The Intercept is not far-left, they are Blob-aligned via Pierre Omidyar.
Reading this meter you linked from AllSides, it appears that the main purpose of that meter is to enforce the boundaries of the Overton window using faux-objectivity as a cover.
If Trump dies, Vance becomes president. If Vance dies, Mike Johnson becomes president. What do you know about those people that I don't that convinces you the hammer will come down once Trump is dead?
The electoral strength of the Trump base is their ability to identify with Trump, which makes the political component of open defiance a guaranteed loser. None of Trump's presumptive successors have his advanced age, imagery of an unregimented approach to self-care, comfortable ease with crude mannerisms or showmanship.
A USA where the economy is poor and the Gen X and older cohorts have returned to 2010 levels of apathy is one where Newsom, Walz, Kelly, Booker, Ocasio-Cortez etc openly directing anybody they have authority over to disregard all instructions of federal personnel up to indefinitely detaining federal personnel does not stop them from sweeping in 2028.
A big part of his draw is that there are a lot of truly reprehensible people out there, and Trump gives his base permission to say and act out their worst instincts.
For example, before Trump, it was slowly becoming increasingly unacceptable to openly espouse racist and sexist beliefs in public and among your peers. Now, we have official government communications and executive orders including blood and soil rhetoric.
He's loud and annoying, which many perceive as confidence. He's not confident, make no mistake, but people think he is. Someone smarter and better spoken will perform worse. They want a "simple man". Of course Trump is not actually simple, but because of how stupid he sounds they think he is.
However, he tries to portray himself as smart and knowledgable but is clearly quite stupid. That doesn't track with his supporters both believing what he says and also thinking that he is stupid.
In contrast, Boris Johnson (ex-UK Prime Minister) deliberately made himself look like a blundering fool (messy hair, stumbling over words etc.) whilst being very smart. Unfortunately, he lied a lot and abused his power, so we eventually got rid of him - not the kind of person you want to have power, but the type of person who seeks power.
Vance has the charisma of a moldy potato and Johnson is a fucking weirdo. Trump is (justly) hated by many but he was a celebrity with decades of fame behind him and billions of dollars to throw at the presidency.
Do you think that Vance or Johnson really have the skill and charisma required to stay atop the twitching corpse of a horse that used to be the republican party and keep it moving?
Here's a general rule and a hint - (aspiring) dictators and authoritarians always fill the positions closest to them with people who are semi-competent, but not competent or ambitious enough to threaten their power. That's because the greatest threat to their power is from their allies, not their enemies.
If Republicans found a spine or some love for their country one day they could easily impeach and remove Trump - there's no doubt the Democrats would vote for it. And, if Republicans ever do the math and decide that Trump is more of a weight than a boost, they will do exactly that.
This dynamic is why we've got Pete Hegseth running the military instead of someone... sober.
Dialects degenerate phonemes that would otherwise occupy identity relations between different utterances of the same "word" (word/concept mutable hyperobject as is the standard in any socially-relevant spoken language) which would be a bit of irony in this thought experiment since common knowledge dictates that more data samples must be present in the dataset (not less, as in rarely-spoken languages) to associate separate pronunciations of utterances representing the same underlying concept. However very-rarely-spoken languages probably don't have distinct dialects since so much focus is put on mutual intelligibility with the few members of the group that remain fluent in that language. It's not outside the realm of possibility that small speaking communities nonetheless fractionate into dialectical specialities but that seems increasingly unlikely as the fervor for preserving/recognizing dying languages increases, and global instant communication continues to become more commonplace.
Example: Schwabisch is wild and would be phonetically transcribed very differently from Hochdeutsch which is its ostensible language progenitor (technically more a cousin than an ancestor in the lineage of language evolution), but if the goal is merely to focus the model purely on phonetic transcription then you can add additional post-processing layers which map sounds to core concepts shared across dialects for actual translation. But I like your idea of interacting with the intermediate elements to familiarize yourself at least with the phonetic patterns, we humans are still thinkers enough to infer patterns of grammar and semantics from these building blocks just as we have done for the entire history of the species/lineage before written representations of language came along (relatively late -- evidence of script cropped up only once civilization had centralized to a sufficient degree to make economics non-local and non-trivial).
tl;dr the big words: it's not til you collect enough spoken samples of the dead(ish/dying) language being spoken that the local idiosyncracies are discovered, luckily linguists are smart enough to probably anticipate and certainly post-process language snippets to grasp the common structures for this or that given language.
> ... very-rarely-spoken languages probably don't have distinct dialects ...
That's true if you mean "very rarely spoken" literally, as in even the native speakers don't get to use it very often. But many languages aren't widely spoken (such as only in a certain geographical area, which sometimes is only a single village, or other times a small number of villages). But inside that area, they are frequently spoken. And you might be surprised how many of those small-geographic-area languages still have distinct dialects.
