The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been accused by historians and rights campaigners of “grotesque stupidity”

I see they were being kind to him.

I literally don’t know a single veteran or service member who either respects him or even just likes him. Literally 100% across the board disdain. There’s got to be at least a couple who have positive views of him in the DoD, but no one I’ve met or worked with…

One of my friends once told me that when you go far enough left, you get your guns back.

Please read the citations. I’ve found Claude (and a slightly lesser extend GPT) to be right more often than not, but the leading LLMs do get things wrong with enough frequency that it’s worth checking.

Also, to be clear, I’m not fervently anti-LLM, but I do know how it works (as much as anyone who has read the academic literature). “Thinking” is at best a misnomer and at worst a marketing term. It’s just an ouroboros; the LLM more-or-less feeds its output back into itself to “check” it and “think.” It works surprisingly well, but it’s not actual thinking.

Something along these lines is why I’ve always loved Star Trek and didn’t get into other shows/movies as much (like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, etc.), especially as a kid. The crew of the Enterprise were just regular people, albeit hyper-competent, but still just people at the end of the day. They would combine their diversity of skills and overcome crazy situations. There was no savior or chosen-one, just people with skills and their own interests. It feels achievable for anyone to be an officer on the Enterprise if they put in the effort to be there. Not everyone can be a Jedi or a super hero. That’s not to say those other stories are bad, but I always felt that’s what made Star Trek special, and Picard’s humility, I think, really showcases it. It feels like he would say, “I’m just a guy doing a job.”

Jennifer Griffin phrased this really poorly. (Fox News isn’t really known for intelligence…) Three ships were fired on, and they returned fire with retaliatory strikes, per USCENTCOM. https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4480437/centcom-protects-us-warships-transiting-strait-of-hormuz/

So, the war isn’t back on, but it’s not off either. For a cease fire, there’s been a lot of firing going on. The US never should have kicked this hornet’s nest.

“The Host,” which is also the first episode with the Trill.

Honestly, yes. I went in pretty skeptical because I don’t really like the 32nd century setting and find teenage drama tiresome. SFA is actually pretty good. I really liked this episode: classic Trek storytelling and excellent world-building. The teenage drama stuff is annoying (to me personally), but that’s kinda the price of having a show about cadets.

There are some great characters, too. Jay-den (the Klingon and focus of this episode) is great, and Lura Thok, the Cadet Master, is an absolute gem of a character.

…That’s perjury on top of acting in contempt of court. Is there some reason why he hasn’t already been put in shackles for that?

On a separate note, Bovino is so stupid. He has no clue that he’s being set up to be the fall guy. He’s racking up all the points to get all of the excesses of this evil operation in Chicago pinned squarely on him. He’s giving the ghouls at the top plausible deniability should accountability ever come.

That’s a great overview of it. I think you’re right; as soon as Trump dies (and I do think it requires his death, not just leaving office), MAGA will fall on each other like wolves. This is why I’m not concerned about “who comes after Trump” because in choosing, MAGA will splinter and self-destruct. I’m actually concerned about actually getting there. If Trump dies (naturally is best), and the country isn’t completely destroyed, we’ll have a hell of a cleanup project, but I think it could be fixed in a generation or two.

The fact that MAGA potential heirs are starting their succession fight tells me that they know and are privately acknowledging that he’s not healthy and are trying to get a headstart in kneecapping the opposition.

I’m cautiously optimistic after these polls and hoping that they learned their lesson after caving the last time. I think the potential for bad polling spooked them the last time, but with this, they might find their spines and get some concessions from the Republicans. At this point, we really need some sort of victory.

But I always leave room to be disappointed.

But there is something the courts can do that doesn’t involve punishment: simply order the administration to re-hire the IGs with back pay and scrub the termination from the record. That’s the actual legal remedy in this situation.

Same. At this point, I’m only buying stuff that’s local to my community from small businesses. I don’t want to help American mega-corps, and I don’t want to contribute to any tariffs going to fund the government.

