Worth pointing out that the primary source of the article’s quotes clearly didn’t vote for this, though presumably quite a few of her co-workers did.

Halee Hadfield said the timing couldn’t be worse.

“My wife has prescriptions that she has to get refilled monthly, and without health insurance, she’ll miss out on what she needs,” she said. “I already have Indeed open on my phone—what other choice do I have?”

Hadfield estimated the impact could hit around 1,800 people when counting commuters and relocators, warning of a “significant drain” on the area.

“Executives like Michael Adams will be fine, but the vast majority of us won’t. You voted for this.”

Theater lobby vs streaming lobby. YAY!

Frankly, as long as they stop memory-holing completed projects like Zaslav did, it will be at least a modest improvement.

I believe it’s a dedicated parking garage, which admittedly only helps a little.

Yup, but it also might be lightly photoshopped. The Street View has a window right where the portajohn is sitting that looks pretty permanent, but this pic or the street view could be old.

Trump is a resident of Florida, and the BBC does business in Florida via the website, BBCNews, Britbox licensing, etc. The complaint even talks about gray-market VPN viewing of iPlayer. Jurisdiction isn’t really the issue. Establishing any actual harm at all will be the issue, to say nothing of “billions” of dollars worth of it from some splicing that is honestly editorial shading at worst. He is super pissed off in that speech, issues way more shaded threats than calls to peaceful actions, and pardoned the people who killed or injured multiple Capitol Police. Proving that the 10 or twenty people in Florida who actually saw the thing is worth anything to a plaintiff who won the fucking election is going to be an incredibly tall order for any half-way conscientious judge or jury.

It’s typical Trump “lawfare,” complete with breathless nonsense adjectives in the complaint to make the diaper baby anger-happy when he reads it. Only the sheer awfulness and expense of American litigation makes it even conceivable that the BBC will eventually settle, and if they do it will probably be right before discovery after they exhaust any motions to dismiss and other procedural tactics.

There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.

There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”

AI does a perfectly fine job summarizing my boring work meetings, but the entire point of those is to be straightforward and unambiguous and in line with previous similar meetings. You cannot trust generative AI to interpret anything with even a modicum of subtlety or novelty. At best it will give you a slop-rack of a framework you can wrestle into something mediocre but basically usable for a specific purpose.

But a twenty-percent efficiency upgrade with a low ceiling on its quality is not what they’re all selling. AI is real, it’s here to stay, but good god I can’t wait for the bubble to pop so LLMs can settle into the limited use cases where they add value.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

That’s a pretty slimy technicality.

Trump on immigrants in late 2023: “They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Kobach just last month on the Coldwater case: “It still effectively takes the vote away or cancels the vote of a U.S. citizen.”

Most town residents voted for these men. Whether they realize it or not, they’re getting what they wanted. On Election Day, they chose cruelty.

The worst part of this is that the actual guy getting deported should be the reason these yahoos see the light, but instead they just want to be special and not have their preferred “illegals” suffer the consequences they have brought down on so many others. Consequences are for the big city where the brown people are all evil and lazy drug-selling job-stealers, not Coldwater where the one brown guy is a sweetheart who makes sure to vote how his friends do. He seems like a genuinely decent, if utterly dim, person who’s simply never known anything except this shitkicker town actually being fairly nice to him, and indeed if you “know your place” and don’t present an economic threat or make them feel insecure about either of those first two things, many MAGAs will be perfectly pleasant to you.

She was his special education teacher in school [apparently he was very far behind and had poor English skills in a school that had no proper ESL program, and he was not a uniquely talented intellect who could overcome that]. This mess actually started, she said, when she took Ceballos and her other special education students to the Comanche County clerk’s office on a field trip. And there, she said, she actually played a role — which she now regrets — to get him mistakenly registered as a Kansas voter…

“That’s right,” Dennis Swayze said. “I was the one who drove him to Wichita when he was still a kid, to get him that first green card. He saw those words, ‘permanent resident,’ and thought that made him a citizen, and that was not true. So I partly blame myself. We should have brought this up and said it wasn’t enough. But there’s others who also should have been more on the ball. Where was the county clerk when he raised his hand about registering? The clerk should have asked too.”

