The timing was impeccable, it was right as I was finishing reading the last box.

I do recognize your handle, I’ll give you that much.

Bicycles are allowed to treat stop signs as yield signs in many areas; it may be worth checking to see if you live in one of them. But rest assured! Statistically, for every one of those you see, there are hundreds more cars violating traffic laws.

Me too! It’s exhausting, and the most frustrating part is that it’s contagious. Generally, this means it’s time for me to turn off my phone and go outside in the sunshine and watch a soccer game. I dunno what your “watch a soccer game” is, but things like riding a bike or walking in a park or dangling your legs in the ocean definitely qualify. Mostly, the idea is to remind myself there are good things too, and to remember that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

I’m with him that the evil is mostly coming from Miller et al, but I don’t think there’s enough Trump left to do much of anything other than watch cable news and shitpost online:

López Obrador urges Trump to “tell the parasites surrounding him to go to hell” and concludes by saying “for everyone’s sake, let the other Trump return”.

Precisely:

This was backed up by traffic officer PC Mark Hodson of West Midlands police who said that the “effects of behavior that people are moaning about is negligible. If you look at the statistics, if you look at the actual threat of harm, cyclists aren’t posing a risk to anybody.”

Well, the drivers are by-and-large the ones who opposed properly funding the light rail’s initial construction, so I do still blame them.

I think what’s most concerning is that it’s an elevated station. How do you leave the surface and not notice?

This study doesn’t really improve my impression of LLMs, but it does really hurt my impression of the value of a law degree:

Participants created 40 representative contract law questions that students might ask after class or during office hours, wrote their own answers, and then evaluated responses without knowing whether they came from AI or other participating professors. The AI systems performed comparably to the best human instructor in the study.

Perhaps most striking: professors flagged AI responses as pedagogically harmful only 3.5% of the time, compared to 12% for peer-written answers.

“In most fields where AI gets tested, there’s a right answer. In law, there often isn’t,” said Sarath Sanga, co-author and professor at Yale Law School. “Two opposing arguments can both be good. What we wanted to know is whether AI can meet the latent professional standard that lawyers use to evaluate each other’s arguments. In this case, the answer was yes.”

Mmmm, I think you have the right phenomenon, but the wrong measure. I think what most people are asking is “why is it that people continue to feel poorer, even though wage growth is beating inflation?” The economic indicators don’t only indicate that people with exposure to the stock market are doing well, they also show that people have more money relative to the cost of things that economists think they buy, but when you look at other indicators, like credit card debt, you see clear signs of distress. And while you are right that housing and health care are very expensive, the fact that sentiment hasn’t budged while wages are growing faster than their cost is inflating is actually quite puzzling, and probably doesn’t have a solution as simple as what you’re implying.

My intuition, personally, is that either there’s something wrong with our CPI calculation, or that Americans are finding that there are things they want that money can’t buy, like dignity on the international stage, and they’re expressing general malaise as economic sentiment. But I’m just some dude on the internet, what do I know?

The meme was a response to my top-level comment on a Guardian article. I am chaffing because I am not, and will not, discuss this in terms of what House Democrats should do, I am continuing to frame this as what the Congress must do, and the meme mischaracterizes my position.

I keep telling you we need a big goal line stop from the defense, and you keep asking me what I want our running back to do about it. The fact that running backs aren’t going to make big defensive tackles doesn’t reduce the need for the defense to make a play.

(edit for our non-American readership: “I keep telling you we need to pump crosses into the box to look for our target striker, and you keep asking me what I want our center backs to do about it. The fact that center backs don’t get into the attack doesn’t reduce the need for us to score a goal”)

This story is not about House or Senate Democrats. This story is about four House Republicans who broke ranks with the White House. Focus up.

Saying vetoing this bill would be bad for Trump is like claiming he couldn’t survive appearing in a tan suit

I will answer this! My argument is not about Democrats and Republicans, my argument is about the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of the US government. My point is that the showdown over the ongoing military operation in Iran is a disagreement primarily between the Congress, which has not authorized a military action, and the White House, which is pursuing a “military action” which is manifestly a war that requires authorization from Congress. My frustration is not that the Democrats have succumbed to the Republicans, but that the Legislative branch has cowed to the Executive. I am not arguing with you about which of the two parties is the “good one,” I am telling you that the important part of this showdown is whether the United States has three branches of government or one. I want congressional republicans to be backstabbing, power grabbing, self interested assholes and make a naked play for political power against the most unpopular man in the world on his weakest issue because the Congress cannot possibly be organized enough to be as evil as Stephen Miller.

Yeah. A lot of USLW games are played in gridiron stadiums, and the touchline is way further out than the sideline. They’re not required to be strictly uniform like gridiron, though, it’s more like a baseball diamond in that regard, so I’m not sure if they’re strictly wider, or just usually wider.

Right?! It’s just so puzzling a choice.

Yes, in fact, I do require an actual resolution to have actually passed both houses that actually has a chance of constraining the use of executive power before I will have considered the legislature to have done something. My greatest concern is not that the Ds aren’t standing up to the Rs; my concern is that the legislative branch is letting the executive do whatever it wants.

I am also fascinated by the measurement “two soccer fields.” Americans largely play soccer on American football fields, so any American would just say “two football fields.” But everyone else hates calling it “soccer” and prefer to use metric rather than comparisons? This just seems like they chose all their measurements to be maximally irritating.

Surprise! It doesn’t actually matter at all 🎉

The vote’s impact is symbolic, with the margin well short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto.