It should be mentioned that this was a 2012 trial after a 2009 earthquake, and that all but one of the convictions were overturned on appeal. The one whose sentence was confirmed also had his sentence reduced and suspended. In Italy, convicts don't go to prison until after their first appeal, so none of the scientists served a day of their sentence.

The one that had his sentence confirmed, though not his punishment, had provided information in an interview that was scientifically invalid and discourage evacuation. Specifically, he told them that the many small quakes reduced the likelihood of a big quake by releasing pent-up stress, but the scientific consensus is that this isn't true because the amount of energy released by small quakes isn't enough to affect the energy of a big one, not unless there are tens or hundreds of thousands of small ones, and that a rise in the number of small quakes more often indicates increased probability of a big one.

I don't think he should have been prosecuted for what he said, but he really should have been more precise, and more responsible. A suspended sentence to make the point that scientists need to be careful and precise with their public statements in cases where lives are on the line is excessive, but it's not ludicrous.

It would barely inconvenience them. These guys are well-funded. They'd just set up their own relays outside of China.

Will it actually help his coin and the crypto bros? I'm not so sure.

A lot of crypto bros believe that all that crypto-assets need now is legitimacy and they'll blow up and take over the world. They also think, probably correctly, that regulation will legitimize crypto-assets. In some sense that may be true, but the ability to sidestep regulation is and always has been crypto-assets' killer feature. Take that away and they may be legitimized, but they'll also lose their only actual reason for existence, which I've got to think will ultimately be bad for crypto-coin valuations.

Trump is clearly terrified of it being released. That's why he's taken to insulting anyone who brings up Epstein, attacking the credibility of the file contents (just in case he is ultimately forced to release them) and engaging in delaying tactics like this grand jury testimony order.

More than that, grand jury files are secret and can generally not be released to the public. The president can ask, the AG can ask, but only the court can approve the release, and the court can only do that only as defined in the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure, Rule 6(e)(3)(E):

The court may authorize disclosure—at a time, in a manner, and subject to any other conditions that it directs—of a grand-jury matter” in a number of situations including:

(1) in connection with a judicial proceeding;

(2) to a defendant who has come forward with evidence that something improper occurred before the grand jury and he may be entitled to have the case dismissed; or

(3) at the request of the federal government, to another jurisdiction that needs it to prosecute a case.

Which of those apply in the current situation? Granted the language says "including", rather than "limited to", but the judge will take guidance from the specified situations and unless there's some similar reason to release the files, the judge will refuse.

No, he's throwing it to a judge to decide, for three reasons (which he probably didn't come up with and probably doesn't understand).

The first is to delay and hope that people demanding the info calm down and forget about it in the meantime. The judge probably won't act quickly (they generally don't), and while the judge is thinking about it the administration can just point to the order and the judicial process and shrug, saying "Trump ordered the release, that's all we can do". That's bullshit of course, because Trump absolutely could just order the DoJ to release the files it has, but because it's mostly Trump's own people who are upset, and most of them know nothing about the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, they'll probably buy it. For a while.

The second is so that when the judge ultimately refuses, Trump can throw the court under the bus. "Hey, I tried, but those damned courts and their activist judges", again ignoring the fact that Trump doesn't need the courts to do anything. As you pointed out, Maxwell's pending appeal may help him get this outcome.

The third is that because the grand jury testimony was focused on what Epstein and Maxwell did, so in the unlikely event that the judge does order its release, it probably won't include a lot of damaging information about other people in their circle, like Trump or his associates, that might be in the full files the DoJ has. As you pointed out, Bondi also gets to decide what parts are pertinent, so there's that filter as well.

To be clear, I strongly doubt there's a "smoking gun" in the Epstein files that could convict Trump of sex crimes. If that were there, the DoJ would probably have acted on it after he left office. But there definitely is something in those files that Trump is afraid of. Maybe it's about him, maybe it's about someone near him. But there's something he doesn't want to come out and that's why he's refusing to release the files and trying to pre-emptively discredit them in case they leak or he is somehow forced to release them.

How did the stock market get into this discussion?

And the list concept concerns me. Are these lists appealable? If not, then they're abusable.

