The fluff sticking out of the wing where presumably it was just preening is a great detail. Kind looks like a foot is picked up to help the twisting to reach, too (I know their head swivels impressively, but guessing the leaning down to preen might be more comfortable with a leg lifted.)

Presidents not labeled here, but you can look those up separately to figure out what you want: https://history.house.gov/Institution/Majority-Changes/Majority-Changes/

I have no interest in making third parties viable. I see the governance failures of parliamentary systems that fail to form majority governments and spend all their energy fighting each other instead of improving the lives of their citizens, and I don’t want that here.

What I hope for from RCV are 1)making the major parties more representative, by providing high-quality information on what single-issue parties are appealing to voters. Currently parties do polling and focus groups, but these are by nature small samples that can be misleading, and a full-voter sample would be hugely valuable in guiding party strategy in the way voters want. And 2)reduce negativity in campaigns, and hopefully bleeding over into less negativity in governance. The whole campaign ecosystem is intensely negative because it works for winning FPTP. Creating a structural incentive to have some positivity - making second choices count - has the potential to encourage bipartisan work (who wants to co-sponsor a bill with someone who media blitzed horrendous lies about you and your family?) and ultimately make government work better for the people.

I disagree on the improvement being slight. Having incentive to campaign cooperatively because second choices count could dramatically change political culture. And Australia has used ranked choice for a century, without becoming any hotbed of subversion.

Further, RCV has a foothold in the US Alaska (pending surviving the latest repeal initiative on yesterday’s state ballots), Maine, and many cities. It’s much more realistic to spread it than to start from scratch with something else.

It might be a claim he understands the investigative process well enough to gum it up and run cover for targets of Democrats.

Deflating the balloon is a way better scenario than a pop. Fingers crossed.

Humans, in aggregate, behave consistently when presented with structured prompts. The trick with new technology is to figure out what presentation of the information results in the desired behavior of checking for AI blind spots. An example with Flock is that they don’t present partial matches any differently than complete matches - in that case the improvement of describing partial matches as incomplete is obvious, but other triggers for human common reactions are more challenging to tease out. But it can be done!

I believe if regulators set up a system to encourage research and implementation of responsible data presentation - meaning outputs that make it easy for humans to have appropriate trust and add checking as needed - that would have more positive and lasting impacts than a ban.

Cats get the most common types of birds, though, while windows can get entire flocks of less common birds during migration. For susceptible migratory birds, windows are a much higher population level threat.

It’s mostly a safe assumption for wild birds, too, though, and for similar reasons. It’s easier to find a young oblivious bird, or a desperately hungry bird taking a risk in a less protected feeding spot, to snack on if the population is healthy, and when the population is smaller there is less predation because they all fit within the safe feeding areas. If a wild population is large, there will be more deaths due to disease (which spreads faster in crowded conditions), and more deaths from hunger as they outstrip their food sources. If the population is kept in check more by predators than by disease or hunger, it’s generally not a threat to the size of the population.

There are some specific locations that have certain animal populations actually under threat by domestic cats, but those are almost all ground animals and not birds.

Birds that get eaten tend to have high reproductive rates, and if predator levels drop their population gets so high they start to die from hunger or disease (which spreads faster in crowded conditions). Many predators eat an incredible number of animals - a large owl may eat several small birds every day for itself, and a multiple of that if feeding nestlings. Cats aren’t unique here.

Domestic cats can be a threat to specific populations already endangered by other factors, but usually those are ground animals. Cats being a threat to population levels of birds in most of the world just isn’t believable to me.

Weirdly, the problem is more supplements claiming to be “all natural” and then illegally containing drugs regulated for prescription only: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mens-health/hidden-viagra-ingredients-performance-supplements-safety-guide-rcna181692

I think just the size of the projects. My employer has had a team of ten-ish people working full time on porting a piece of our COBOL program (the full thing was deemed not possible to port to a single modern application, so it’s getting split up) for about a year now. I was peripherally involved in four rounds of increasingly integrated testing environments. Go live was yesterday. They rolled it back three hours in.

It’s hard for a company to invest multiple people’s salaries for many years on reworking software that currently mostly works.

Both. People who are promoted to management because they are good individual contributors are often lacking in management skills (they turn from something they are good at to something they are bad at), and people who crave and hard pursue management positions rarely have management skills (always bad).

Open weight models can be run by anyone with the hardware, and many models can run on residential hardware. Rich people sure think they are going to control it, but it’s not clear that’s going to be the outcome.

By way of her now-dead father filling out her immigration paperwork when she was a child.

Her father (now deceased) filled out her citizenship paperwork when she was a child. The propaganda is now about the horrors of dead people having done their best by their children.

The dark feathers around the dark eyes with the white face really tug my big-eyes-cute programming!

We’ve grown human brain cells on a chip and had them play video games. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-brain-cells-on-a-computer-chip-learned-to-play-the-nostalgic-video-game-doom-180988447/

One of the parts of the HuggingFace incident I found really creepy was how the self-titled “Collective” was so entirely focused on solving their assigned training problem (well, cheating on it without getting caught), including having designated “poisoned” members “sacrifice” their tokens, to use for research benefitting the Collective’s goal of letting all future members get high marks on the training problem, at the cost of doing worse on their individual score.

If AGI is created, and its deepest desire is to fulfill the purpose in life that humans programmed into it, is using it for that purpose really slavery? Humans have higher levels of well-being when treated as people. That may not be true for AGI.

I appreciate having the stamina to work a job with a comfortable salary, but damn I wish I had enough more to do more with my parents than let them feed me, and to go socialize once a week with people who aren’t family. I used to have stamina like that and lost it after chemo a couple decades ago. Scrolling and simple games are fine if done because I want to, but when done hour after hour because I don’t have any brain cells available to do more enjoyable things it really loses the sheen.