That’s why I’m specifically wondering about the public aspect of the bounty—it presupposes that the assassin will be publicly known and able to conduct financial transactions afterward, and that the sponsor will be able to openly make good on their promise.
I’m not asking whether there have been any previous similar bounties—I’m asking whether any of them were the primary incentive for a successful assassination.
The attempt against Rushdie failed, and the attacker claims to have had religious rather than financial motivations (and doesn’t seem to have planned to escape to collect payment in any case).
Has there ever been an assassination that was motivated by a public bounty? And did the assassin successfully collect?
I never used it in person, but the LFP (light field picture) format used by Lytro cameras was an interesting concept—you could change the focus, depth of field, and perspective after the image was captured.
A better idea would be using Medicaid recipients to replace incompetent cabinet secretaries.
Fluid construction grammar
Unscented transform
Heteroglossia
Lorenz system
Relict (biology)
Yuezhi
In order: 8 (sans sauerkraut & pickled veggies), 1, 7, 3, 5, 4, 6, 2.
It’s what happens when a very naughty function tries to divide by zero.
I think it does accurately model the part of the brain that forms predictions from observations—including predictions about what a speaker is going to say next, which lets human listeners focus on the surprising/informative parts. But with LLMs they just keep feeding it its own output as if it were a third party whose next words it’s trying to predict.
It’s like a child describing an imaginary friend, if you keep repeating “And what would your friend say after that?”
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
One of the crime scene cleanup photos shows a prominent pride flag in the window of the establishment, and the venue’s website says “Proudly Black-, Brown-, Queer-, and Women-owned.”
Could that have been the motivation for the attack?
the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation
Are all those qualifiers even needed?
Are there any state or local agencies larger than the federal government’s? Are there any other countries with larger agencies? (China or India, maybe?)
Or can we just call it “the largest law enforcement agency in (western) history”?
Art is built on metaphor, which is an underlying connection between multiple meanings.
In semantic space, meanings are points while metaphors are vectors.
The brain generates a characteristic signal (from a sub-region of Broca’s area) when it detects grammatical errors—but it generates an identical signal when you’re listening to a grammatical sentence and need to re-parse it partway through. I think this latter case is actually the real purpose of the signal: every time it triggers, your brain is warning you that you need to stop and check the sentence again even if the meaning seems unambiguous. So the “pretending they can’t understand you” reaction could just be a reflexive response to that signal (i.e., the brain is telling them it’s confused even if there’s no logical reason it should be).
They do say the rate of change was greater than the pre-COVID trend, but I don’t know if that means the level is now below where it would be if the pre-COVID trend had continued without interruption.
It’s interesting that the same stimulus (COVID) could cause crime to spike in the short term, then decline to below the original level.
I wonder if that could be a general pattern with societal trauma or social change in general—there’s an initial period of disruption, then a re-adaptation that creates an opportunity to resolve long-standing issues with the previous status quo.
It always seemed to me that the obvious conclusion to draw from the idea that some teens are under so much social pressure to align their mental and biological genders that they see suicide as the only alternative is that that aspect of society is in urgent need of fixing, not the bodies of the teens in question.
My kingdom for the lord of all horses!
Since 1995, I’ve always associated Ian McKellan with his iconic portrayal of Richard III.
Which colored my impression of Lord of the Rings a bit.
The sponsor would have to be able to publicly demonstrate that the assassin was paid, though—otherwise they could claim to have paid the bounty while keeping the money, and the assassin couldn‘t protest without exposing their identity.