Honestly the issue with the story is Ken Paxton, he literally has negative credibility. I know virtually nothing about Roblox or this case, but if Paxton is the first AG to pursue it my automatic assumption is he's prosecuting them because they either failed to give him a bribe or he thought they were helping Democrats register to vote or something.

Well, he renamed it and made minor changes around the edges so he could claim that it was broken and he fixed it. And then, of course, proceeded to violate the agreement he signed.

What is this obsession with pedophilia? I'm really getting rather suspicious of MAGA. I suspect your average Catholic priest or Southern Baptist youth pastor thinks about nude children less than most MAGA individuals.

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

Excellent post, just a couple of comments.

First, it's interesting that Nikkos said "a previous administration", without naming it. It was, of course, Trump 1.0.

Second, international treaties on refugees don't require a country to accept every refugee and there are multiple examples where nations have made agreements that modify which county must handle asylum claims. For example, the US-Canada Safe Third Country agreement specifies that asylum seekers must make their asylum claim in whichever country they arrive in first. If the US and Mexico had a similar agreement, then refugees could not enter from Mexico at all. Trump tried to get Mexico to sign a Safe Third Country agreement, but Mexico refused -- and it probably would have been invalid anyway, since Mexico might not satisfy the requirements of a "safe" country under the US law that authorizes the signing of Safe Third Country agreements.

Instead, Trump signed the "Migrant Protection Protocols" agreement with Mexico, which was the "remain in place" agreement. You said that no other country should be willing to put up with it, but Mexico did formally agree to it, though only to avoid tariffs. Of course, Mexico has declined to renew the protocols in Trump 2.0 (though Trump announced they had, which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum immediately denied -- Trump's habit of unilaterally announcing that an agreement has been reached obviously doesn't really work).

Anyway, there are lots of reasons why countries might agree to various limitations on asylum processes to manage refugee volumes, and these agreements are often perfectly valid under international and national law. Trump, of course, doesn't care about legality, or humanity, only what he can get away with.

With a president who solves an existential threat by finding the best expert he can find, and using his own formidable political skills and charisma to run interference for that expert.

Seriously, Comacho was a meathead, but Iâ(TM)d vote for him.

The best way to detect file types is to make them unambiguously what they are by means of content type, file extension and structure. And fuck any format that decides to be something vague or ambiguous - they brought that problem on themselves.

Smaller EVs need smaller batteries. Maybe there is a clue in that statement for companies like Ford, Tesla, Rivian et al shitting out these 3 tonne monsters. People don't need these vehicles and smaller vehicles have better margins.

I'm sure he could afford private tutors and "home school" them just like many rich families did in the long past. It doesn't explain why other kids would be taught there though. Maybe it's all benevolent, e.g. Zuck thinks, "hey I'm paying for tutors so they can teach some other kids at the same time and my kids can get some peer bonding going". Or maybe it's some weird shit going on, some fucked up discredited teaching method like Jaden Smith received. Who knows. But it's no longer home schooling at that point.

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

The problem with PC gaming is that Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Epic, Rockstar, CD Projekt et al decided to replicate Steam independently. So gamers now enjoy umpteen bloated launchers sitting on their desktop with their own sign on systems, stores and update processes.

So blame greed for Steam retaining its dominance. Companies wanted the cake to themselves and failed to see the bigger picture that federation would have been a better idea. Develop a common platform that handles sign on, updates, achievements, anticheat, matchmaking, discussions, forums, reviews etc., but does NOT include a store. Companies would be free to sell their games however they liked from wherever they liked. The system could still have had a landing page or a promotional aspect but purchases happened elsewhere, possibly using SSO to make it simple and easy.

It would have been a more successful and fair system than what actually happened.

Most European cities have decent public transport and taxis. Not to mention that self driving cars barely work in the USA which has a vastly simplified road network compared to what you'd find in Europe - one way systems, roundabouts, narrow lanes, places where you have to give way etc.