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Personalities may adjust over a lifetime, but character doesn't. For just one example, my friend's pal was a happy-go-lucky fellow. After he married, he "changed," and it was noticeable. I don't discuss people when they are not in the same room as me, so I bided my time in silent curiosity. One evening I asked about so-and-so as we hadn't seen him in a while. My friend said that "XX" became frightfully unhappy with marital life. His "goober" wife -- who didn't have a sense of humor -- soured his once cheerful outlook on life. The harridan would shush him at parties and warned him not to laugh so loud at social gatherings. Nevertheless, "XX" was still the same hardworking guy at work who made all his promotions on time and helped little old ladies cross the street -- just without the smile.

My friend's cat "changed" over the years. "Ajax" became more grouchy with age as he couldn't clean himself the way he used to because of physical ailments and obesity. "Nothing pleases him anymore!" was a constant refrain in that home. Nevertheless, Ajax didn't scratch or bite anyone or become a destructive nuisance -- the poor cat just purred less. His character didn't change -- just his personality.

Some people's lives are chapters in a book or phases along a journey -- evolution, maturation, and self-awareness is expected.

The saddest people to come across the universe are the ones who hadn't evolved or changed for the better over the decades.

"Oh, I see that after 20 years you're still an immature nitwit in an ill-fitting suit that remains the slowest hand to ever reach for the bill at the end of dinner."

Sigh.

PS: Crabs in a bucket? I remember Colonel Sanders and "chickens in a bucket."

LYD/TrueBlue:

Los Angeles County: Neighborhood by neighborhood.

measureofamerica.org

Also earlier reports on Houston, New Orleans, aspects of NYC . . .

They did the entire country by congressional district back in 2008. Fascinating. It's probably updated but costs money to access.

The AI question has everything to do with the nature and possibilities of alien intelligence, which is science fiction.

#104 | Posted by Zed at 2026-07-23 10:02 AM | Reply | Flag:

So no more hard science fiction then, back to speculative.

Since you've been reading about AI, and all of it fiction, and you won't watch a simple statquest video, here's something to read about AI that's real: The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.

The foundational paper causing all your fretting.

Hillary voted for the Iraq war and Turds swore off democrats for life.

Did she? I'm actually curious.

Yes she did in 2002 after the US was attacked on 9/11 after W and Ashcroft negligently ignored the warnings that Bin Laden was going to use airliners as missiles to attack the US.

The FBI had warnings earlier in 2001 that Saudi's were attending flight schools to learn to fly airliners, but were not interested in leaning how to land, only fly them. The FBI did not pass those warnings upwards despite the transition team from Clinton specifically told the W administration that Al Queda was the single biggest threat the US was facing.

Ashcroft was more focused on covering the breasts of statues in federal buildings and stopping pornography in his religiously fueled crusade.

After 3,000 Americans died because of the administrations negligence (some have said complicity in ignoring the warnings to get a Pearl Harbor moment to use as excuse to invade Iraq per PNAC) there was hyper jingoistic chest thumping and public opinion to make someone pay for 9/11. Colin Powell sold his credibility by presenting CARTOON renderings of WMD labs at the UN and was humiliated. Rumsfeld told the US the WMD's were in Iraq to the North, South, East and West of Bagdad (jeez that limits it). The Iraq war was all about getting it's hands on Iraqi oilfields and nothing about holding Bin Laden accountable.

It was easy to see the administrations lies at the time, but Hilary ever trying to be a moderate Democrat went along with them.

I don't like her, but she is 1000000% better than that piece of ---- in the Oval Bordello now.

BTW none of this would be happening now if Mitch McConnell did his job in 2021 and convicted Pedo47 for his crimes of 1/6.

Way past copyediting, I had a direct hand in the following. And I don't think my name is in it, which is why I'm posting it here.

archive.org

If I've read my Retort correctly, I'd guess that AngryDad and I have a mutual connection or acquaintance in the person whose publishing house produced this.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, the publisher died of a virus contracted at a Mexican restaurant. It became known in Atlanta as "Death by Burrito."

The particular strain of virus was allegedly developed in a lab in Atlanta. The book published before his demise, which I also worked on, was OKBomb, about the OKC bombing.

According to the book (and the conspiracy theorists), two explosions occurred that day, and seismic records show it. McVeigh's bomb, and then the illegally stored weapons, bombs, and other explosives on the floor of the federal building below the day care center (if memory serves).

So the big damage wasn't McVeigh's. It was the feds themselves.

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