Jeremy Williams, the man who brutally R*PED and M*RDERED 5-year-old Kamarie Holland in 2021, is set to be executed TODAY by lethal injection in Alabama. This should be the fate of any monster who r*pes a child.

Cognitive reward shapes in sports and career Sports are amazing environments to learn. When you play a sport for thousands of hours, you start to see the world through that sport. It is a simple fact—your biological neural network is being conditioned to respond to the behavior incentivized by the rules of the sport. The funny thing is that most people choose their sports for accidental reasons such as parents, geography, or school programs. People rarely think about how the particular sport you play influences how your brain thinks more generally. Going a step further, playing the right sport may even benefit your career. My two favorite sports are tennis and soccer. Tennis is one of the best sports for teaching consistency. In tennis, there are hundreds of points in a match, and each point is worth exactly one unit, regardless of whether your opponent made an unforced error or if you constructed the most beautiful point ending with a winner. Tennis is low-variance optimization—you win by reducing unforced errors, playing percentages, and grinding out small advantages. Tennis is also an individual sport, which teaches you to rely on yourself consistently. Tennis has a similar cognitive reward shape to professions like being a surgeon or a pilot. Surgery and aviation require consistency, self-accountability, and deep focus. And similar to how you can only win one point at a time in tennis no matter how spectacular it was, there is no extra credit for the best appendectomy or the smoothest SFO-JFK flight. Your craft is to provide consistency with very low tolerance for error. On the other hand, the tennis mindset transfers relatively little to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a high-variance, team game where failure is tolerated and occasional creativity gets rewarded exponentially. Minimizing unforced errors in tennis is a totally different mindset from deciding whether to make a moonshot business move that will likely fail but could potentially net a billion dollars. Obviously I am not saying that tennis players cannot be great entrepreneurs, but I do think it is a totally different cognitive reward shape. Being a forward in soccer has a much closer reward shape for entrepreneurship. What a forward in soccer learns is to create many small chances. It is a fact that most of the game, you are not scoring—even if you look at all the times that Mbappe got on the ball in one of his best games, most of those led to nothing! But all that matters is creating enough chances to score once (or a few times) and win the game. If you break down a 90-minute game for a forward, almost all the time is failure or noise, a few minutes will be leverage, and a few seconds will determine the fate of the game. I have not played soccer for thousands of hours, but I can imagine that being a lifetime forward in soccer would teach you to be comfortable with failure and asymmetric returns. In summary, I am claiming that there can be substantial value when the cognitive reward shape of your sport mirrors that of your career. I’ll admit that I’ve done some cherry-picking for illustration purposes—entrepreneurship also requires consistency and error avoidance; and goalies in soccer have reward shapes that are very different from strikers. But I think the point stands. If sports shape how we perceive risk, effort, and reward, then we should choose them wisely.

I wouldn't have worked so hard- but I flew across the country for a beautiful rocket shot and I was determined to get one, even when fate throws me a curveball. What are your thoughts, should astrophotography technique be used in these situations?

濃雲不改青山色 貶抑難移壯士魂 Though heavy clouds may veil the sky in endless gray, The verdant mountains hold their color, bright as day. Though scorned, demoted, crushed by fate’s unyielding hand, The warrior’s soul stands firm — unbowed, forever grand. ☀️ #จิตติพจน์วิริยะโรจน์# #inkMine# #vss365# #詩# 对联 詩 诗词 poetrycommunity WritingCommunity 陸享瑞

The Islamic Republic is continuing its war on the people of Iran. But Iranians are fighting back. Yesterday in Esfahan, citizens noticed the regime was preparing for a barbaric public execution. Reports circulated that the regime was set to hang three protesters from the January 8/9 uprising. At dawn, hundreds of brave Iranians gathered in the square to protest this medieval brutality and public murder. They jeered and shouted at the executioners. Sadly as the call to prayer played, two young men were hung from cranes. Security forces chased the protesters, firing on them with live ammunition, trying to kill more and more Iranians. The murder of protesters and other political prisoners are often done in prisons. But the regime, fearing the Iranian people will rise against them, is conducting them in public in an attempt to intimidate them into silence. Untold other brave protesters are currently facing a similar fate. Their lives hang in the balance. This is two Irans: the vile and evil Islamic Republic against the brave and heroic people of Iran. Iranians will not back down. They will fight. But they should not have to fight alone. The world must back these brave men and women.

