Two years ago, Belarus forced down an airliner crossing its territory so as to seize dissident journalist Raman Pratasevich and his (then? former?) girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Now Lukashenko has tentatively decided to keep him in prison for 8 years for the crime of journalism.

There is no reason to suppose Lukashenko would actually release him, 8 years from now. It might do to him what Israel has done to Mordechai Vanunu — keeping him effectively incommunicado indefinitely, and pretending it is has a purpose other than making him suffer.

Sapega was sentenced to 6 years in prison.

What we think of as tales of individual resilience are the tales of those that survived danger by chance, and assume it made them stronger.

The chance sets you on a good path may result in your learning to be good at something. But chance doesn't turn out good for everyone.

Noam Chomsky criticizes large language models as useless — fundamentally, by the way they are designed — for advancing understanding of cognition. This is because cognition plays no part in them. They don't try to understand anything.

Machine-learning systems can do many practical tasks well — those tasks that don't inherently involve conceptual understanding of anything. They can be useful, for good purposes and bad purposes. At the same time, they can treat their users justly (if released as free software) or unjustly (if released as nonfree software or only as a "service")

But we should distinguish this from intelligence, and reserve the term artificial intelligence for artificial systems that can understand.

*EU aims to harmonize criminal laws across bloc to fight corruption.*

*[DeMentis] accused of favoring insurance-industry donors at residents’ expense.*