Senator Alex Padilla (D-Ca), interrupted and arrested while asking questions of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem related to ICE. She’s the former South Dakota governor who spent $5 million of her state’s COVID money on a tourism campaign. You might remember the dept of Homeland Security was created (along with the term “homeland”) by George “Dubya” Bush after 9/11, as “not a whole new agency” but a reorganization of parts of existing agencies, to coordinate their work (to protect Freedom™). Their budget this year is $107 billion. Sound like a whole lotta coordinatin’ goin’ on.

“Oh yeah? Well, ‘credible reporting’ says you suck!”

So? It says human imagination is indefinite.

I don’t do fb - do people jealously challenge other people for liking pics?

An e-note is a full step above a d-note and a half step below an f-note.

Yes, LLMs are designed to emulate how a human would respond to a prompt by digesting a huge amount of human-generated content. They can do that fairly well except when they can’t.

I had a dedicated electronic chess game - a board with LEDs on it showing where the game wanted to move. You had to move physical pieces around and press membrane switches under the squares to tell it where you moved. I don’t remember if it was described as “AI” back then or not. I thought of it as a chess expert system on a chip. As a total novice player I could rarely beat it on its lowest skill level. Was never interested enough in chess to get the game for my 2600. But I still have both of those things in a box.

Queen to queen’s bishop three, Captain.

Agree, that was well thought out. Also I loved how Toshi got a jarring feeling when the ship went into warp and it gave her the heebie jeebies. It totally made sense that some people would be aware of that, especially somebody whose “different” brain workings enabled her to parse meaning out of unfamiliar languages.

I thought they should have also made the Vulcan mind meld mysterious and weird at first - it’s been so long I don’t remember how they handled that, but in my own ideas for a retro series before Enterprise came out I thought the Vulcans would sort of keep the mind meld private and personal. The first time it would be used in an episode - reluctantly, in an emergency - it would really spook the crew. They would wonder, “Can they read our minds? Are they controlling us?” It would create a lot of tension and the Vulcans would have to rebuild trust.

It was never expressed this way, but what if it turns out they physically transport your actual atoms through subspace, kind of like a particle beam, so they’re your atoms and it’s the very same you?

In that case there’s always the other Federation.

Ok, new TNG plot idea - to provoke war with the Klingon Empire, Romulan hackers infiltrate the Federation’s central update servers, programming Klingon commandos to pour out of holodecks all over the fleet, take over vessels, and attack Earth. The Enterprise is spared because Wesley disabled auto-update to troubleshoot the Moriarty problem and forgot to turn it back on.

I’m a slice of American cheese. I was told if I applied myself I could be fondue!

Lookout, Jimbo! He’s comin’ right for us!

De Santis may be a sack of shit but that doesn’t justify the misleading headline in this case. He was giving a specific example of escaping “when a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle, and threatens you.” DeSantis says so many outrageous things for real and pushes outrageous policies for real, there’s no need to misquote him.

That’s the problem when social services are cut to the bone and they have to hire whatever thugs they can get for the shit money they can pay, and they lose whatever trust they might have from the population they’re supposed to serve.

This reminds me of a job where my office buddy and I used to shoot rubber bands, paperclips, little wads of paper etc. at each other over the partition between our desks, or bank them off the wall. There was this guy Dave from another floor, who occasionally stopped in with a question for one of us, and I swear to god every time he came in was right when we were screwing around like that or laughing immediately afterwards. Every. Single. Time. Once while we were exchanging fire I even said something like, “Time for Dave to show up,” and like 2 seconds later he walked in. We both busted up laughing. Dave developed a srsly bad attitude about us because he didn’t think we ever did any work, but actually we were hella busy most of the time.

Because of the office layout at one of my jobs I developed exceptional skill at backhanding stuff into the trash bin diagonally behind me across the room. So when I made a home office I set it up the same way. People are always asking, “Why is your trash bin way over there?”

humorous drama = dramedy

Yes, that’s why saying “redundant” is a humorous way to imply that sailboats suck up all your money.