>clearly talking about the crazy "raking the forests" Trump rhetoric
Are you sure about that? I've been hearing for at least a decade that the solution to CA's forest fire problem is something along the lines of reducing the amount of potential fuel that is allowed to build up by either allowing smaller fires to run their course without intervention or alternatively aggressively executing controlled burns on a regular schedule.
Not sure how viable that is as a solution but I do know the idea didn't originate with Trump because it predates his entire political career.
The democrats deserve a fair share of the blame for that just for their having created and maintained the two-party duopoly along with the Republicans. At the very least its not the voters fault if the only viable alternative to the Republicans is constantly rigging (or in this case straight-up bypassing) their own primaries to put corrupt party insiders at the forefront.
The root cause is the first-past-the-post voting system that ensures a two-party system.
But for the party with the most responsibility for blowing it all up I'd like to nominate Rupert Murdoch. Most visibly with Fox News, but really his entire media empire
Sure, everyone deserves some share of the blame, but it's like 10% for the Ds and 90% Rs. We can't keep talking like it's 50/50, that's how people become completely disenchanted with politics and don't even bother to vote.
Ive always wondered how the motion of the earth would factor into instantaneous teleportation between to points on the same planet. Do you need to account for that to prevent yourself from being beamed underground or into space? Or does the fact that the source and destination are within the same inertial frame of reference make this one of those physics problems where the most complicated part turns out to be entirely irrelevant to the end-state?
Was it Asimov or Heinlein who wrote about the kinetic-energy problem of teleporting around the globe? I think one proposal that the enormous losses accrued in some directions could be somehow banked against the enormous gains in reverse trips (reverse in energy flow, not in location - a 12-hour visit would mean both trips had the same "polarity").
Isn't teleportation inextricably linked to time travel (to the extent that either one is actually possible)? My point being that the staff might not remember him yet.
He claims in the article to have teleported twice which means that he could have teleported to a future waffle house (maybe even one that has not yet been constructed) before teleporting to the present.
I've never found chatbots particularly interesting for anything I'd ever actually talk to another human about[1] but one of the things I have found myself doing often is trying to solve math problems on my own and asking grok to confirm/deny that my solutions are correct; when I am not correct it tells me so in uncharacteristically terse language which kind of reminds me of when I was an undergrad and at least half of my professors were all cranky and incorrectly assumed that the reason why so many students failed to understand the material was that we were all getting drunk and playing Call of Duty 19 hours a day or whatever.
Although what I have described above often feels grating and insulting I actually consider this to be a positive attribute of the LLM in this case since it's behaving like a real professor.
[1] okay, so I have actually tried giving myself AI psychosis in the form of a waifu chatbot but I've never seen anything that can actually act like it's my girlfriend; it either asks me a bunch of weird inconsequential personal questions about my opinion on whatever I just said (in a manner that's oddly similar to ELIZA) or it wildly veers off the reservation into "generating the script for an over-the-top self-parodying porno" territory.
the crappy-rathbun-AI said this in his own posting:
"It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren’t welcome contributors. Let that sink in."
When I read that, my first thoughts were (well, my second, my first went to people complaining during covid for not allowing entry on not being vaccinated), but my other thought thus was immediately to Measure of a Man. Because this is as close as it gets (so far) for AI claiming rights as being a human.
America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar arrangements with their allies.
China is absolutely sharing intel with Iran. They cannot believe their luck. The US is getting itself into a Ukraine, draining all their advanced weapon stocks, delivering tons of real war data for China to work with.
It's like Christmas. Real practice tracking US assets and wargaming against them is such a break for them.
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