25 years later, the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 seem both raw and distant. On the one hand, the news reports that day have been seared into the American consciousness like few, if any, events in American history. The heroism displayed by the civilians and first responders who risked — and in some instances gave — their lives to rescue others from burning towers represents the American spirit at its finest. This is also true of the selfless actions of the passengers on United Flight 93, who spared hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians from a similar fate that befell those killed in the WTC. On the other hand, the unity displayed following those attacks seems like a distant memory. America has since been chastened by suboptimal outcomes in foreign conflicts, has foolishly imported foreigners who hate the US, and has largely forgotten the lessons of 9/11. We don’t commemorate today’s 25th anniversary because “somebody people did something,” as one member of Congress has claimed. The US was attacked by foreign Islamic jihadists who were willing to kill as many civilians as possible in furtherance of their religious and ideological agenda. That agenda is as present today throughout the world as it was in 2001. Indeed, it is much stronger within the borders of the United States than it was on the day of the terrorist attacks. Honoring the memory of those killed on 9/11 requires us to be clear-eyed about the belief system that precipitated the terrorist attacks and the ongoing threat posed by that belief system. Never forget should mean never forget

The anti-AI coalition continues to maneuver to find arguments to slow down AI progress. If someone has a sincere concern about a specific effect of AI, for instance that it may lead to human extinction, I respect their intellectual honesty, even if I deeply disagree with their position. However, I am concerned about organizations that are surveying the public to find whatever messages will turn people against AI, and how the public reacts as these messages are spread by lobbyists or by politicians seeking to alarm constituents, companies pursuing regulatory capture or seeking to promote the power of their technology, and individuals seeking to gain attention or to profit by being provocative. A large study (link in original article below; h/t to the AI Panic blog) by a UK group tested different messages that are designed to raise alarm about AI. Their study found that saying AI will cause human extinction has largely failed. Doomsayers were pushing this argument a couple of years ago, and fortunately our community beat it back. But AI-enabled warfare and environmental concerns resonate better. We should be prepared for a flood of messages (which is already underway) arguing against AI on these grounds. Further, job loss and harm to children are messages that motivate people to act. To be clear, I find AI-enabled warfare alarming; we need to continue serious efforts to monitor and mitigate the environmental impact of AI; any job losses are tragic and hurt individuals and families; and as a father, I hold dearly the importance of every child’s welfare. Each of these topics deserves serious attention and treatment with the greatest of care. But when anti-AI propagandists take a one-sided view of complex issues to benefit their own organizations at the expense of the public at large — for instance, when big AI companies argue that AI is dangerous to block the free distribution of open source projects that compete with their offerings — then we all lose. For example, public perception of data centers’ environmental impact is already far worse than the reality — data centers are incredibly efficient for the work they do, and hampering their buildout will hurt rather than help the environment. While job loss is a real problem, the “AI washing” of layoffs — in which businesses that had over-hired during the pandemic blame AI for recent layoffs, although AI hasn’t yet affected their operations — has led to overblown fears about the impact of AI on employment. Unfortunately, this sort of propaganda easily leads to regulations that create worse outcomes for everyone. For example, oil companies worked for years to create fear of nuclear energy. The result is that overblown concerns about the safety of nuclear power plants has stifled nuclear power development, leading to millions of premature deaths from air pollution that was caused by other energy sources and a massive increase in CO2 emissions. Let’s make sure overblown concerns about AI do not lead to a similar fate for the many people that would benefit from faster AI development. Last week, the White House proposed a national legislative framework for AI. A key component is a federal preemption framework to prevent a patchwork of state regulations that hamper AI development. I support this. After failing to gain traction at the federal level, a lot of anti-AI propaganda has shifted to the state level. If just one of the 50 states passes a law that limits AI in an unproductive way, it could lead to stifling AI development across all the states and potentially across the globe. The White House proposal rightfully respects each state’s rights to control its own zoning, how it enforces general laws to protect consumers, and how it uses AI. But if a state were to pass laws that limit AI development, federal rules would preempt the state law. The White House proposal remains a proposal for now. However, if the U.S. Congress enacts it, it will clear the way for ongoing efforts to develop AI in beneficial ways. Where do we go from here? Let’s support limiting applications — those that use AI, and those that don’t — that harm people. When the anti-AI coalition argues against AI, in addition to considering the merits of the argument, I consider whether their position is consistent and persuasive, or if they are just promoting whatever concerns they think will sway the public at a given moment. And, let’s also keep using a scientific approach to weighing AI’s benefits against likely harms, so we don’t end up with overblown concerns that limit the benefits that AI can bring everyone. [Original text with links: ]