https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/joe-biden/?ex_cid=abcpromo

Looks like he’s at ~38% approval, ~58% disapproval.

For what it’s worth, the ipsos poll here is a bit of an outlier compared to other recent polls.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

I assume his point is that calling Manchin or Sinema “liberal” isn’t super accurate.

She was kicked out due to complaints about her vaping and being loud.

Everything else came out afterwards when they double checked the tapes.

She’s a 37 year old divorced grandmother.

You’re essentially correct, there, but slightly off on a couple details. About a month before her divorce finalized, she was kicked out of a musical for vaping and being rowdy with her new boyfriend.

Apparently that might or might not be a mistranslation?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/checkmate

mid-14c., in chess, said of a king when it is in check and cannot escape it, from Old French eschec mat (Modern French échec et mat), which (with Spanish jaque y mate, Italian scacco-matto) is from Arabic shah mat “the king died” (see check (n.1)), which according to Barnhart is a misinterpretation of Persian mat “be astonished” as mata “to die,” mat “he is dead.” Hence Persian shah mat, if it is the ultimate source of the word, would be literally “the king is left helpless, the king is stumped.”

Look at figure 2.

Consumption isn’t 50%, but it’s the largest single bar in that chart - significantly so.

And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

This is facile.

According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.

Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there’s still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I’d rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%…

Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.

You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.

You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.

The government spends hundreds of billions on infrastructure every year.

Have we fixed potholes permanently?

Also, $8 billion is a bit less than $24 bucks per person in America. Do you really think $24 is enough to permanently solve hunger in a country? Do you think that another $5/person is reasonable, a few years later?

Almost half of food waste is people buying food that they let go bad before they eat it.

That’s substantially a price problem, in that people are more willing to let a cheap banana spoil than a prime rib or lobster. Food being cheap makes people more willing to let it expire.

But fixing residential food waste by making food more expensive would make hunger worse.

Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.

Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.

Emacs is a bunch older than common lisp.

One of its more idiosyncratic design decisions was using dynamic scope, rather than lexical scope. They did add in per-file lexical scope, though.

It also just doesn’t implement a lot of common lisp’s standard library.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

Emacs unfortunately uses Emacs lisp, not common lisp or scheme.

One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.

One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.

One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.

English definitely has rules.

It’s why you can’t say something like “girl the will boy the paid” to mean “the boy is paying the girl” and have people understand you.

Less vs fewer, though, isn’t really a rule. It’s more an 18th century style guideline some people took too seriously.