monotremata

Honestly this isn't really all that accurate. Like, a common example when introducing the Word2Vec mapping is that if you take the vector for "king" and add the vector for "woman," the closest vector matching the resultant is "queen." So there are elements of "meaning" being captured there. The Deep Learning networks can capture a lot more abstraction than that, and the Attention mechanism introduced by the Transformer model greatly increased the ability of these models to interpret context clues.

You're right that it's easy to make the mistake of overestimating the level of understanding behind the writing. That's absolutely something that happens. But saying "it has nothing to do with the meaning" is going a bit far. There is semantic processing happening, it's just less sophisticated than the form of the writing could lead you to assume.

So, this is wild speculation, but I'll tell you my guess. I think it's about TSMC, the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer. China has, for years, been saying that Taiwan isn't an independent country, but is instead "Chinese Taipei," a part of China. They've been using this idea for years to gradually build towards an invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan, of course, does consider itself an independent nation. The US officially holds no position on this question, which is kinda bonkers; there's this whole diplomatic dance about whether the US would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. The US might not care if it weren't for TSMC, which runs the plants that produce a huge proportion of the world's CPUs and GPUs and AI chips. All the best chip-making technology and know-how is with TSMC. It's a major vulnerability in the US supply chain.

China has been ramping things up in the past several years. It's suspected that a big part of why they're going along with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that Russia probably promised to go along with China invading Taiwan in exchange. It's all very sub-rosa, but there's been so much military maneuvering and posturing and so on back and forth around Taiwan that it's been kind of dizzying.

This is, unfortunately, part of why China was enthusiastic about getting Trump back into the White House. Trump's policies of isolating the US from its military allies, instigating worldwide trade chaos, and cozying up to dictators make the conditions a lot more ripe for China to make a move on Taiwan. And since the US has never been able to actually talk about Taiwan before, it's gonna look absolutely batshit to the majority of Americans if China invades Taiwan and the US government suddenly wants to go to war against China over this, which seems like a huge risk. But since, as Trump so eloquently put it, "everything is computer," we basically can't stand by and let China take Taiwan without a fight.

So he's trying to gin up sentiment against China on his own terms to lay the groundwork for a war that seems increasingly inevitable.

Tell this to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was here legally, and was grabbed and sent to a prison in El Salvador. The government isn't giving people any opportunity to prove their status. That's what we mean when we say they're not being given "due process." There's not a trial or anything. They're just grabbed and hauled away.

Why doesn't the successful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia without due process rise to this level for you? It's true he wasn't a US citizen, but he did have a protected status that let him live and work legally in the US. And given that he was deported without due process, but simply by "administrative error," there was no point at which he was given the opportunity to bring up his legal status. That is, the thing that would be different if they tried to do this to a citizen is that they would have successfully done it to a citizen. Presumably the courts would order them to bring the citizen back, but they've already done that with Abrego Garcia, and the administration isn't complying.

If that's your bright line, maybe check out the boot that's straddling it.

"Oh, you don't need to get a receipt if you give us your email address instead..."

The "specific program" I have trouble with is Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). There are projects that try to run it through Wine, but there's a specific function that isn't implemented in Wine right now that Fusion relies on as part of its authentication service, so it won't log you in correctly, at least on the default Mint install. I think at least one of the relevant functions is currently in the Wine beta, so it may work again in a bit--I did manage to get it working briefly at one point, but I somehow screwed it up again subsequently. (I may just have forgotten how I launched it...I think I have two versions installed at this point, the Flatpak and the Snap install.) But even when it worked it was slow and janky in a much more severe way than when it runs natively on Windows.

The "specific program" my dad is interested in is Hesuvi, a piece of headphone virtualization software that also does equalization and crossover. At some point I identified a program I though would work on Linux as an alternative, but I would want to test that before committing to switching his computer over from Windows, and I haven't got around to that yet. Other than that he mostly uses Zoom, and I think I tested that and it worked okay in Mint, though my memory is a little weak on that too.

I dunno. Basically everyone has their own little patterns they use with their computers, and switching to Linux requires changes to those patterns. It's an adaptation. That's not to say it's not worth it--for a ton of people it probably is. But I'm not sure my aging parents can do it, and thanks to Fusion, I'm not sure I can do it either, because I just don't have a good replacement.

The other option I'm looking into is Windows IoT LTSC. That omits a LOT of the problematic bullshit.

I'll figure something out before the end of support, anyway.

The White House is more than 40 hours away from here driving non-stop.

The number of people from here who could have participated in a march at the White House (maybe taking a week off work in order to get there and back traveling 16 hours a day by bus) would have been very small. Instead, thousands of us marched in our local downtown yesterday in a solid throng.

Protests at a specific location convey a message, but mass protests everywhere convey a message too.

https://m.xkcd.com/2566/

I think they move too smoothly. I think it's maybe a combination of the "ew, tiny things are parasites" and the "ew, smooth-moving things are snakes" responses, even though neither of those is appropriate for the silverfish itself. I think that's part of what happens with the house millipedes, too.

