The us also has a $14,600 standard deduction that effectively adds a 0% bracket and increases the lower thresholds by that amount (people in the higher thresholds would probably itemize, decreasing their effective tax even further).

The IRS does index the tax brackets for inflation.

Also, that table does not include state taxes.

This isn’t progress. It is actively incentiving having compensation be tips in the tax code.

No, we don’t know that. First, not even the military claims that all of the detainies orchestrated 9/11 (which is a much stronger claim then merely being involved).

Second, do we really trust the portion of military that violated domestic law, violated international human rights law, lied to congress about it, and fought for decades against bringing cases to trial?

Is it more likely than not that a given inmate there is a terrorist? Probably. But that is not the standard for indefinite imprisonment.

Egypt has been an ally for decades, even if public opinion in Egypt has forced the government to keep the relationship out of the spotlight. Anyone who claims that Israel has no friends in the region is woefully out of date. The region is bipolar, and Israel is firmly in one of the two camps.

The crazy thing is that most of the 9/11 comparisons have been coming from Israel and proponents of the way Israel has been handling this.

I seriously do not understand how someone can look at the history of the US’s response to 9/11 and come away thinking it supports Israel’s actions. Although, in fairness to Israel, at least they got the (quasi)country correct.

Moral of the story: get nukes (see also, North Korea)

Also, the US has been regularlu conditioning its weapons supplies to Ukraine on them not being used in Russia proper; while calls to put any conditions on Israel’s usage of them have been a complete non-starter.

And what happens after you kill the Houthi leadership? Do all of the Houthi forces turn over their weapons and go home? Get taken over by a more radical leadership? Split up into a bunch of cells with no centralized leadership?

The Houthis are not a force for good on the region. However, compared with other terrorist groups, they are relatively rational and constrained. If even half of their forces want to go more extreme, they will have a proximate reason to do so, and no leadership to stop them.

The likely result is the Gaza war expands into having a full war on the Yemen front (which is, admittadly, on track to happen anyway), against an enemy that no longer has the capacity to negotiate or surrender.

As a fun side note, a bunch of those cells are also going to be freshly angry at the US, which is very much not in her interest.

We’ve tried killing terrorist leadership before. It tends to not end well.

The Israeli Minister of Diaspora endoresed the anti-semetic National Rally candidate in the recent French election.

Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu has been aligning with the anti-semetic Trump in the US elections.

There has always been a significant amount of anti-semetism in the Zionist coalition. Hitler’s “final solution” was his solution to the “Jewish question”, which had been explicitly talked about in Europe since at least the mid 1700s, but was popularized in 1843 with the publication of Bruno Bauer’s book “The Jewish Question”.

Before Nazi Germany came up with it’s final solution, they considered a more modest proposal of resettling their Jewish population outside of Germany, including some support for Zionist movement. Their only major opposition to Zionism was a concern that it would destabilize the region. Otherwise, it would get Jews out of Germany, thus solving their Jewish Question. Ultimately, Nazi Germany settled on a much less well structured approach of “voluntary emigration” by making life intolerable for their Jewish population, before finally settling on their final solution.

Once Israel was established, her anti-semetic neighbors seized on the opportunity to resolve their Jewish question by finally forcing out their Jewish population (who now had somewhere to go).

Of course they did. Isreal has spent the past 10 months aggressively radicalizing the organization. And killing the rest of Hamas’s leadership. Now, they are left with an enemy being run entirely by its most militant wing.

Quantum mechanics is not magic. Magic specifies the outcome, but not how a system evolves to reach that outcome. Quantum mechanics has precise equations describing how a system will evolve over time, but is famously bad at describing the outcome.

By the same token, we can see that thermodynamics and conservation laws, while widely accepted, are magic. I have heard legend of a deeper magic known as “Lagragians”, although knowledge of that lost art remains confines to the warlocks’ ivory tower.

https://xkcd.com/2904/

I don’t understand how Israelis keep voting him in either.

They aren’t exactly voting him in. Israel operates under a parliamentary system, not a presidential one.

Between 2018 and 2022, Israel had 5 elections because they were unable to form a government. No political party held an outright majority of parliament, so to form a government, they needed to form a coalition between multiple parties. Historically, this had gone fine, but during this period the more liberal parties adopted an “anyone but Bibi” stance, and refused to join in a coalition led by Netanyahu. Similarly, Netenyahu’s party, Likud, representing about 25% of parliament, dug in and refused to remove Netenyahu from being party leader, and the other conservative parties joined in and refused to join a non Netenyahu coalition. With the Arab parties forming a third wing, neither side was able to get to 50% to form a government.

Ultimately, Likud and the conservative parties ended up winning this fight, but only by joining with far right parties that were previously to extreme for Israeli politics.

The main complaint isn’t so much that Israel is killing enemy leaders; but that it is doing it in a strategically self destructive way.

