What we think of as tales of individual resilience are the tales of those that survived danger by chance, and assume it made them stronger.

The chance sets you on a good path may result in your learning to be good at something. But chance doesn't turn out good for everyone.

Noam Chomsky criticizes large language models as useless — fundamentally, by the way they are designed — for advancing understanding of cognition. This is because cognition plays no part in them. They don't try to understand anything.

Machine-learning systems can do many practical tasks well — those tasks that don't inherently involve conceptual understanding of anything. They can be useful, for good purposes and bad purposes. At the same time, they can treat their users justly (if released as free software) or unjustly (if released as nonfree software or only as a "service")

But we should distinguish this from intelligence, and reserve the term artificial intelligence for artificial systems that can understand.

*EU aims to harmonize criminal laws across bloc to fight corruption.*

*[DeMentis] accused of favoring insurance-industry donors at residents’ expense.*

Starmer has dropped the policy commitments he made when he ran for leadership of the Labour Party, and it seems he was planning all along to do so. Apparently, all Labour stands for with him in charge is winning power.

Most horribly, he has made sure that all new Labour MPs will be like him.

It's like the British equivalent of the "centrist" US Democrats, but worse. Imagine if the Democratic Party machinery had the official power to forbid progressive candidates from running in a primary. That's what Labour is now.