Also, the line between "AI generated" and "non-AI generated" is ever more fuzzy. AI is used for upscaling. AI is used in cameras to enhance images taken. AI is used to make the sort of minor edits that are done the world over in Photoshop. Etc. There's also the fact that this is done with image fingerprinting, which is fuzzy, so then any images that have minor modifications done with AI which get added to the list will get the raw images flagged as well. The thing people want to stop is "fake images", and in particular, "fake images that mislead about the topic at hand". But then that's not "AI" that's the problem in specific, that's image fakery in general (AI just makes it faster / easier).

And re: fingerprinting, take for example, the famous case of the content-spam creator who took a photo of a woodcarving of a German Shepard, flipped it horizontally, ran it through an AI engine to make trivial tweaks to the image, and then listed it as his own. I'd think any decent fingerprinting software would catch both versions. And if it's not flexible enough to catch that, then I have to wonder how useful it is at all, since images constantly change as they move around the internet, even accidentally, let alone deliberately.

Nope did not happen.

I don't like that the police have access to this much computer surveillance at once. I'm not supporting a company thats making it happen. Police over and over again prove that they are basically Cartman from Southpark.

Yes that explains the complexity, but not the ongoing bad naming of the options.

Statistics is highly useful for CS, and calc is a prerequisite for (real) statistics.

Not if coding is all you can do. That's his point. He's not saying you don't need a degree, he's saying you do need it because it teaches more than just how to code. If all you want is to code, you don't need a degree. But if you want to be a computer scientist or a software engineer, you probably do need a degree... and Google hires computer scientists and software engineers, not coders.

Heh. That reminds me of a conversation I had with my academic advisor in the CS department back in college (~35 years ago). I had been working as a programmer for a couple of years while going to school to get my degree, and had been writing code of various sorts for a decade. I was also young and very cocky. While laying out my path to graduation we were looking at scheduling the required software engineering series. I asked if there was a way I could skip it because "I've been writing code for a while, so I'm pretty sure already learned everything on my own". The professor gave me an indulgent smile and said "I think you should take it anyway".

Looking back, I'm embarrassed for and amused by my younger self. So clueless. So arrogant! I assumed I had discovered, on my own, in a few years of solo projects, the software engineering lessons accumulated by the industry over decades of large-scale projects. I took the classes and immediately realized how much I didn't know, and that the classes were only going to scratch the surface. In hindsight, I'm not sure "scratch the surface" is even accurate, but they did at least make clear to me that I had a lot to learn, and show me something of what the shape of that knowledge might be.

As for whether you can get hired by Google without a degree... you actually can. Google cares about capability, not credentials. That said, there aren't many non-degreed SWEs at Google, because auto-didacts smart enough and dedicated enough to give themselves a good grounding in all of the things a decent degree program provides are pretty rare.

It is hard in practice to get hired without a degree because the recruiters generally discard resumes that don't include a degree (or clearly-equivalent experience), but if you happen to know a Google SWE and can convince them to give you a mock interview (most are happy to unless it's clear to them that you're going to fail badly), and you pass, they can jump you past the screening process, straight to the onsite interview.

Undefeated in UTF-8 battles. Never met a non latin1 encoding it couldn't mangle.

Hitting a bit of the "Crúiscín Lán" during a "brain storming" event, I see. God Damn I wish I worked there.

WHAT is right there on video? That is NOT one of Zelensky's bodyguards. That's a random soldier from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade, which recaptured Izyum, during Zelensky's visit to celebrate the victory. Do you think bodyguards spend all their time taking selfies with the person they're protecting? Grow some common sense circuits in your brain. And it's not like Zelensky was handing the man an award with the patch prominently featured in front of the camera while he received it or anything. The Russian volunteer ranks are absolutely littered with Nazis.

What, you mean like the Russian governor of occupied Donetsk outright giving an award to a guy with a Totenkopf patch? Or all of the numerous Russian officials who have praised or given awards to the puppy-eating, unabashed Nazi, Milchakov?

Also, contrary to the misinfo sites you read, that was not a photo of "one of Zelensky's bodyguards". That was from his visit to Izyum where he was posing with random soldiers from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade to celebrate the retaking of the city from the Russians. That's why everyone has their phone out to take selfies.