I’m not an expert in the Bible, but I don’t think it really ascribes omnipotency to God. I think it’s better to understand it as God being able to do all that can be done. So He may have limitations, but they are such that no other being can do something that He is unable to do.

From that sense, He is not able to save humanity freely, but he can set forth a process through which He can achieve this goal with some cost. I.e., He can create a divine being (that is either Himself in whole, Himself in part, or a direct descendant of Himself depending on your interpretation) that is able to spread His message and display an act of extreme self-sacrifice.

I don’t really understand exactly what the sacrifice did or what needed to be fixed, but I do think the stories make a lot more sense if you accept that God has some limitations. For instance, I assume that Noah’s flood was his first attempt to fix the problem (by killing everybody except for the most righteous of His creation), but it failed because He can’t do everything and doesn’t know everything. And the story of Jesus was His next attempt to sort things out.

But that’s just me thinking about them as fictional stories that really need to be edited rather than a divine and infallible truth.

I think it started around when he married Jenny McCarthy, who has long been a very vocal anti-vaxxer.

So she’s drawing in New Year’s Eve numbers for a random day in May, and it looks like this concert is the largest standalone concert.

At least, according to the Wikipedia article that you took the screenshot from.

Aren’t you contradicting yourself here? Your first line proclaims the existence of US censorship, but then your next line says that the US is bad because of unregulated free speech. How can there be both censorship and unregulated free speech?

I think the deal was $13 per pizza when you buy two. Toppers around me has a similar deal that is always available. One large specialty pizza is $23, but they have a deal where you can get two large pizzas for $12 each instead. A small order of sticks is $10, and a large order is $15. So two large orders of sticks (which are the same size as a large pizza) with two large pizzas with the deal would be about right.

I was just reading this article about a mathematical understanding of closed time-like curves.

In essence, the argument is that time travel to the past is possible with a degree of free will, but you would not be allowed to alter the past in such a way as to remove the motivation for traveling back in time. E.g., it would be like Futurama where Fry kills his grandfather, but he impregnates his grandmother, thus allowing himself to be born. The idea is that the timeline would correct itself and ensure that your future self will always return to the past.

Right, 1/1024 is 0.0009765625 or about 0.1%.

Bit in this context refers to the Shannon from information theory. 1 bit of information (that is, 1 shannon) is the amount of information you receive from observing an event with a 50% chance of occurring. 10 bits would be equivalent to the amount of information learned from observing an event with about a 0.1% chance of occurring. So 10 bits in this context is actually not that small of a number.

Thomas Jefferson, 1787

And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.

I think this quote puts it aptly. It obviously comes from a more tumultuous time, but the United States was borne out of the idea that violence is a valid response to injustice. Law and order are preferable to anarchy, but that doesn’t mean that all law is valid. When the laws are used to insulate the powerful few against the many, what reason is there for the many to follow the law?

This often-cited quote from Jefferson urges regular rebellion against the law so that the powerful will never lose sight of how tenuous their position is. If you let the powerful manipulate the laws for their own benefit against the interests of the rest of society, you’ll be left with a population that has no interest in upholding the law.

That is ultimately why people are happy to let this man face no consequences. People are angry at the billionaires, especially those in the health insurance industry. And this action is being picked up as a warning shot across the bow. Society is saying that we are sick of the status quo, and if things keep going as they have been, this is not going to be an isolated event.

Yeah, it would be more interesting if the middle track were empty.

Looking at a map with the current polls (and focusing on the toss-ups), it seems that the most viable path to victory for Harris is to pick up PA, MI, and WI. If she drops PA, she’d need MI, NV, WI or AZ, and GA or NC, but that seems like a big ask. If she wins PA, she could lose WI if she picks up AZ, GA, or NC and she could lose MI if she wins GA, NC, or AZ and NV. But winning PA and losing both WI and MI would require winning AZ and either GA or NC.

So there are a few paths to a Harris win, and a few don’t seem very farfetched, but none of them seem likely enough for comfort. Definitely not how I was hoping to be feeling at this point in the election.

That’s the big reason why I loved Diablo II, but was lukewarm on the following two. The skill tree was fixed and a had nice synergies between the skills. I used to keep a notebook with plans for different builds that seemed fun and was primarily interested in the skills rather than items.

In Diablo III, the skill tree was much more limited, and you could swap things out at any time. So planning out a build and starting a new character was pointless. You could just swap the active skills.

