Someone please ask the rock-ribbed, law-and-order, God-fearing evangelical Conservatives of America if they stand four square with (checks notes) the mobster-affiliated head of the Hell’s Angels and a convicted tax cheat in their moral support of the ex-President on trial for fraudulently hiding hush money payments to the adult film actress he bedded in a hotel when his third wife was caring for their newborn 3000 miles away
So it sure feels like we’re going g to have a verdict next week in #Individual1’s criminal trial.
The prosecution has shown ample evidence that there was a payoff to Daniels, by Cohen, from his personal funds, which were reimbursed through sham invoices for non-existent legal services.
The intent of the payoff was to kill the story in the closing days of the election. After he won he even tried to avoid reimbursing Cohen, and iced him out.
@Cdespinosa He has half a billion or more in judgments on appeal, too. It's possible appeals courts will turn down one or more of the cases, or find against him before the election, or he will jeopardize his bonds. A lot of pressure. Not much fundraising towards actual electioneering. The Dems have so much more money to spend that they are holding in reserve.
@Cdespinosa I’m hoping he’ll get felonies on all counts. Of course they’ll appeal and that won’t happen before the election.
So, he has to be defeated at the polls and we have to hope the government is able to hold up against the onslaught of legal challenges and potential violence in the streets.
Do not ask a language model questions involving reasoning, factuality, or moral judgment. Language is a vehicle for those, but it is not the SOURCE of them. And there is an enormous amount of language in the public sphere that’s devoid of them—and that trained the models.
@Cdespinosa When I was younger I remember reading theories that the human facility of cognition is identical to our facility of language. I think we're seeing evidence now disproving that idea.
@dgoldsmith@Cdespinosa This all feels akin to the magic trick where you ask someone for a number and given one you say “look under the lamp" - and there's a number!
What people don't realise is that for any given number there's a different place with that number.
•We• are injecting the intelligence into the LLM's responses by selecting those that match our expectations of intelligence. And all the nonsense is discarded as hallucination that can be fixed.
Thank you, @cabel, for the hundreds of new followers. Just a heads-up to all the new people. You’re not going to get much Tech True Crime on my feed. I post a lot of retrocomputing stuff, but you’re also going to get leftist politics, ridiculing cryptocurrency and generative AI, San Francisco Giants baseball, and atrocious puns. Also geezer reminiscing about Good Music. Be warned,
Conservative Texas school board member actually reads curriculum and realizes that kindness, selflessness, and fairness are actually the Christian values she should be supporting.
Then she runs up against the hardliners who want to resegregate, privatize, and monetize K-12 education.
“The LAPD is not expected to like the existence of “Fuck the LAPD” merchandise. But their sole remedy is to not do things that result in people wanting to buy and wear “Fuck the LAPD” merchandise. I understand that would be a difficult task. But I promise you that it would still be easier than trying to get a court to rule that “Fuck the LAPD” shirts violate the LAPDF’s intellectual property rights”
Well, by and by, way after many years have gone
And all the war freaks die off, leavin’ us alone
We’ll raise our children in the peaceful way we can
It’s up to you and me, brother, to try and try again
So hear us now
We ain’t wastin’ time no more
‘Cause time rolls by
Like hurricanes runnin’ after the subway train