For example: my wife (a linguist) did her master's thesis on the pronunciation of a language with about 7,000 speakers, and identified how many distinct dialects there were. (Which is why I know a little bit about this). She recorded native speakers from all 13 (I think it was 13, but it might have been 14) villages where the language was spoken, and found five different dialects, which she grouped into two "main" dialects. (Think American vs British in the English language, with subdivisions into Midwest, New York, and New England accents and so on, and you'll have the right general idea — though these dialects were closer to each other in sound than Midwest vs New York). I'd have to go reread her thesis to give you any more details. But this was a language that was only spoken in a small geographic area, but it was frequently spoken, because that was the main language of those villages. (The country's official national language is what the kids learned in school, but some of the people, mostly those 60 years old or older, hadn't gone to school, because the first government school in their area was only built 60 years ago -- so they only spoke their minority language, and not the country's language, and their kids had to translate for them if they had to leave their village and go shopping in a major town).
I personally disagree with "no free lunch"; (for the uninitiated, "no free lunch" refer to the fact for any deterministic algorithm, there exist a problem that will force the algorithm to go through the entire solution space to find the optimal solution, with every single other possible algorithm beating it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem)). For many planning problems, finding a good enough solution is sufficient, and there are many optimization algorithms that work for a wide variety of problems and provide a good enough solution in reasonable time. Different algorithms are better for different problems (ex: Metaheuristic (ex: Late Acceptance) Solvers beats MIP Solvers on vehicle routing, whereas MIP Solvers beat Metaheuristic Solvers on Employee Scheduling and Bin Packing. But both Metaheuristic and MIP Solvers provider good enough solutions for both vehicle routing and bin packing.
No free lunch theorem has nothing to say about approximate solutions, so I'm really not sure what you're going on about.
OR-tools is almost exclusively linear programming which according to its strict assumptions converges more or less trivially, assuming a correctly composed program.
Which means if you're paying for it "as a service" you all but deserve to lose that money.
> Different algorithms are better for different problems
So... why does your rhetorical style have such oppositional tone if you're just going to reaffirm the no free lunch theorem?
Look at it this way: I am arguing against "No Free Lunch theorem says an optimization algorithm cannot solve all problems because for some problems it performs worse than other algorithms"; I am arguing approximate solutions are good enough, and in practice a wide variety of optimization algorithms find good enough solutions despite being worse than others algorithms for the problem class. Moreover, some algorithms/solvers can be configured, which fundamentally change the direction the solving takes (for example, a custom phase that uses your domain knowledge of the particular problem to get a good enough initial solution to be improved upon) (Side note: I am NOT affiliated with this post/project; from the website I don't really see a value add for it, especially since the site is lacking so many details).
How about the broad anecdotal consensus that Duolingo, a gamified language app, famously does not do much if anything to prepare people for conversational fluency.
I don't disagree but something less bad is better than something more bad if those are the only two options. I only said Duolingo was better than Youtube. Duolingo is nuts. I get my children's spam from them and it is this crazy emotionally abusive manipulative therapy talk nonsense trying to get them to use the app. I hope they are using AI to write that. LOL. I can't imagine the actual human who would do that for a job.
That's also grammar that's fit to get you harangued and chided by other 4-9 year olds on the schoolyard. Social outcomes are the primary means by which language is meaningful.
Earnings represented by GDP are not distributed evenly across a given population. That 17% of extra earnings goes to relatively few people in the States (I'm putting this very mildly, the concentration in reality is insanely lopsided).
The US healthcare industry is ~10% of the workforce. More if you include people affected by the supply distortions thereof (all those techbros working for agentic penis pump startups).
The fact that that pie is not sliced evenly does not change the fact that is an integer multiple larger than it ought to be.
My nightmare has become reality. Software engineers now rule the world.
Life and death policies being made by people who last week you were arguing about whether using Kubernetes is worth it for a throwaway project, or whether tabs or spaces are more appropriate.
I just wonder how bad it will have to get before they decide we need to be reigned in. Going by how the 20th Century went, if it's anything like that we're in for a rough time before we get there--like, to a place where software engineers have to act like, well, engineers.
You're playing party politics. That's the risk you take: that the party has goals beyond your (dareisay naive) utopian ideals for civic engagement.
Parties are not universally evil, when I malign them in this way it is in full acknowlegment that organization is the nearly singular path to "effect on target" as regards society-scale politics. What I mean is the party per se becomes a superorganism that has always as its first priority self-preservation (a la homeostasis) and it is very worth remembering this when subsuming oneself into their structure.
Reading this meter you linked from AllSides, it appears that the main purpose of that meter is to enforce the boundaries of the Overton window using faux-objectivity as a cover.