deathmtn

The “math wars” have raged for decades between academic mathematicians and math educators. Many of the former argue that a traditional sequence of courses that emphasizes rules and solving equations is needed to provide an adequate foundation for higher math, whereas the latter tend to favor teaching that emphasizes basic concepts over rote learning and incorporates practical applications. In recent years, the debate has swirled around whether data science is more useful for college-bound students than traditional subjects such as second-year algebra. The dispute has also become a proxy for larger cultural wars, most notably over diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

In other words, a lot of these bots are checking for a robots.txt file. When they see one, they jumble up their user-agent and keep going. Yesterday's user-agent file had 641 unique user-agents. Today's had almost 18000. It would be hilarious if it weren't assholes destroying the Internet for speculative profit.

The numbers also imply a lot of bots that don't do this -- they ignore the robots.txt entirely. (Which is what I expected.) Looks like Scrapy and Amazonbot are most prone to ignore. In contrast, the appearance of GPTBot and ClaudeBot dropped way off.

This month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its endeavors with Mr. Trump.

Notably, State Department leadership wants consular officers to consider “whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.” The cable also instructs consular officers to inform applicants with private social media accounts that they could be viewed as evading vetting and request they make their accounts public while the Fraud Prevention Unit reviews their case.

And during the contentious 1876 presidential election, the company leaked sensitive dispatches to the campaign of its preferred candidate, the probusiness Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. "Hayes might never have been president but for the fact that Western Union provided secret access to the telegrams sent by his rivals," writes Columbia law professor Tim Wu." To the press and the public, such abuses, when they came to light, underscored the need for legislators and judges to act to protect telegraphic communication.

Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his plan to create a wireless telegraph, said that he would be "remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war."? Not to be outdone, his rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that his invention of radio would "make war impossible.", AT&T's top engineer, J.J. Carty, predicted in 1923 that the telephone system would "join all the peoples of the earth in one brotherhood."* In 1932, the popular technology writer and future RCA vice president Orrin Dunlap said that television would "usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth."

Such cheery predictions were put to an early test in the summer of
1914. In the immediate aftermath of the June 28 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through recently strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern has described, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. Rather than calming the crisis, they inflamed it.

The Trump administration has confirmed that it is pulling the nomination of private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead NASA. First reported by Semafor, the decision appears to have been made because Isaacman was not politically loyal enough to the Trump Administration.

Video shows East Boston residents Elizabeth Bally and Keith Dixon recording the arrest, before, without much warning, an agent shoves Dixon into a truck and then to the ground.

Bally and Dixon said they were given no instructions on where they could stand before they were shoved. They said they were not trying to impede the agents, but were trying to make sure the man being arrested was being given due process.

"Especially with the chaos of the moment, and it was really unclear who these people were and what was happening, and just making sure that processes were being followed," Bally said.

Dixon said he hurt his head, neck and shoulder, and is planning on going to the hospital to make sure he doesn't have a concussion.

The actual answer took me a few minutes to code up and I trust my skills for a particularly simple task. But I didn't start by coding it myself because it took less than 30 seconds to describe the problem in written English, and I thought these are the kinds of tasks perfectly suited to LLMs.

Perhaps if I had asked the LLM to write me a script, it would have had a better outcome, but they would require me then saving and running the script myself, which, sort of defeated the point of throwing the problem to the LLM.

In April, a group of charitable organizations released a joint statement pledging collective action if the government seeks to challenge them or the non-governmental organizations they support. More than 670 organizations have now signed that statement.

…

The legal community is also starting to mobilize. Over 500 law firms recently signed a friend-of-the-court brief opposing government retaliation against Perkins Coie for representing clients unpopular with this administration, including Hillary Clinton.

…

The Big Ten Academic Alliance is pursuing a “mutual defense pact” in which member institutions would provide legal representation, countersuits, strategic communications, amicus briefs, expert testimony, legislative advocacy and research in defense of any school that becomes a target of the administration.