[from the other article] After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.

Then the guy’s lawyer is giving everyone false hope, talking about how he didn’t have intent to break the law. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter. There are two cliches you’ll hear from Lawyer TV: “You have to have intent,” and “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” They are not in contradiction, though it turns on lawyer hairsplitting. If you push a button that says “free candy” and it instead shoots an investment banker in the face, you haven’t committed a crime, assuming the “button” wasn’t suspiciously trigger-shaped or anything. If someone tells you that it’s not murder to shoot an investment banker in the face, you still go to jail for murder if you shoot an investment banker in the face, because regardless of what you know about the law, you intended to shoot an investment banker in the face. You have other defenses, like entrapment, but that isn’t nearly as easy to claim as people like to think, and getting back to this story, it has to go way beyond somebody else being stupid and herp-derping your illegal voter registration because a white guy was with you.

I think the Kansas Reflector writer actually summed it up very well:

As sure as if every Republican voter of Coldwater lined up to cast a stone at Ceballos, their choices at the ballot box in 2024 and 2022 had the same traumatic effect. They did this to their friend. They did this to their mayor. They did this to their beloved town fixture. And until they figure this out, our country and our state is not going to get better.

Absolutely. Without “uncanceling,” the Acolyte, they need to find a way to get him back for a project. What an utter waste if they don’t. The physicality for the role and choregraphy was perfect, and he “sold” the Dark Side without an appeal to raw coercive power at a political scale, and it worked better than maybe any other approach I can recall. Even the comedic timing and “dude from Jacksonville” vibes (Go Jags!) slotted in perfectly for the (super telegraphed) reveal and the interactions with Osha and Sol. I also liked that Sol brought a lot of humanity and Qui-Gon energy despite Lee Jung-jae’s awkward line readings (the reasons for which I completely understand), and Jecki was good.

I went into that show fully ready to embrace everything about it and almost preemptively give it the grace I knew certain toxic fans wouldn’t, and I still couldn’t love it, though it has its moments and it’s not awful TV. The structure is awkward, the mystery unappealing and self-important, many of the performances unengaging, and frankly despite all the money they blew it often looks cheap. They also killed two out of the three characters I liked the best. Easy targets like the singing and the fire in space and the chubby lightsaber hilts were just people fixating on unimportant shit because they didn’t like the show but lack the ability to say why, or some of them are ashamed to say why. The whole thing needed another couple of passes through the editing process and maybe some hard discussions about why making the entire show look like Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge is not a good use of the budget.

Or, you think you lost one and get the second, but the original was tucked into some zippered sub-pouch all along.

Should’ve been with prejudice, as they were so clearly malicious prosecutions.

I believe those motions are still pending.

Yup. I’m sure Truth Social will go nuclear on Mamdani about two minutes after his next meeting with Steven Miller.

Peaked in obedience school…

The kindest thing you can say about her is that she values something more than the Trump cult. Whether she “comes by her crazy honest” or is just tired of subordinating her own ambition to his whims, that I couldn’t say. In any event, she’s quite awful and even joking that she’s welcome in the Democratic party is stupid, but the break itself should be welcome. I think we’re also going to be seeing a good bit of erosion around the edges and some pretty insane palace politics. I have no doubt that a lot of people fancy themselves Trump’s defacto heir, and the jockeying for that and people not wantingg to wait until he croaks may be the only thing that keeps him from getting significant support in testing the term limits on US presidents.

Somebody should remind Trump of how many Nobel Peace Prizes Neville Chamberlain has.

Yeah, I mean there’s not a big huge punchline, but this was clearly a bit of a general send-up, and also prodding at a very specific “Tim Tebow” type of muscular Christianity.

That type of Christian man is big and strong, but also extremely manicured and soft-spoken (even while saying the usual heinous shit) and “effeminate” by certain heteronormative standards. The look and vibe lends itself to fairly easy jokes about men who are closeted or so naive they don’t realize they’re closeted, which will needle some and maybe give others food for thought. Anybody who’s spent time in the Bible Belt will have met the dude in this comic, and maybe his wife.