Everyone should have a strong base in STEM and the humanities. It irks me to no end when STEM majors can’t write, communicate, or understand a wider historical context just as it irks me when humanities majors claim to not understand basic algebra or scientific concepts. It’s fine to have a preference, but an expert engineer should have a passing familiarity with philosophy and ethics, just as a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics.

Then there’s business majors who have no familiarity with anything at all. If I had my druthers, “business school” wouldn’t even be an option at a university.

I worry that poor execution or bad decision making is what will sink the progressive movement. People assume that Johnson’s poor performance is due to inherent issues with democratic socialism, when in fact it he’s just not good at his job.

Exactly! It’s why I’m not concerned with Mamdani based on what I’ve seen. He seems fairly level-headed, and he has a bit more governing experience than Johnson had.

Not all progressives have the right disposition and skills to do great things - and if progressive voters can’t or won’t distinguish between policy and performance, then the movement is likely to fizzle out.

We need to have the ability to self-criticize and be pragmatic. There’s room for pragmatism without compromising core beliefs.

Absolutely! Some of it is definitely racism, and it is at the root of some criticism. His issue is that he seems to attribute virtually everything that’s negative or even questioning to racism. Honestly, I get why he’s defensive because of that, but that doesn’t make it any less of an overreaction.

Questioning investing in the south and west sides (to be clear, a good thing) is probably rooted in racism. Questioning why another pastor is being nominated to some position is probably not. He treats both the same.

So, being from Chicago, Johnson’s problems are mostly personal and of his own making. Like the article highlights, his staffing and approach has been pretty abysmal. He has a tendency to appoint unqualified pastors to positions (which, to be fair, is classic Chicago graft and not unheard of in the city with other mayors), and he doesn’t handle criticism well (that is, everything is “because he’s a black man” even if the criticism is justified). Plus, antagonizing the very popular governor from the same party is just a stupid thing to do. Some decisions are taken haphazardly (like trying to house migrants on toxic land). Others are just insanely stupid given the history of Chicago and basic financial literacy, like trying to take out a high interest loan to satisfy the Chicago Teachers’ Union or paying over $1M per unit of affordable housing.

The closest thing to an indictment of progressive policies is how Johnson wants to balance our budget, i.e. through taxes, even though Chicago is one of the most highly taxed places in the country already. He seems constitutionally incapable of reviewing for waste in the budget, of which there is plenty thanks to graft built up over decades. In this case, we don’t really need more of a tax in the city; we need the money that’s already being sent to be used more effectively. Decades of financial mismanagement and straight up corruption (which are, to be clear, not Johnson’s fault) led to where we are now. Even that, though, is not really because he’s progressive.

In all, Johnson’s problems are not because of overarching progressive policies; it’s because he personally makes poor decisions and doesn’t really have a grasp on how to effectively govern. While I haven’t looked too far into Mamdani, if he can simply make sound management decisions and not alienate those who should be allies, he’ll have a better time.

I agree, but this does sound cool for a one off–like Picard s3. Ultimately, though, I want new adventures with new characters exploring the vastness of the universe.

Isn’t it an international human rights violation to make somebody stateless?

Yes.

100% agreed. It should not be used as a replacement but rather as an augmentation to get the real benefits.

I study AI, and have developed plenty of software. LLMs are great for using unfamiliar libraries (with the docs open to validate), getting outlines of projects, and bouncing ideas for strategies. They aren’t detail oriented enough to write full applications or complicated scripts. In general, I like to think of an LLM as a junior developer to my senior developer. I will give it small, atomized tasks, and I’ll give its output a once over to check it with an eye to the details of implementation. It’s nice to get the boilerplate out of the way quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, LLMs are a huge advancement and unbelievably awesome for what they are. I think that they are one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past five to ten years. But the AI hype train is misusing them, not understanding their capabilities and limitations, and casting their own wishes and desires onto a pile of linear algebra. Too often a tool (which is one of many) is being conflated with the one and only solution–a silver bullet–and it’s not.

This leads to my biggest fear for the AI field of Computer Science: reality won’t live up to the hype. When this inevitably happens, companies, CEOs, and normal people will sour on the entire field (which is already happening to some extent among workers). Even good uses of LLMs and other AI/ML use cases will be stopped and real academic research drying up.