I guess there are a few notable examples of celebrities that are ardent atheists (or agnostics), such as Rchard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Carl Sagan. However, I don’t think that I see that so much for pundits unless you are talking about people that are brought on specifically to speak about atheism or religion. And when it comes to politicians, atheism is usually anathema to them. I tend to see them all professing how important their faith is, even if it otherwise seems out of character for them. The only one that I can think of who is openly atheist is Kyrsten Sinema (at least in the United States), but I don’t think she uses the term “atheist.”

Maybe things are different in Europe, though.

Oftentimes, amendments like those are proposed because they will kill the bill. If AOC wanted the bill to pass and knew that it could not pass with that amendment, then she would need to vote against the amendment even if she otherwise agrees with the content. That fact is another reason that amendments like this are suggested: they force a politician to vote against something that they otherwise support.

So when evaluating her vote in the amendment, you need to consider the broader context of the bill that was being voted on to understand what her vote means. Was the bill as a whole worthwhile, or should she have tanked it for ideological means?

The most recent thing that I learned about was that the CIA secretly worked with Boris Hagelin when he formed Crypto AG in the 1950s to ensure that encryption devices sold to foreign countries were easy to break by American intelligence agencies. Then in the 1970s, the CIA secretly purchased Crypto AG and owned it until 2018.

Crypto AG sold devices to countries across South America, Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia. Basically, all of tge US’s adversaries aside from the USSR and China.

FYI, there is a difference between nonviolence and pacifism. Pacifism opposes violence altogether and is predicated on the idea that there is a peaceful way to settle all disputes. That is to say, it’s a philosophical or ethical position. Nonviolence is a strategy to achieve your goals without employing violence. Nonviolent protesters do not take violence off the table altogether. Rather, they believe that violent actions are not as likely to achieve their goals as nonviolent action would be.

In general, nonviolent action is taken by groups who are opposing an oppressor that has a significant power advantage over them. By resorting to violence immediately, they play into a game that they are destined to lose. Instead, they strive to use nonviolent means to make their struggle impossible to ignore. It relies on the oppressive system being vulnerable to a change in public opinion. In general, it also involves an implication that they may someday resort to violence if things do not change. That is, it differs from pacifism in that it does not deny that violence may be necessary.

I’m assuming that it’s a bit different when dealing with toilets in the home, but my experience with cleaning public restrooms has shown that women are quite capable of making a mess around the toilet as well.

You are expecting too much from Trump. His pattern is to proclaim some new policy with shaky justification and no prior analysis. At best, his thought pattern is, “20% sounds like a good number.” Then he lets the rest of his administration try to define something of substance around his public statements, hoping that he doesn’t contradict their attempts in the coming days.

Technically, they are if sending emails to Americans, but I’m not sure how much enforcement this law gets.

I used to not refrigerate my syrup. However, that changed when I found a scoby growing in it one day. And some people refrigerate natural peanut butter so that the oil doesn’t separate.

Personally, I think education is more important and people should free to make their own decisions.

That’s precisely what he, and the tobacco industry that was supprting him, was working against. He wasn’t just taking a libertarian stance against regulation. He was arguing against the evidence that smoking tobacco, and second-hand exposure to tobacco smoke, were bad for your health. And the quoted portion of the article also indicates that he pushed to keep tobacco education out of the broader drug education in schools.

Don’t forget that he’s been in Congress for decades, and many of the things that he had been fighting against as a senator are responsible for the general awareness of the dangers of smoking and the record low number of smokers.

The central figure in Islam is Muhammad. Hence, not Christian. The central figure in Mormonism is Jesus Christ. Hence, Christian.

Yeah, I grew up in Wisconsin closer to the Minnesota border, so I used both as well. When I moved to Eastern Wisconsin, I solidified on “drinking fountain” because people here call it a “bubbler” and tease you more about “water fountain.”

Oh yeah, and I remember getting blank stares in college when mentioning that we had a lot of hot dish growing up. I didn’t realize how regional that phrase was.

Yeah, this is a clip of what he said.

https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trump-suggests-injecting-bleach-to-kill-covid-virus/5162133

Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds - it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s - that’s pretty powerful.

Yeah, we dissected frogs, worms, and fish in eighth grade. In high school, if you took anatomy and physiology, I know they also dissected fetal pigs.

The lack of justice seems to be a given, so I’ll be fine with a rotting corpse that got away with it sooner rather than later.

My city has been making fertilizer from the sewage sludge for a century now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorganite

Ukraine desperately wants the United States to continue supporting them, and currently, the US is run by a group that has been mixed in their support. Trump in particular has been rather unsupportive of Ukraine. Trump is also a figure that is very easily swayed by flattery, so if Zelensky can show himself as among the few that is saying good things about the US’s actions in Iran, that may help them secure more solid continuing support in their struggles against Russia.

So it’s not just that they have little cause for sympathy with Iran, but also that they have good reason to speak out in favor of the US.

They’re talking more about Expert Systems or Inference Engines, which were some of the earlier forms of applications used in AI research. In terms of software development, they are closer to databases than traditional software. That is, the system is built up by defining a repository of base facts and logical relationships, and the engine can use that to return answers to questions based on formal logic.

So they are bringing this up as a good use-case for AI because it has been quite successful. The thing is that it is generally best implemented for specific domains to make it easier for experts to access information that they can properly assess. The “one tool for everything in the hands of everybody” is naturally going to be a poor path forward, but that’s what modern LLMs are trying to be (at least, as far as investors are concerned).

Yeah, I like to think of out more as a spotlight than a mask. You’re choosing which aspects of yourself to draw attention to rather than hiding yourself behind a persona.

That is, unless we’re talking about the masking that neurodivergent people talk about wherein they put conscious effort into hiding their essential nature in order to fit in.

To be more clear about what they mean, “immaculate conception” refers to Mary being born without original sin and continuing to be free from sin throughout life. This allowed her to be a worthy mother to bring God’s child into the world. This is generally only a tenet of Catholic teaching, and most other denominations reject the notion.

The term for a woman becoming pregnant without sex is “spontaneous conception,” and it does rarely occur in some animals when they are isolated from males of their species. Though in those situations, the offspring are exclusively female as the female only has X chromosomes to pass on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception

In the court document, it lays out how OpenAI developed the latest model to prioritize engagement. In this case, they had a system that was consistently flagging his conversations as high risk for harm, but it didn’t have any safeguards to actually end the conversation like it does when requested to generate copyrighted material.

The complaint is ultimately saying that OpenAI should have implemented safeguards to stop the conversation when the system determined that it was high risk rather than allowing it to continue to give responses from the large language model.