Exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish.

I moved to the UP a year ago

From Indiana. Unless you have lived outside the UP, you can’t fully understand just how terrible life outside the UP can be. Recently had to return to Indiana temporarily, and the difference is night and day. There is more lawn space and endless fields of pesticide ridden corn and soy here in IN than forest space, I long to be surrounded by trees again. The rivers and reservoirs are contaminated and foul-smelling, I miss the fresh air and beauty of the pure lakes. It jumped from 80 degrees less than a week ago to 35 again, and it’s giving me whiplash. I miss the steady cold of the UP. It takes 20 minutes and countless turns and trafffic lights to go 8 miles away, compare that to the ease of driving on 41. I cant see most of the constellations because of light pollution, and the noise never ends. Being back here literally fills me with dread.

I may technically never be a yooper, but I hope I can submit this UP appreciation post. It’s truly one of the best places in the USA to live.

Well, I heard that at Naucratis in Egypt there was a certain ancient god of that place, whose sacred bird is the one they call the Ibis, while the name of the divine being himself was Theuth. He was first to discover number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, and also draughts and dice, and of course writing. Now, at that time, Thamus was king of all Egypt round about the great city of the upper region. The Greeks call this city Egyptian Thebes and they refer to Thamus as Ammon. Theuth went to this king to show off his discoveries, and he proposed that they should be passed on to the rest of the Egyptians, and Thamus asked what benefit each of them possessed, and as Theuth explained this he praised whatever seemed worthwhile and criticised whatever did not. Now, Thamus is said to have expressed many views both positive and negative to Theuth about each of the skills, so an account of these would be quite lengthy. But when he came to writing, Theuth said, “This branch of learning, O King, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories, for I have discovered an elixir of both memory and wisdom.” The king replied, “Oh most ingenious Theuth, one man is able to invent these skills, but a different person is capable of judging their benefit or harm to those who will use them. And you, as the father of writing, on account of your positive attitude, are now saying that it does the opposite of what it is able to do. This subject will engender forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, for they will not make use of memory. Because of their faith in writing, they will be reminded externally by means of unfamiliar marks, and not from within themselves by means of themselves. So, you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. You will provide the students with a semblance of wisdom, not true wisdom. For having heard a great deal without any teaching, they will seem to be extremely knowledgeable, when for the most part they are ignorant, and are difficult people to be with because they have attained a seeming wisdom without being wise.”

OpenAI came forward to police after Jesse Van Roostselaar killed eight people and then herself [sic] last month, saying the attacker's ChatGPT account had been closed but that she [sic] evaded the ban by having a second account.

The legal claim filed in the British Columbia Supreme Court alleged that OpenAI had “specific knowledge of the shooter utilizing ChatGPT to plan a mass casualty event like the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.”

OpenAI has said it considered but didn’t alert police about the activities of the person who months later committed one of Canada's worst school shootings in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, on Feb. 10.

CALLICLES: Well, Socrates, you know the saying, ‘When going to war or a battle, it may be too late to join in!’
SOCRATES: Oh! Does this mean that a banquet has ended and we are late?

Considering a move to the UP EHH?? (Well dont bother because we dont need any more people in our slice of heaven.)

WAYLAND: I imagine, Onnia, that you, like me, have experience of a whole range of speeches, and that you have observed something about them – that the speakers are not easily capable of mutually defining the issues they are trying to discuss, and of learning and teaching themselves, and concluding their meeting upon that basis. Instead, when they dispute over something, and one says that the other is not speaking correctly or clearly, they become angry and they believe that the other is speaking from resentment towards them, from a thirst for victory, rather than pursuing the issue in front of them for discussion. And some of them end up behaving most disgracefully, engaging in slander, and saying and hearing such things as make even their audience angry on their own account, because they deemed such fellows worth listening to.

Well, why am I saying this? It is because I think that what you are now saying is neither entirely consistent nor consonant with what you first said about rhetoric. Yet I am afraid to refute you in case you assume that I am out for victory and my words are aimed at you rather than the issue and its elucidation. Now, if you are the sort of person that I am, I would gladly continue to question you, but otherwise I shall have done with it.

What sort of person am I? I am one of those who would gladly be refuted if I say anything untrue, and would gladly engage in refutation if someone else were to say something untrue, and yet I am no less averse to being refuted than to engaging in refutation. Indeed, I think that being refuted is a greater good insofar as it is a greater good to be released oneself from the greatest evil, rather than releasing someone else. For I believe that nothing is so evil for a person as a false opinion on the issues with which our present discussion is concerned. So, if you claim to be someone of this sort, let us have a discussion, but if you think we should have done with it, let us bid the issue farewell now, and bring our discussion to an end.

ONNIA: No, Wayland, I say that I myself am the sort of person you have described. However, we should probably take our audience into consideration too. Yes, I should tell you that a while ago, before you arrived, I gave numerous exhibitions to these people, and we are now likely to prolong this unduly if we engage in discussion. So, we should also consider their circumstances in case we are detaining some of them who wish to do something else.

ARTHUR: Wayland and Onnia, listen for yourselves to the commotion from these men, who wish to hear anything you have to say. As for myself, I pray that I never become so busy that I would set aside such discussions as these, conducted in this manner, because it became more important to do something else.

HF: Yes, by God's grace, Arthur, I myself have been present at many discussions over the years, but I don’t know if I have ever before been so delighted as I am now. Accordingly, if you wish to converse for the whole day, you will be doing me a favour anyway.

WAYLAND: And, indeed, HF, there is no impediment on my part as long as Onnia is willing.

ONNIA: Well, Wayland, after all that it would be a disgrace for me to prove unwilling, since I was the one who announced that anyone could ask whatever they wanted. So, if this is how these people see it, proceed with the discussion and ask any question you want.

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.