Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.

I had guessed it was Sri Lanka since it is also shown just off the coast of India. Then I figured it was more likely Indonesia given it’s surrounded by so many other islands and not that close to India. But yeah, now that I know that the name meant Japan I’m wondering if it’s depiction on the map is a conflagration of accounts of Indonesia and Japan.

I’m no expert, but for me personally, my shin splints went away immediately when I changed my running stride from heel strike to toe strike. I learned this when I tried running in minimalist shoes and the complete lack of cushion meant I would be bruising my heels. So, I stopped slamming my heels into the ground and instead land with the ball of my foot, absorbing the impact with the flex of the foot. I think of it as treating the cause rather than the symptom. It’s an adjustment, and I was a bit sore in some muscles I previously didn’t even know my foot had in there, so I had to work up to it a bit. Since I got used it though, I actually really enjoy the feeling of my feet and legs while running. I’ve also heard that the toe strike stride is less energy efficient, so apparently serious athletes never use it. If you’re running just for the exercise or for fun though, I recommend giving it a try.

My personal opinion on fishing as a pastime is funny. The idea of sitting by the lake for a few hours with friends and beers sounds like good fun, but as soon as you add that I’ll also be waiting for a fish to strike, it suddenly sounds dreadfully boring to me. I just hate waiting on things.

If the politicians and bureaucrats that Trump and friends pushed out are like murky swamp water, then the ones he brought in are like raw sewage, so I always said that he only wanted to “drain the swamp” so he’d have room to pump in said raw sewage.

I imagine that many of his supporters think he isn’t bluffing. I don’t think this is intended to prove it’s a lies, but to signal to his less dedicated supporters that the publication is lying to hurt him. We can predict how this headline will be framed on Fox.

I would argue that doesn’t qualify as trivial.

This is it exactly. “I am at home” describes your location. “I am home” describes your current state.

The speculation is that due to him fraudulently over-valuing his properties (as just proven in court) to borrow more than they are worth against them, he likely has negative equity on those properties. Can’t borrow against equity if you’re underwater on all your mortgages.

Thanks, that is a better word there.

I can see the argument that it has a sort of world model, but one that is purely word relationships is a very shallow sort of model. When I am asked what happens when a glass is dropped onto concrete, I don’t just think about what I’ve heard about those words and come up with a correlation, I can also think about my experiences with those materials and with falling things and reach a conclusion about how they will interact. That’s the kind of world model it’s missing. Material properties and interactions are well enough written about that it ~~simulates ~~ emulates doing this, but if you add a few details it can really throw it off. I asked Bing Copilot “What happens if you drop a glass of water on concrete?” and it went into excruciating detail about how the water will splash, mentions how it can absorb into it or affect uncured concrete, and now completely fails to notice that the glass itself will strike the concrete, instead describing the chemistry of how using “glass (such as from the glass of water)” as aggregate could affect the curing process. Having a purely statistical/linguistic world model leaves some pretty big holes in its “reasoning” process.

“That is my legal argument,” Blanche replied.

People are saying he only hires the best lawyers. Well let me tell you that nobody hires better lawyers than Trump.

Our kids need to focus on fundamental educational building blocks, not political ideology - either left or right.

From the page. Odd that they claim that, yet every single report they found worth publishing further down the page is about stuff they consider ‘left’.

Haha, different meaning of the word. Referring to “chaps” the clothing item from the Western part of the U.S., not to folks who don’t have an ass. Chaps were made of leather and worn over jeans to protect to protect the inside seam area of them from excess wear from rubbing against the side of the saddle and the stirrup straps when spending a long time riding a horse. Or are sometimes worn without the jeans by men being lewd.

Joy ride and running drugs are common reasons to steal any old car. Whoever has been stealing it clearly isn’t doing so to keep it since the same car keeps getting stolen again.