Bin Laden was a risky move, but the strike was conducted in Pakistan, who was friendly to us; and there are allegations that the Pakistani government gave more of a green light to the operation than they were willing to admit.

Al Zawahiri was in Afghanistan about a year after we left. The Taliban at the time was still occupied in condolidating their power domestically; and their big victory was getting the US to withdraw. They lacked the will and means to start a major war with the US.

Al Bagdhadi was done as part of the Syrian civil war, in direct coordination with the SDF. At the time the operation was planned, the US military was directly involved on the ground in Syria, although our sudden withdrawal prior complicated that.

Israel is dealing with a country that is antagonistic to Isreal, and which has spent decades building up its military capabilities in anticipation of an eventual hot war with Israel. Iran has demonstrated that it has serious political will in avoiding a hot war, however it is just 1 miscalculation away from stumbling into one anyway; and every direct attack Israel makes causes Iran to roll the dice again. Or, at some point Iranian leadership might decide that all Israel’s direct attacks mean they are in a hot war already, an that Iran should respond with full force.

In the case of this particular assassination, I struggle to see what tactical or strategic upside Israel gets to justify the risk. Israel is nominally trying to negotiate with Hamas; but they just killed a senior Hamas member who was involved in those negotiations. Worse, they killed a member who was, within the context of Hamas, a pro peace moderate. Him leaving for completely benign reasons would have been bad for Israel, because his replacement woukd likely be more antagonistic then him. This is 100x worse when he leaves due to a direct and deliberate attack by Israel.

The only way Israel’s actions make sense is if the leadership that has been spending years trying to start a war with Iran is trying to start a war with Iran; and if the leadership that has been spending months sabatoging any potential deal in Gaza wants to sabatoge the potential for a deal in Gaza.

The AI developers understand how AI works, but that does not mean that they understand the thing that the AI is trained to detect.

For instance, the cutting edge in protein folding (at least as of a few years ago) is Google’s AlphaFold. I’m sure the AI researchers behind AlphaFold understand AI and how it works. And I am sure that they have an above average understanding of molecular biology. However, they do not understand protein folding better than the physisits and chemists who have spent their lives studying the field. The core of their understanding is “the answer is somewhere in this dataset. All we need to do is figure out how to through ungoddly amounts of compute at it, and we can make predictions”. Working out how to productivly throw that much compute power at a problem is not easy either, and that is what ML researchers understand and are experts in.

In the same way, the researchers here understand how to go from a large dataset of breast images to cancer predictions, but that does not mean they have any understanding of cancer. And certainly not a better understanding than the researchers who have spent their lives studying it.

An open problem in ML research is how to take the billions of parameters that define an ML model and extract useful information that can provide insights to help human experts understand the system (both in general, and in understanding the reasoning for a specific classification). Progress has been made here as well, but it is still a long way from being solved.

When I was learning Japanese, I came across a sentence along the lines of “lets buy stuff at the <shoppingumouru>”, I could understand most of it fine, but didn’t recognize bracketed word, which was conveniently written in a script that denotes loan words (and I have trancscribed phonetically above). I probably spent at least half an hour trying to look up “shoppingumouru” simce I couldn’t find it in my dictionary. Eventually, I turned to Google translate and immediately facepalmed when I saw the answer.

The actual difference between a working new mouse and a failing double click mouse is in the button itself (mechanical parts are almost always the problem).

However, it is not some exotic failure mode. All mechanical switches have a “bounce”, where the contact makes and breaks a few times before settling into the connected position. Switches are typically designed to make the actual contact spring loaded (which is the origin of the click sound you here). As they age, this mechanism degrades, making the bouncing problem worse.

However, this is a well understood problem that any electrical engineer should be familiar with. One solution is to install a filter capacitor. Now it takes longer to switch between the on and off state, so the inherent bounce in the switch is smoothed out to the point where you cannot detect it.

They probably did testing with a new switch, and decided that they didn’t need to include any explicit debounce component, ignoring the fact that the switch would degrade over its lifetime.

The annoying thing is that fixing the double click is stupidly easy. Years ago, I got frustrated with that exact problem (after a string of 3 mice that each lasted only a few months); so I opened one up and soldered on a random capacitor I had lieing around.

Capacitors like that cost literally less than a penny, and are no more complicated to install at production time than any other component already on the circuit board.

Bail them out how? The US has 20 years of experience in loosing wars on terror. If they drag us fully into this mess, why do they think it would result in anything other than them loosing harder.

1 line of code?

Amateur, I changed 1 byte of code in the Linux kernel!

It was random driver with something along the lines of “if (hardware_version > 3) fail()”.

One day we got a new shipment of hardware that wasn’t working for some reason until I upped that 3 to a 4.

The insidious thing is that refusing to serve does not grow dissent within the ranks. It takes those who are dissenting out of the ranks, which causes the army as a whole to be more extreme. And, given long standing compulsory service laws, such dissenters can be jailed, allowing the government to disrupt any potential domestic anti war movement.