The same journalist wrote a piece last summer titled “The seeds of this political disaster were sown decades ago”. I can’t read it due to the paywall, but judging from the title, they may not have been completely complacent.

Take the sentence “Police accused John Doe of inciting a lynch mob to attack the alleged rapist“. The police aren’t alleging that the victim was a rapist, they’re saying the rape allegation was part of the context of their own accusation against John Doe.

If an act is described as an accusation, it’s already implied that everything within the description is an allegation by the accusers. But if something within the description is itself labeled as “alleged”, that nested allegation becomes part of scenario the accusers are reconstructing.

All of it is being alleged—that’s what an accusation is.

But they’re not accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were allegedly wearing masks, they’re accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were actually wearing them. In the context of the act of which she’s accused, there were no allegations.

“Alleged” isn’t idempotent—every time you add it, it modifies the meaning.

prosecutors accuse her of arranging group sex with middle and high school boys as young as 13 years old while they allegedly wore Scream masks.

Can someone re-train journalists on the use of “allegedly”? The accusation is that she did these things, not that she is alleged to have done them.

Sprinkling the word around with no logical consistency just trains people to ignore it, which defeats the purpose.

Tesla makes limos now?

Yeah, jpeg converts to lab (or something similar, I think). But the dimensions are the same: one channel for lightness, and then a number of channels one less than the total number of sampled frequencies to capture the rest of the color space.

Spectral JPEG XL utilizes a technique used with human-visible images, a math trick called a discrete cosine transform (DCT), to make these massive files smaller […] it then applies a weighting step, dividing higher-frequency spectral coefficients by the overall brightness (the DC component), allowing less important data to be compressed more aggressively.

This all sounds like standard jpeg compression. Is it just jpeg with extra channels?

I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin put Trump up to it, so Russia could step in and portray itself as the defender of Europe.

So they’re adding phone capabilities to Tamagotchi?

Now is the second-best time for Schumer to step down.

They’ll be fine with a crash as long as they’re convinced it’s hurting someone else more.

Technically, in a lynching a mob kidnaps a suspect from police custody—this was more of a reverse lynching. (Same ultimate intent, though.)

He’s not just a journalist, he’s the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic. He’d be risking the whole publication, not just himself.

Maybe he was afraid that if he kept lurking they’d eventually charge him with espionage.

He’ll just threaten to invade Sweden unless they give him the peace prize.

Ok—to the extent that SVG is HTML, the variant of HTML that it is is a flavor of XML.

More precisely, both are flavors of XML.

Musical notes have a characteristic volume “envelope”—attack, decay, sustain, and release. The loudest part of the note is near the start, when some initial disturbance causes something to vibrate. The decay of the vibration is at least partly caused by the second law of thermodynamics: the energy of the vibration is being lost to the environment in the form of heat and sound, and the amplitude decreases exponentially with the energy.

If you play it in reverse, it sounds like the vibration is being fed energy from an external source and then abruptly cut off.

I like Molly White’s recent take, that it might be more productive to treat this as a labor issue instead of a copyright issue (at least in principle). Even if the AI corporations aren’t technically re-selling copyrighted works, they’re still profiting from the authors’ unpaid labor.

“Mother of Exiles” would have been a cooler name than “Statue of Liberty”.