ProfessorPeregrine

Proud to say that in Colorado, ranked choice voting is on the ballot this year! It's even supported by the big political names here, including the governor.

I actually had the TI-59. I remember I entered a program where you are trying to avoid a missile running on vectors and a mine that was teleporting around on a Cartesian grid, and saved that on one of the magnetic strips. And also programmed the quadratic equation on a magnetic card. It had a base it could attach to that provided power and had a thermal printer strip. That calculator also had a place to put a pre-programmed chip into it. I think I had casino games or something.

If you're wondering how I had all that in high school, well that was what my dad thought would buy my affection when he left my mom for the secretary... Didn't work, but I got a piece of cutting edge hardware for it.

Which is why I am happy to be a metallurgical engineer who can blacksmith...

No, there was a small slot that you would feed the magnetic card into from left to right. It had a little motor that would pull it through. I still have mine somewhere.

Silly, now you've broken the law in Florida because you've talked about climate change. That and signing petitions will get you a visit from the police! Totally normal state governmental functions.

It's real! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins

Widdershins. It means counter to the sun's direction , and was seen as inauspicious. Counter-clockwise, before clocks.

Proud to be a supporter of CPR...

I think that was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, iirc

I think this is why LLMs work, and some research backs this up. Humans actually don't create new phrases for unique situations very frequently. Much or even most of what we say is existing word chunks stuck together.

For example, look at this sentence. It communicated what I intended, but it is just a small idea conveyed with a standard text requiring no thought to generate. It could have easily been "Peregrine, with self reflection," or something. Memes are a more obvious example of this.

At some point in that imaginary culture maybe they just abandoned the original language since they could adequately communicate using only shared story references. Whether that part is realistic for an advanced technology culture maybe requires suspension of disbelief.

For a more sophisticated take on this, there is a similar story inside of the Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe that asks some interesting questions. In that case, the language is specifically limited to ideologically-approved tracts in order to limit what the populace can think about, so as to be easier to control. However, the story told might be subversive.

Did you even read Sotomayor' dissent? I did.

You are not considering the part where we can't use relevant testimony or documents to prove that what the President does is illegal in the first place. The President can just say whatever illegal things they did were official acts, and all the evidence that might prove otherwise is off-limits. It relies on other people in the administration to not follow the illegal order, but of course that is a weak protection and the President can fire them or do something illegal to them without consequence too.