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David Roman's avatar

I struggle to square your oft-cited dislike for journalists with the trust you put on a WSJ story filled with anonymous sources from a country at war. Mind you, I spent over a decade working for that paper, and I'm quite sure that not everything every source told me was true; in fact, I'm pretty sure that most stuff that anonymous, national security sources told me was not true.

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anon5412's avatar

Gell-mann amnesia probably. You have to trust people at some point. Can't be an expert in everything.

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David Roman's avatar

Fair. Gell-Mann is underrated. Happens to me too.

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Elizabeth's avatar

Thanks once again for the fantastic book recommendations!

Concerning the Nord Stream pipeline, I find Seymour Hersh‘s story more credible: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

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Hugh Hawkins's avatar

Missed opportunity to not call your south Asian blog “Pandit Pundits”

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AMac78's avatar

Re: "The Fellowship of the Rednecks," fun to watch. We've come a long way from the Turing Test, and in a short time.

Can anyone point to a "The Making of" link? E.g. what was the granularity of the prompts? One big one -- 'Make me a trailer of a redneck version of LOTR'? Or a series of specific ones -- "For the first 15 seconds, banjo strumming accompanies a close-up of a wide-eyed Frodo in a wife-beater, which then pans to..."?

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Walter Sobchak, Esq.'s avatar

"Waymo’s new robotaxi will feature fewer sensors to help lower costs."

Fewer Sensors, more crashes?

I am not getting in one of those things unless there is a big red button, that the passenger can push, and which will 1. bring the vehicle to a stop, 2. start an emergency flasher light, and 3. call 911.

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Will's avatar

Thanks for this. I read the linked piece which referred to inherited DNA from grandparents and the point which I was aware of that grandchildren, unlike with regards their parents, can and do inherit different proportions from different grandparents. I still don’t fully understand how this/recombination works and will read it again but it is fascinating particularly when one considers all the differences we witness with our siblings children and grandchildren.

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Pincher Martin's avatar

"Finally, [David Frum] was also prescient enough to predict that a nationalism conservatism would likely become more powerful in the coming decades."

I just want to note that this wasn't that much of a prediction in the wake of Perot's highly successful third party campaign in 1992. Frum's prediction seemed a better bet right after it was written than it did by the end of the 1990s or the oughties. There was not a steady line toward populism from the early 1990s to 2016.

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Sep 10
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Razib Khan's avatar

i really haven't been tracking him since ~2010 (he had some complimentary things to say about me, but he's also a believer in intelligent design :)

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