jacobolus

There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.

All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.

This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.

It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.

Or more likely because they make money from selling small replicas of the sculptures in the museum store, and don't want to undercut that by making it trivial for everyone in the world to 3d print their own.

> you could be compelled to hand over footage

If they need to get a court order signed by a judge to recover material that is directly relevant to a legally justified criminal investigation, then there's significantly less scope for abuse than what cops are doing with the flock mass surveillance system, where some have literally written "LMAO" in the form field describing the reason for their search, and where they've been using the searches to stalk citizens who are not suspected of any crime.

I would expect a significant proportion to be caused by persistent viral infections. Hopefully at some point in the future everyone gets a multi-strain HPV vaccine, and hopefully researchers continue to develop vaccines for other similar viruses.

> had access to education and could move to cities

Or their rural economy collapsed, everyone was hungry and unemployed, and they moved somewhere new out of necessity and basically started over with nothing, living in squalid conditions and working very unsafe, unpleasant, and exploitative jobs.

It's clear to most people that a marriage between someone 50 and someone 14 is a serious power imbalance, coercive beyond the younger person's ability to consent, and nearly everyone in our society thinks it seems gross and wrong. But as far as I can tell such marriages have not been happening in California. Prior to the new law, the consent of the parents and a judge was required.

(Personally I think a marriage between someone 50 and someone 18 still seems bad. But the way our legal system works, once someone is 18 anything goes.)

It's less clear that a marriage between a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old or between a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old is inherently problematic. If, for example, the woman of such a couple gets pregnant, being married could give helpful legal protection/advantage, since most of our laws are written around the default expectation of married parents.

According to a news article from a few years ago, groups opposing a previous ban on child marriages in California included the ACLU (who claimed that it "unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental right of marriage without sufficient cause") and Planned Parenthood (who said the law should "not impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health and their lives").

Uh oh:

Hobbies and interests: Collects jelly beans systematically

I guess that's what I get for buying 4 different types of jelly beans one time.

As an aside: I'm quite convinced that an extremely precise version can be implemented that is significantly faster than Karney's, roughly comparable in speed to simpler naïve approximations. But for most purposes where the precision matters Karney's implementation is not any kind of bottleneck, so it's not clear it's worth spending significant effort on trying to do better.

Maybe that's something one of the big LLM companies might want to throw their machines at optimizing if they need to do a lot of geographical calculations.

You know what also works to get the Karney formula into a program? You can download Charles Karney's free software (MIT license) implementation in several [1] programming languages and then just make a library call – the API is straightforward. If you have comments or questions you can read his several clearly written papers describing the problem, its history, and his algorithm, or you can directly email him: he's a very nice guy, and pretty responsive.

[1] https://geographiclib.sourceforge.io/doc/library.html#langua...

Many places have all of the single-family homes also owned by corporations. I think the problems you are concerned with here are predominantly increasing financialization of the economy and increasing wealth inequality rather than anything to do with zoning changes.

> what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard

If housing has gotten so expensive that the "working middle class" has to live somewhere else and commute in, the way to attack that is to increase the stock of available housing, not continue to sharply restrict it.

> crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class

To the contrary, relaxing zoning requirements most strongly benefits people who are less wealthy and currently end up overspending on housing or getting priced out.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp seems to be a more currently maintained fork of the original https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/

Past congressional actions were premised on an executive acting in good faith, upholding their oath of office, and following Congress's explicit intentions described in the laws you mention.

A situation where a corrupt and incompetent president is explicitly trying to blow up the US economy using not-really-relevant laws as a pretext was not ever anticipated, and he will hopefully be strongly rebuked (e.g. impeached) by the next Congress.

> managed to sell tariffs

He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs, which are widely understood to have contributed to high prices and economic stagnation.

What he did manage to do is bully the abjectly servile GOP leaders of Congress into not doing anything about the tariffs, even though setting trade policy is expressly assigned to Congress by Article I of the Constitution, and Trump has repeatedly exceeded any legal authority.

"The compliance date for 19 CFR 145.12(a)(2)(v) and (vi) is on October 22, 2026"

I am agreeing with you that "the" in "I went to the store" does not necessarily imply any specific instance of the noun, and is a grammatically distinct use of the word.

Some of the statements (by other people) in this conversation are wrong, based on applying a school-style oversimplified explanation that doesn't really match English usage.

It is common for someone to say, for instance, "I need to go to the store" even if they don't have any particular store in mind.

A prescriptivist pedant might insist that this is incorrect, and they should instead say "I need to go to a store", but in my judgment as a native speaker, the version with "the" is more idiomatic, and the version with "a" sounds stilted.

Both of these are common in the US. It doesn't seem like there's any strong regional connection.

Judging from a search, "play the piano" is about 5 times as common as "play piano", but there are also many sources which uses both versions in close proximity, apparently interchangeably.

Some people have the primary goal of making things work for everyone. Other people have the primary goal of personally benefitting. These are often in conflict. The better a company or team can align these goals, the more effective it is, and the more everyone tends to benefit, but in many organizations the folks looking for personal advantage are most likely to end up in charge.

