re called “agents.”

Isn’t that the guy who copied a smaller creator’s comic and then photoshopped fake evidence that he had created it first?

How to account for their success with music and visual art, though? Midjourney was making beautiful, intriguing images years ago, and AI music can be genuinely catchy and surprising. Again, the mainline models on default settings are pretty meh, but models tuned to the task are near-human quality. If there were enough of a commercial demand for high-level literary fiction to incentivize analyzing story structures, prosody, metaphor, etc., I don’t doubt they could rapidly improve on that front as well.

I suspect most of this is due to imperfect RLHF that focuses on brand-safety and rhetorical tricks that get annoyingly noticeable when they’re repeated at an industrial scale. The models are approaching superhuman ability at coding and math, but primarily because they’re more easily verifiable (plus it’s where the money is). But if there were a more rigorous way to quantify what makes good fiction work, there’s no reason in principle why a strong model wouldn’t be able to “optimize” it the same way it can images or video.

I’ve fine-tuned a local model on my own writing before and it’s spooky how well it can capture a stylistic voice.

I don’t know, we tried it in the 70s and people hated it enough to switch back pretty quickly. Under permanent DST, sunrise in January would not be until after 8 AM, while under permanent standard time sunrise in June would be shortly after 4 AM.

It’s fatal. The tattoo and earlier abuse allegations combined dragged him from a mid-high single-digit lead to a statistical tie in a race with an opponent who usually overperforms. And this latest scandal is so awful that it has caused virtually every major supporter from Chuck Schumer and the DSCC to Ro Khanna and Our Revolution to cut bait. He might still have a diehard base of true believers, but that isn’t enough to win.

The alternative where he drops out and gets replaced by a not-fatally-damaged Democrat who might actually be able to win?

They’re not anonymous to Politico, they would have spoken to them and verified their identities. They’re only anonymous in the story to protect them from harassment from creeps who think they’re part of a conspiracy.

Until Google neglects to update Google Earth and your entire system update gets hung on a no-digest error so you have to either uninstall Google Earth or run a custom update command that skips it every single time. 😩

Not only that, but the director is a huge fan of the book and is also the CEO of Laika, so there should be no issues with creative differences!