It’s interesting, they used to think that having a big vocabulary or knowing multiple languages delayed having Alzheimer’s. It turns out that family often first become aware that a person is developing Alzheimer’s because the person starts regularly forgetting common words, but people with big vocabularies can come up with alternatives when they can’t remember one, so their family doesn’t recognize it as early. When those people are diagnosed, they end up being further along.

The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.

Oh, it’s fantasy

I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.

As other people have said, it would be way worse to have him him assassinated. If it’s looking like he’s going to lose, I could see the people who want the US unstable to prefer assassinating him instead.

This country has horrific systemic racism, and that might very will have instigated this scenario.

On the other hand, if there’s a guy prowling between the houses of my neighborhood, even if he’s in uniform, I’m going to call the police to make sure it’s legit, and I’m going to describe him as best I can, including skin color.

He’s so disingenuous. He says “I’m just a dumb guy asking questions,” but his show is clearly slanted and he gives sure time to people who wouldn’t and shouldn’t reach that kind of audience without him.

I’ve been careless with a delicate man

I always hear about people lamenting that they lost their boomer parents to Fox News or Facebook or whatever, but I’m a boomer parent who lost a son to Rogan. He’s always quoting absolute nonsense he heard on that show about Kamala or liberals. It’s so sad - he’s a pretty smart guy.

I’m not at all bothered by “swear words,” and I’ll use them occasionally (mostly when I think it’s funny), but it’s somewhat rare. I just don’t find it very necessary most of the time. I can usually make my point just find without, but sometimes the emphasis seems right out, again, it seems funnier.

Loathsome, misogynistic convicted felon? Yeah, about right, though at 72 he’s a bit young.

So if a group of guys came to your neighbors house and told the family that they’re going to move into it with them, you wouldn’t be for removing them, even if that meant a fight? It would be better to just let them move in because that way no one gets hurt?

And if they successfully move into your neighbor’s house, they might have eyes on your house next.

Russia is trying to take over Ukraine, a sovereign country, by force, and other countries are trying to help Ukraine fight Russia. Yes, people on both sides are dying. Ukrainians apparently overwhelmingly believe it’s worth the fight.

It’s really infuriating. Every time he’s asked a question, and she gets a rebuttal, he just starts rebutting her rebuttal and they just let him. And half the time what he’s says has nothing to do with the question that was asked. They cut Kamala off pretty much every time.

The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.

But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.

“Watch for the voter fraud because we win without voter fraud,” Trump said. “We win so easily. Hopefully, we’re going to win anyway. But we want to keep it down."

Yeah, this is just him doing more to set up January 6 Part 2.

It’s kind of amazing how upfront they are about it

The Republican response is literally that they’re going to defund the IRS. If there weren’t 100 other things demonstrating that the Republican party serves the ultra rich, and not the people, it would be astonishing.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.