The tax situation for U.S. territories is complex and varies between them. Here’s a brief overview:

Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands:

Residents generally do not pay federal income tax on local income. They do pay federal payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare). They have their own tax systems.

Guam and Northern Mariana Islands:

Have a “mirror” tax system that parallels the U.S. federal tax system. Residents pay taxes to the territorial government instead of to the U.S. federal government.

American Samoa:

Has its own tax system. Residents generally do not pay federal income taxes.

However, there are exceptions:

Federal employees in these territories generally pay federal income tax. Residents with income sources from the U.S. mainland may need to pay federal taxes on that income. Some residents may need to file U.S. tax returns under certain circumstances.

It’s important to note that while residents of these territories may not pay federal income taxes in many cases, they also don’t have full representation in Congress and can’t vote in U.S. presidential elections (though they may participate in primary elections).

On the way out of the office, I told my new coworker “Have a good Independence Day,” and he responded without missing a beat, “You too, it’s the last one!” lol, fuk

Mildreds out here, tryin ta take ‘Mildred’ back, and y’all throwin shade like people ain’t have to live with dumbass fuckin names like Mildred. Leave Mildreds alone! They’ve got enough to deal with. Wait, they chose Mildred, like as an adult? In the present? Pfft.

A person belonging to one or more Order is just as likely to carry a flag of the counter-establishment as the flag of the establishment-- just as long as it is a flag.

The DNC is not a government entity. It’s a private organization that represents the interests of party members and has no legal obligation to serve the public. We can be irritated with the DNC, but we can’t blame them for this.

Such wonderful, terrible things.

/stares in smart glasses

I do love that generative AI is getting better at imagining text.

If our present reality was described accurately in a novel written in 1985, it would be firmly cyberpunk.

You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency. Google announced the WebP format in September 2010, and released the first stable version of its supporting library in April 2018.

The format has spotty support across applications and some vulnerabilities were discovered that required patch efforts last year. It’s not clear why you should do anything.

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This is another good use case for gAI. Copy/paste the comment into a GPT and tell it to re-write the content at the desired reading or technical level. Then it’s available for follow-up clarification questions.

That’s how I communicate my intention to pay a parking ticket. “Bowing to regulatory pressure”

Humans are really bad at determining whether a chat is with a human or a bot

Eliza is not indistinguishable from a human at 22%.

Passing the Turing test stood largely out of reach for 70 years precisely because Humans are pretty good at spotting counterfeit humans.

This is a monumental achievement.

Sure, thanks for your interest. It’s an incomplete picture, but we can think of LLMs as an abstraction of all the meaningful connections within a dataset to a higher dimensional space - one that can be explored. That alone is an insane accomplishment that is changing some of the pillars of data analysis and knowledge work. But that’s just the contribution of the “Attention is All You Need” paper. Many implementations of modern generative AI combine LLM inference in agentic networks, with GANs, and with rules-based processing. Extracting connections is just one part of one part of a modern AI implementation.

The emergent properties of GPT4 are enough to point toward this exponential curve continuing. Theory of mind (and therefore deception) as well as relational spatial awareness (usually illustrated with stacking problems) developed solely from increasing the parameter count describing the neural network. These were unexpected capabilities. As a result, there is an almost literal arms race on the hardware side to see what other emergent properties exist at higher model sizes. With some poetic license, we’re rending function from form so quickly and effectively that it’s seen by some as freeing and others as a sacrilege.

Some of the most interesting work on why these capabilities emerge and how we might gain some insight (and control) from exploring the mechanisms is being done by Anthropic and by users at Hugging Face. They discovered that when specific neurons in Claude’s net are stimulated, everything it responds with will in some way become about the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. This sort of probing is perhaps a better route to progress than blindly chasing more size (despite its recent success). But only time will tell. Certainly, Google and MS have had a lot of unforced errors fumbling over themselves to stay in what they think is the race.

I’m happy to take the time to alter your perspective, if you are open to new information.

FetLife is a relatively respected kink social media platform. It’s not about hooking up (though that certainly happens, just like on any online platform - hell, I knew people that later married that met in EQ). From my limited experience there, it’s mostly about making everyone feel less ostracized. Of course, they have to have very explicit rules about consent, or that turns into a predator’s playground - but again, that’s true of any social media platform.

As long as no one messes with their open source contributions… (ditto for MS)