It also didn’t seem to have any hard spots. If you followed the main quests, your character improved just fast enough to keep the challenge throughout consistent. So I never really felt a need to grind. I mean, I hate games that are all grinding, but I also like it when there are walls that you have to spend some time and effort to move past.

Diablo IV was even worse for this as the areas adapt to your level. So no matter where you were, the challenge was the same.

Neither of the two were awful, in my opinion, but they dropped the parts that made Diablo so exceptional to me. So I really didn’t spend too much time with either of them whereas I played Diablo II for about 10 years.

From the wiki, the idea comes from an essay that somebody has written about a conversation they had with a friend about the struggles of chronic illness. The conversation took place at a restaurant, and she grabbed the spoons for use in a metaphor because there were spoons nearby. She gave her friend a set of spoons, and every time her friend mentioned doing a task, she took a spoon away.

It could have been anything, but spoons happened to be at hand and she wanted to make a physical representation of an abstract concept. The essay resonated with people, so spoons became entrenched. And now I hear people say that they’re all out of spoons to express the idea that they’ve done all that they can that day.

“Jones” is an American slang word meaning to be addicted to something, so “jonesing” for something means to crave something very strongly, and generally very vocally.

“Breve” is a coffee drink that is commonly made with half-and-half, which is a product that is equal parts cream and milk. I assume that people have taken to using the term to refer to half-and-half itself, but I’ve not personally heard that.

So the sentence is saying that their cat was addicted to half-and-half and would act like a junkie doing anything to get their next fix.

In case you missed the joke, this is a reference to how John Hinckley Jr shot Reagan because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster. It’s posted today because of the assassination attempt on Trump yesterday.

Well the origins were laudable, it’s just that it was shortly thereafter extended for racist means. Binet and Simon wanted to see if they could devise a test to measure intelligence in children, and they ultimately came up with a way to measure a child’s mental age.

At the time, problem children who did poorly in school were assumed to be sick and sent to an asylum. They proposed that some children were just slow, but they could still be successful if they got more help. Their test was meant to identify the slow children so that they could allocate the proper resources to them.

Later, their ideas were extended beyond the education system to try to prove racial hierarchies, and that’s where much of the controversy comes from. The other part is that the tests were meant to identify children that would struggle in school. They weren’t meant to identify geniuses or to understand people’s intelligence level outside of the classroom.

The ask that YouTube manage their system better. Currently, they assume that a copyright claim is valid unless proven otherwise, and it is difficult for content creators to actually get them to review a claim to determine if it is invalid. So, a lot of legitimate users that post videos without actually violating anybody’s copyright end up being permanently punished for somebody illegitimate claim. What we want is for YouTube to, one, make it more difficult or consequential to file a bad claim, and two, make it easier to dispute a bad claim.

However, that’s not going to happen because the YouTube itself is legally responsible for copyrighted material that is posted to their platform. Because of that, they are incentivised to assume a claim is valid lest they end up in court for violating somebody’s legitimate copyright. Meaning that the current system entails a private company adjudicating legal questions where they are not an impartial actor in the dispute.

So your concern is legitimate, but it’s ignoring the fact that we already are in a situation where a private company is prosecuting fraud. People want it to change so that it is more in favor of the content creators (or at least, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty), but it would ultimately be better if they were not involved in it whatsoever. However, major copyright holders pushed for laws that put the onus on YouTube because it makes it easier for them, and it’s unlikely for those laws to change anytime soon. That’s what I’d say we should be pushing for, but it’s also fair to say that the Content ID system is flawed and allows too much fraud to go unpunished.

You’re talking about the court system. They are talking about Content ID. YouTube makes it easy to submit faulty copyright claims with little repercussions if they fail, so there are more fraudulent claims than you’d see in the actual court system. They want YouTube to penalize the abuse of their system more strongly so people that upload videos don’t have to deal with so much shit.

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If you ever use SQL Server Management Studio, you can experience the opposite. Whenever there’s an update, you’ll get a notification in the application, but to actually install it, you need to go to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Chrome, on the other hand, updates itself upon restart without requiring anything special from the user.

As a software developer, I really like that part. It means that websites I work on only need to consider the features supported in the latest version of major browsers rather than the last several (as was the case with Internet Explorer).

So, it’s nice and something that I remember really appreciating when Chrome was getting popular. But it’s still a weird thing to brag about.