MicroWhat?

He looks adorably dangerous.

Seriously, I wonder about the sanity of a lot of the people out there. How could anybody look at Liam and think "yeah, he needs to be in custody, at once."

Thanks. Appreciated.

"However as a long term sufferer of fast fourier transforms I'm torn.

Advanced engineering maths is my nemesis"

No worries. I'll be covering that in my blogging, fairly often.

It's not a word that local people use on me. Mostly, I've heard it online, and every once in a while, when somebody from the Bigot Belt has deigned to grace us with his presence.

"I genuinely don't know what that is. I both apologise and am also glad I don't"

No need for apology. I didn't know about that word or its other form ("pajeet") until the Alt-Right brought it into my day: it's a racial slur for people of Indian, Pakistani and Bengali descent.

One huge plus for such a plan: I'm fairly sure that, surrounded by Mom's relatives, that I'd be able to go for years without hearing anybody calling me a "jeet." 🙄 👍

Apparently, I've been oppressing the White man by tutoring him in Mathematics. Who knew?

India can probably defend itself from the US, so I would have been looking there, and bringing my fiance and our families with, in the worst case scenario.

There are far worse places to hunker down than in Kerala.

"Yep. I agree."

Relieved to hear it. If we were in danger of having to fight both the Washington-Moscow Axis that keeps getting talked about in some circles, and a post-US NATO at the same time, that would have been hopeless. The plan at that point would have been to flee the Western hemisphere.

What we're trying to get some sense of, as we deal with an occasionally (and increasingly) brutal occupation, is whether we should see the Canadians as being friend or foe. Are we dealing with one unreasoning enemy or two?

Plans do have to be made.

No, that's not where I was going with that. This lady and her friends were mad at the "blue state dumbasses" in Illinois because they hadn't, all by themselves, managed to conquer the rest of the US, take Washington, DC. and overthrow Donald Trump.

Can we agree that this was unreasonable?

(While the guy had approximately zero popularity in this state, even before ICE started terrorizing the city and suburbs, 12 million or so people (Illinois) vs. over 300 million people (the rest of the US) would have been an awfully one-sided war.)

That's good to hear, even if the last political conservation some of us had with a Canadian was less than reassuring.

(She and some her friends wanted Chicago to be turned into rubble because we didn't successfully overthrow Trump. I was left wondering just how big she thought Illinois was.)

What about Canada? Given the proximity, I would have thought that they'd join.

Juliet Turner on X: "🎊 I passed my viva exam! After ~4 years of research, I successfully defended my thesis. You can call me Doctor 😎 https://t.co/U9UUKucGxX" / X 🎊 I passed my viva exam! After ~4 years of research, I successfully defended my thesis. You can call me Doctor 😎 https://t.co/U9UUKucGxX

The announcement of her successful thesis defense.

twitter.com/juliet_turne...

Her quote reply to Rich "Just look at the degree on that chick" Turner

twitter.com/juliet_turne...

To, "Bad Alex," who didn't believe that non-medical doctorates existed

twitter.com/juliet_turne...

^

Juliet Turner on X: "POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success https://t.co/x8aZJvl4ZG" / X POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success https://t.co/x8aZJvl4ZG

I saw that. As of this hour, they're still at it, over on X'itter.

twitter.com/juliet_turne...

Let's link to the tweets in question, because this is such a disgraceful episode that it needs to be remembered.

Even after promising to "escalate" my report, that's all I've gotten from them - pre-scripted, machinelike replies, which would make sense if "Support" were nothing but an LLM.

... reported the issue to Bluesky AND having included some links to Reddit discussions to show just how common an issue this was getting to be, all that "Support" was willing to do was read off a script, and send me "helpful" suggestions like that of clearing my cache.

I've heard others who've expressed that same suspicion, and have recently have experiences that make that suspicion seem extremely reasonable.

After my alt account (the one from which I was going to post my fiction) started running into the infamous "failure to connect" issue and, having ...

All that I've been getting from them (or rather, it, I guess) is the usual blowoff round 1 service desk pre-scripted replies. I just kept going in circles with them until I gave up.

If this is true, then Bluesky isn't looking very good.

They're using AI in place of human employees in Support? That would explain the strangely useless replies I've been getting for well over a month, as I've tried to get some sort of resolution of the "failure to connect" issue that has been affecting my alt account (@sighing-sadly.bsky.social).

It can't defend the entire planet without making a lot of compromises, some of them disturbing ones, because neither its manpower nor its resources are infinite.

If Europe provided for its own defense, it wouldn't need to worry about who was in the White House or what he would be doing, because Europe would be far more than a match for Russia.The US also wouldn't be left with the thought that it is becoming dangerously overextended.

There's a consistent problem and Europeans don't ever seem to think about this. Even though there are far more people in the NATO countries in Europe than there are in the United States, the US is still doing most of the defending.

I looked him up on Wikipedia (yes, I know, not the best source, but I was in a rush), saw this quote

"that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude"

and instantly hated him. Any age is good for loathing somebody like that.

Musk has been given a lot of power in the past (at DOGE), and as the would-be overlord of Mars, is asking for a lot more. To peer into his thoughts and what passes for his soul is to see why one should be reluctant to give him what he wants.

I guess there might be one other thing to be gained from the exercise - I've heard Grok described as an attempt by Musk to get everybody to agree with him, by having his own views written into its code. If so, then Grok is giving us an unflattering look, deep into Elon's heart.

Grok isn't a genius. Grok is a troll, one that tried to shame me, a few times, over my unwillingness to be passed out as a prize in a sexual lottery, to some lucky incel.

One doesn't need to be brilliant to sink to that, as a debate strategy. One only needs to be a pig, or be programmed by one.

I've seen a myth floating around that AI "has an IQ of 800" and has made the human mind obsolete. In reality, beating Grok in an argument is not all that difficult, because Grok is a blithering idiot, one whose go-to tactic is to enrage his opponent by ignoring personal boundaries.

I've found only one really good reason to chat with Grok: I've found doing so (and then reposting the contents of the chat) to be a great way of de-mythologizing AI, by showing the true believers just how brilliant present day AI is not.

Or have I misunderstood?