For reasons that I won’t go into right now, I was curious about the odds of drawing different types of poker hands if you draw cards with replacement (i.e. put each card back after drawing it). The most obvious difference is that this opens up some new possible hand types, like five-of-a-kind and even five-of-a-kind […]
Video Poker Odds With Replacement Read More »
Of course, it’s in the most Hegseth way possible: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced a new effort to annually screen service members’ testosterone levels and offer testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), framing it as a way to keep troops on the “leading edge of lethality.”
I did not have “Hegseth mandates gender-affirming care” on my bingo card… Read More »
Between continued US attacks on civilian ships in the Caribbean and our threats against civilian infrastructure in Iran, there’s been a lot of talk about what can be done to discourage war crimes in a country where laws increasingly just don’t matter. Obviously the current DOJ won’t do anything, but what about a future DOJ?
It’s been exactly 2,222 days since the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you were wondering.
2222 days since the start of the pandemic Read More »
Secretary of Defense Hegseth is threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to give the military unfettered access to Claude, their AI model. Unlike Google, OpenAI and xAI, Anthropic has so far refused to allow their model to be used for fully autonomous military targeting operations and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens.
Hegseth turning the screws on Anthropic Read More »
A few days ago the White House announced they were eliminating Obama-era incentivizes for car engines that automatically turn off at red lights. The feature saves gas and reduces the more noxious emissions car engines produced at low RPM, but in some cars (especially non-hybrids) the air conditioning doesn’t work as well with the engine
Making America Hot Again Read More »
From TalkingPointMemo, on the Supreme Court oral arguments challenging the Idaho ban on trans girls paying in girls sports: The justices spent most of their time during oral arguments on the equal protection claims, and seemed to coalesce behind a position that could have ramifications for small minorities beyond the trans community: that Idaho and
The Financial Times just coined the phrase “the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter,” which honestly is the best turn of phrase I’ve heard since enshitification. What’s going on is that X (the aforementioned site) recently released an update that makes it incredibly easy to generate, well, deepfake porn based on real images. As
The deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter Read More »
David Kurtz, TPM: “Jan. 6 felt that momentous then, not just as a culmination of the conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, but a clear and present choice about what path the country would take from there… The results of the 2024 election made clear which fork we took, and so we now remember the
Remember my dear, the sixth of the year… Read More »
Every year for the past 36 years or so my friend Jay and I have exchanged Christmas gifts that are trapped in some way. Open it without disarming the trap and they’ll “explode” (set off a loud cap, sometimes with accompanying flash paper), fire nerf darts, set off an alarm, or the like. For a