The authors of this piece are Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. It is hosted at Terence Tao's blog, but he did not write it.

> Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding

Computer moves are typically much more concrete than human moves: a human will play based on pattern matching ("intuition") and can only make explicit calculation of a small fraction of possibilities, after which decisions are guided by guesswork. The computers are unbeatable in practice because they can calculate concretely in seconds what might take an expert human long intensive study to notice, and they don't make the same kinds of oversights humans can make.

But if you stop and explore a particular position for an extended time, and if you have an intermediate level of chess skill, you too can probably often (usually?) figure out why it's doing something. Sometimes understanding the computer's reasons takes searching multiple branches of a tree several unlikely looking moves deep, but the collection of threats the computer was preemptively thwarting, traps it was setting, etc. are comprehensible to humans with enough effort, especially in games between the computer and a human.

The frustrating thing about playing against the computer is that it notices and thwarts every plan you might come up with, before you make up the plan yourself, and it doesn't make (human-apparent) mistakes, so the game ends up feeling hopeless. Nothing you try works on it, and if your idea is even slightly inaccurate it will be exploited.

Why would outsiders take this at face value considering Altman's reputation as a pathological liar?

Cf. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

> The memos, which we reviewed, have not previously been disclosed in full. They allege that Altman misrepresented facts to executives and board members, and deceived them about internal safety protocols. One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . .” The first item is “Lying.”

> Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal, “Sam had been lying to us all the time.”

> “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

> Not long before his death, [Aaron] Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”

> “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one [Microsoft senior executive] said.

What was the "truth" in the Johansson case? Many, many people who heard the voice immediately thought it was Johansson's voice, or some kind of sound-alike, presumably picked because she voiced the computer in a popular film. From NPR:

> Johansson said that nine months ago [i.e. mid 2023] Altman approached her proposing that she allow her voice to be licensed for the new ChatGPT voice assistant. He thought it would be "comforting to people" who are uneasy with AI technology.

> "After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer," Johansson wrote.

> Just two days before the new ChatGPT was unveiled, Altman again reached out to Johansson's team, urging the actress to reconsider, she said.

> But before she and Altman could connect, the company publicly announced its new, splashy product, complete with a voice that she says appears to have copied her likeness.

> To Johansson, it was a personal affront.

> "I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said.

It's really fun to play with black and white photography using various kinds of color filters and see how different you can get the same scene to appear.

(Also fun to play with a polarizing filter.)

Maybe to be more precise, conformal projections like the transverse Mercator projection and the conformal conic projection were adopted by militaries after WWI, and the UTM system per se was created during WWII.

The transverse Mercator projection is completely different than what people are complaining about. The UTM system is roughly what you get if you only take a narrow band of the ordinary Mercator projection near the equator, but turn the globe 90°, and use the projection for a narrow strip of a specific longitude, with a different projection for each strip, overlapping at the seams.

It was adopted by the US military between WWI and WWII, and similar projections were adopted by other militaries around the same time, because earlier (non-conformal) map projections led to dramatic errors when they were used for artillery targeting.

If my property bordered an alley where literally every surface had been covered in murals for decades, and I discovered that the organized non-profit coordinating murals in that alley, who had a long-standing relationship with all of the property owners, had set an artist up to paint a new mural there, then I would be happy, yes.

Or if I were unhappy, I would talk to the artist and/or the mural organization about it, ideally before they had put too much time into the project.

I certainly wouldn't wait more than a decade after the murals were finished and then on a whim decide to paint over them, erasing months (?) of artists' efforts in an afternoon.

I don't know why you are putting "mural" in scare quotes. The works in question are clearly murals, not just graffiti tags or something.

Some people have the legal authority to destroy public art. That doesn't make it a morally or socially acceptable behavior.

From Mission Local, https://missionlocal.org/2026/09/four-murals-in-clarion-alle...

> “CAMP has had both written and verbal agreements/understandings with property owners and landlords regarding murals on Clarion Alley for 34, going on 35 years,” read a statement from Clarion Alley Mural Project.

> At the moment, it’s unclear whether CAMP has a written agreement for 3331 17th St. The organization, however, does have a verbal agreement with all the landlords/property owners where they have murals throughout the alley.

> The property’s owners haven’t changed since 2001. The owner of 3331 17th St. is listed as the Guerrero V. Espinoza Trust in city records.

> The murals painted over include “We’re all in this together,” a memorial for activist and artist Kirsten Brydum, painted in 2016 by John Viola; “Everything Must Go,” a tribute to Adobe Books’ former home at 3166 16th St., painted in 2015 by Daniel Doherty; a tribute to local graffiti artist Chloe a.k.a. Marfa by Floyd; and a mural completed this spring by students from Graffiti Camp for Girls, a local organization training young women in creating public art.

This alley has consisted of mostly murals for several decades. Anyone owning property there is well aware of it. If someone ordered murals painted over there, it was because they were deliberately trying to destroy celebrated public art.