[Content Warning: death, sexual abuse, suicide]
A young fellow I knew recently ended his life. We had discussed it before, and he was often miserable, saw no point in being alive, didn’t enjoy it, and as he said “never asked for it.”
You can’t fool me!
The boffins didn’t even predict it, except under the “there may be run-away reactions” cover.
It turns out that when you plunk down the money for a 40-foot ladder, there are a lot of other folks in your neighborhood who need one. That’s typical for specialized equipment: people forgo using it because they don’t want to go to the trouble to obtain it, but … borrow it? Sure.
I know you know I hate the FBI. They’re not just a stealth “secret police” they’re really bad at it. Basically, they had such a great self-promoter in J. Edgar Hoover, that they got a great public relationship through media manipulation and they have been coasting on it ever since. You know “we got John Dillinger” [Which was done by getting a tip-off and showing up and peppering him with machine-gun fire]
When I was a kid I went through a period where I was interested in nautical disasters. Perhaps that has something to do with my general fear of being on a boat out of sight of shore.
We didn’t “lose” in Afghanistan. We “not-won.” Or something.
One of the US military’s less endearing characteristics is that it classifies its failures, which effectively puts anyone who discusses them at risk for prison time.
One of the challenges in AI is creativity: how do you make an AI that makes new things? For a long time, many humans privileged the human experience (as we do) saying that computer creativity was a hard limit.
That great big clueless jackass, Donald Trump, tended to blurt whatever was in the forefront of his mind. Picture, if you will, a conveyor belt of bad ideas attached to a microphone, and that’s a good model for how well Trump could think and keep a secret.