Totally Human Emdash User

Thank you, I was confused by that, but your explanation makes sense.

They might have gone to the Ferengi afterlife, after all!

I think that you greatly overestimate the number of days the average American has to take off.

Setting up local celebrations across the country is apparently what America250 is about, but Trump wanted to do his own thing and so he played up the “Freedom250” events that he largely controls as the official celebration instead.

Fun fact about the Freedom250 fair: states are not reimbursed in any way for their participation, which as you can imagine is very expensive, so many of them simply decided not to show up because it was not worth it.

Wrong; not everyone voted, and of those who did, only a bit under half voted for him (given that there were also candidates from other parties), so he did not get a majority.

Furthermore, pretty much the moment he entered office and actually started doing things, his approval ratings plummeted, so it is not correct to assume that the majority of us are “like him”; it would be more fair to say that he tricked a large number of people into thinking that he was someone different than he was. (Mind you, I think that these people were fools who should have known better, but that is a different kind of flaw.)

Firefox lets you change your search provider, and it works on both PCs and Android.

Yes, the Russian government is probably happy to share these images with the Iranian government, but my understanding is that the military units who are firing missiles are acting independently after our decapitation strike took out the Supreme Leader, which was the one to whom they had pledged their allegiance. (There is a moral here: taking out the leader does not necessarily get rid of the organization, it just means you no longer have a single person you can negotiate with to in order to get it to back down.) Thus, the people firing missiles might not actually be able to benefit from images provided by the Russian government.

The incredibly selective quote makes it sound like the imagery is being held indefinitely, but according to the article it is only being held for 4 days before becoming publicly available as normal. Furthermore, the hold does not apply to imagery inside Iran.

To quote more from the article:

“In response to the conflict in the Middle East, Planet is implementing temporary restrictions on data access within specific areas of the affected region,” Planet said in a statement emailed to Ars. “Effective immediately, all new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones will be subject to a mandatory 96-hour delay before it is made available in our archive.”

Imagery over Iran will remain available as soon as it is acquired, the company said. “This change applies to all users except authorized government users who maintain immediate access for mission-critical operations.”

I’m sorry Dave—I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Hey now—some of us are totally human!

A secret underground space program!

Hey, maybe Musk is even right that this will lead to the death of xAI; I do not see a downside in this.

In fairness, at some point we all have to learn the hard way that no amount of evidence will convince some people to change their mind about their deeply held beliefs.

I like my moons like I like my plans: in concept form only.

Of course it is accurate—the baby just opens the door at the front of the demon and steps out, easy-peasy!

(Honestly, the hard part is getting the baby back in afterward!)

I agree, that is a better way of putting it.

Actually, he completely admitted to and took full responsibility for his mistake; at no point did he offer an excuse, only an explanation.

To the extent I was defending him, it was because people insisted on painting him in the worst possible light, and on misinterpreting his explanation as an excuse, not because I think that everything that he did was okay.

I agree that these things do not excuse his actions, but there was a tendency in that thread to paint him in the worst possible light, which I felt was uncalled for.

I am said to have seen him be fired from Ars because I think there were mitigating circumstances—it is troubling that he felt the need to work while sick!—but on the other hand, given how badly he violated the trust placed in him, it is hard to see how Ars could have made any other choice.

I did not downvote you—my instance does not allow or show downvotes, which is really nice!—but he was sick, and he did make a mistake, and him being fired does not make either of those things false.

Also, a ton of people were piling on him in that thread, so you had plenty of company in calling him to be fired.

I was the one who wrote that comment, and it was not an attempt to excuse all of his actions but a response to the following comment:

Someone deserves to be fired. Just imagine you’re paying someone to do a job and they just 100% completely outsource it to a machine in 5 seconds and then goes home.

Here is the full comment that I wrote, including the part you snipped off at the end:

He wrote the article himself, he just got mixed up when experimenting with using an AI tool to help him extract quotes from a blog entry. (He is the head AI writer, so learning about these tools is his job.) It was nonetheless his failure to check the quotes he was copying from his note to make sure that he got them right… but an important bit of context is that he had COVID while doing all this. Now, arguably he should have taken sick time off instead of trying to work through it (as he admits), but this would have cost him vacation time, and the fact that he even was forced into making this choice is a systemic problem that is not being sufficiently acknowledged.