Imagine if every time you read a news report, or work of fiction, or gardening manual, or anything where the time of day is relevant, you’d need to know what longitude the text originated at and then mentally convert it to your familiar local time before you know whether the events described are in the morning, afternoon, or night.

“Better at news than the news” is a trivially low bar.

How generative natural language works has been highly debated for over 60 years—there’s certainly no consensus most linguists would agree with. And while we have a pretty good idea how the process of facial recognition works, we know that process isn’t conducive to extracting a conventional explanation of how to recognize a particular face. (The best you could do is to make a list of features that would allow someone to eliminate all but one candidate from a small group, but that’s distinct from the process of actually recognizing someone.)

Can you explain how you recognize someone’s face? Can you explain how you balance your body and move your feet correctly as you walk? Can you explain how you speak in grammatically correct sentences without consciously thinking about the rules of grammar?

The vast majority of our experiences are fundamentally inexplicable—basically, everything that isn’t part of our internal narrative.

From the text of the resolution:

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE, THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES CONCURRING, That the General Assembly of the State of Iowa rejects the decision of Obergefell v. Hodges ; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That the General Assembly of the State of Iowa calls upon the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse the Obergefell decision, and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman…

Does the Supreme Court even have the power to reverse a previous decision without a new case revisiting the issue?

And doesn’t it violate the separation of powers in multiple respects for a state legislature to tell the Supreme Court how to interpret the federal constitution?

“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind. How true that is.”
― Dan Quayle

If I make a typo, rather than autocorrecting or deleting a few characters I delete the whole word and re-type it from the beginning. That way the correct spelling gets into my muscle memory and I’m much less likely to make the typo again in the future.

Pizzo stated that the party needed new leadership but other top state officials didn’t want him to be it. “There are good people that can resuscitate it. But they don’t want it to be me. That’s not convenient. That’s not cool,” he added.

Sounds like the state party dodged a bullet there.

Just over a year ago.

Then you can change the channel and they won’t notice!

Maybe now Trump supporters can be persuaded to boycott Fox News.

The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.

It is not an eventuality, it is a possibility that he tries

That’s literally what “eventuality” means:

eventuality | əˌvɛn(t)ʃəˈwælədi |
noun (plural eventualities)
a possible event or outcome.

As others are pointing out, there are mass protests going on—but I think there’s more to it than that.

The general message of all protests is “listen to us or else”. In the US for the last fifty years, “or else” has been understood to mean “or else you’ll lose the next election”—but it’s becoming clear that this threat has no leverage with Trump, either because he’s confident he can manipulate elections (through whatever means) or because he intends to accomplish his goals in his current term and doesn’t care what happens after that.

So protests need to find some other goal and some other message. Right now they’re looking for other weak points (e.g., Tesla dealerships), but once it’s clear they’ve got a strategy Trump is actually afraid of, the numbers will grow.

I tested mine with an infrared thermometer: Starting cold, I turned one burner to medium and another to high, and measured them as they heated up. They heated at the same rate until the medium burner reached its target temperature.

that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker

Same with electric range/ovens.

Clip art/stock art.

That is, “art” that’s intended to be meaningless until someone else uses it in a context that supplies a meaning.

“The monkey about whose ability to see my ears I’m wondering”.

Part of the issue is that the thing you’re wondering about needs to be a noun, but the verb “can” doesn’t have an infinitive or gerund form (that is, there’s no purely grammatical way to convert it to a noun, like *“to can” or *“canning”). We generally substitute some form of “to be able to”, but it’s not something our brain does automatically.

Also, there’s an implied pragmatic context that some of the other comments seem to be overlooking:

• The speaker is apparently replying to a question asking them to indicate one monkey out of several possibilities

• The other party is already aware of the speaker’s doubts about a particular monkey’s ear-seeing ability

• The reason this doubt is being mentioned now is to identify the monkey, not to express the doubt.

• I don’t think it’s useful for a lot of what it’s being promoted for—its pushers are exploiting the common conception of software as a process whose behavior is rigidly constrained and can be trusted to operate within those constraints.

• I think it sheds new light on human brain functioning, but only reproduces a specific aspect of the brain—namely, the salience network (i.e., the part of our brain that builds a predictive model of our environment and alerts us when the unexpected happens). This can be useful for picking up on subtle correlations our conscious brains would miss—but those who think it can be incrementally enhanced into reproducing the entire brain (or even the part of the brain we would properly call consciousness) are mistaken.

• Building on the above, I think generative models imitate the part of our subconscious that tries to “fill in the banks” when we see or hear something ambiguous, not the part that deliberately creates meaningful things from scratch. So I don’t think it’s a real threat to the creative professions. I think they should be prevented from creating works that would be considered infringing if they were produced by humans, but not from training on copyrighted works that a human would be permitted to see or hear.

• I think the parties claiming that AI needs to be prevented from falling into “the wrong hands” are themselves the most likely parties to abuse it. I think it’s safest when it’s open, accessible, and unconcentrated.

Anyone using DeepSeek as a service the same way proprietary LLMs like ChatGPT are used is missing the point. The game-changer isn’t that a Chinese company like DeepSeek can compete with OpenAI and its ilk—it’s that, thanks to DeepSeek, any organization with a few million dollars to train and host their own model can now compete with OpenAI.