I dunno, silverfish are smaller than flies, but they still give me that revulsion response.

Funny thing about that--the authors had no significant ties to West Virginia and were instead inspired by a road trip through Maryland. https://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/john-denver-country-roads/

You definitely can start this way. When I started, I got some help from a physical therapist--I had really messed up my back, and in addition to helping with the acute issue, they also selected a set of exercises and numbers of reps for me that I could do at home, and that was a great starting point for my exercise routine. It was pretty short and focused, so it was easy to find time to do it every day, and the practice of keeping at it was really helpful. My health insurance covered most of the cost of the physical therapist; I had to pay a copay, but even then it was just a couple times a week for maybe two months, so not exorbitant. Insurance is generally willing to help with this stuff for a little while because they know that if your health improves, it's likely to reduce their future costs. So it's worth looking in to whether yours would help with something like that just to get yourself going. I don't think you need to have an acute problem to take advantage of that; I think having a specific goal for improvement is adequate. (They want measurable goals, like "I'd like to be able to jog five minutes without getting winded," or that sort of thing. I believe mine was "I'd like to be able to spend a day out walking around a garden with my family without being laid up the next day by my back." Which reflects where I was at the time. But, y'know, anything that reflects where you currently are, and something that you might be able to achieve in a six-to-eight-week timeframe, is probably a good goal.)

Doing that regularly also got me listening to my body, and that got me to gradually expand my routine--I eventually understood that some of my back issues were propagating up from hip issues, so now I work on those, and some of those are coming from limited ankle mobility, so I'm also working on that, and working on that has got me doing "goblin squats" that has gotten me to stop thinking of dumbbells as something to avoid. I'm also getting closer to being able to do pull-ups; I got a pull-up bar because just hanging from a bar sometimes can really help with a bad back, but at some point I started thinking about how much more I enjoyed moving when I was a kid and took gymnastics classes, and back then I actually had the strength to do things like pull-ups. So now I can do some resistance-band assisted pull-ups, and hopefully in a year or two I'll be able to do the proper thing.

Picturing enjoying movement is something that really motivates me, actually. Like, I used to enjoy biking and ultimate frisbee. I don't, now, but I think I might enjoy them again at some point. I think I might also enjoy parkour, if I can get into that kind of shape, but I recognize that may not be an achievable goal at this point. I had a kind of enthusiasm for brief bursts of very intense movement, like sprinting up a flight of stairs two at a time, or climbing up onto a loading dock in a single giant step.

At this point I do a basic set of dumbbell weight exercises, squats and lunges, push ups, a back stretching and exercises routine, assisted pull-ups, and a walking/running aerobics routine. It's not a ton, but I'm really in vastly better shape than I was when I started a few years ago. I do have a handful of equipment--the dumbbells, a floor mat, a couple of foam rollers, an exercise ball (for trunk lifts, which are good for a weak lower back), a doorway pull-up bar, some resistance bands that I basically just use with the pull-up bar, and the biggest thing is an elliptical machine for when the weather is too bad to do the aerobics outside. There are ways to do it without a machine, like jogging in place or doing rapid shallow squats, but the machine is kind of nice--it's hard to explain, but it really helps to have the exercise take place in its own little isolated space, or even just in its own mental space. I actually also have a little lighted sign that I made (it's a recreation of the neon sign for an exterminator's in my home town that always tickled my fancy back then--it's got a giant neon rat in the middle) and I like to turn that on in my room specifically while I do my exercises there (everything other than the aerobics and pull ups), just because it kind of marks out the distinction of exercise time. It helps make it a ritual, and that helps make it a habit. As I say, hard to explain, but it feels like it matters.

I will say, this routine has also helped me lose some weight. I'm down about 45 lbs (~22kg) from this time last year. That's mainly down to diet changes, but I did ramp up my exercising while doing this to be sure that I was losing fat rather than just losing muscle. I'm still a lot heavier than I'd like, but I'm definitely proud of how far I've come. I'm improving in other measures, too, like my resting heart rate is down from around 100 to around 80, which, again, is not where I'd like to be, but represents movement in the right direction.

So, I do think the physical therapist helped a lot with getting me started, but most of my work I've done at home, and without too much in the way of equipment.

Would I have done better, faster by going to a gym? I dunno. I definitely know that friction is a big factor. If it's hard to actually go do the thing, then it's easy to make excuses not to go do the thing; needing to actually travel to a gym definitely counts for that. There's kind of a balancing act in making my routine easy enough and pleasant enough that I'll actually do it, but also challenging enough that I'm still gradually improving. Sometimes I need to let myself slack off at something a little as an incentive do just do the thing. And sometimes once I'm actually doing the thing I don't need the slack after all.

Bit of a rant, I guess. Sorry, it feels like so much of this stuff is, like, techniques for outwitting part of my own brain, and it feels like those are things other people might be able to use, but I'm not sure how transferable they really are. Hope it helps.

Good luck with your journey! I know I'll need luck on mine.