The 3rd section of the 14th amendment[1] states that no person having engaged in insurrection[2] shall hold any office, civil or military, in the United States. So technically Trump isn’t a legitimate head of state either.
> The 3rd section of the 14th amendment[1] states that no person having engaged in insurrection[2] shall hold any office, civil or military, in the United States. So technically Trump isn’t a legitimate head of state either.
Was he tried and convicted? As far as I know the powers that be instead decided for some reason to attack him on other charges (sexual misconduct, corruption, etc.)
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump engaged in insurrection as a matter of fact. That is, they deemed it so obvious from the evidence presented (much of which was publicly available) that it didn't require a trial for determination.
This was appealed to the US Supreme Court, who didn't rule that this wasn't true, they ruled that the 14th amendment needs to be applied by Congress for reasons of consistency across states... which sidestepped the entire issue and was a dereliction of duty in my opinion, in the sense that they are the highest court and could have ruled on the issue of insurrection, or at least required some kind of jury proceeding at that time. They basically didn't do their one job.
Then Jack Smith later amassed a case about it, with grand jury approval. He ran out of time to try and convict Trump before he was elected, basically published a summary report of his case. Recently he testified before a congressional committee about it and asserted he was extremely confident Trump would have been convicted. He testified that he never consulted with Biden about the case, and asked that the rest of his materials from his investigation be publicly released.
Legally speaking there is a strong argument that Trump engaged in insurrection; he's just been shielded from the consequences by political maneuvers and poor timing.
Put differently, one state supreme court decided he so obviously engaged in it that it didn't require a trial. Another federal attorney presented his evidence to a grand jury and they decided he was likely to succeed if it went to trial.
My personal belief is historians will look at the evidence presented and conclude that US Congress made catastrophic mistakes by not impeaching Trump the first time (for obstruction of justice first, and insurrection second), and that SCOTUS made an equally catastrophic mistake (or corrupt decision) by not ruling on insurrection as the highest federal court, either on its own or with a grand jury trial.
10x when working on a code base I'm very familiar with.
Basically, it amounts to being able to give detailed instructions to a junior dev (who can type incredibly fast) and having them carry out your instructions.
If you don't know the code base, and thus can't provide detailed instructions, this junior dev can (using their incredible typing speed) quickly run off the rails. In this case, as you don't know the code base, you wouldn't know it's off the rails. So you're S.O.L.
LLms are both faster, smarter and way dumber than a junior at the same time.
They work faster, but more often make wrong assumptions without asking. Llms dont ask the stupid questions a junior might, but those questions are essential to getting it right.
A simple question about a spinning needle has haunted mathematicians for more than a century. It led to the Kakeya conjecture, a cornerstone of modern analysis connecting geometry, fractals, and the behavior of waves. Now, mathematicians Hong Wang and Joshua Zahl have cracked the 3D case — a once-in-a-generation breakthrough that could reshape how we understand the Fourier transform. (Also featuring Terence Tao and Jonathan Hickman.)
This paper introduces Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO), our stable, efficient, and performant reinforcement learning algorithm for training large language models. Unlike previous algorithms that adopt token-level importance ratios, GSPO defines the importance ratio based on sequence likelihood and performs sequence-level clipping, rewarding, and optimization. We demonstrate that GSPO achieves superior training efficiency and performance compared to the GRPO algorithm, notably stabilizes Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) RL training, and has the potential for simplifying the design of RL infrastructure. These merits of GSPO have contributed to the remarkable improvements in the latest Qwen3 models.
Despite a significant number of up votes in a short amount of time (174 in 1 hour as of this comment a comment to time ratio higher than anything on the front page) this got moved off the front page. Suspicious.
“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.” ― Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science
Entropy is always increasing in a closed system, but locally it can decrease, if energy is supplied from the outside. Us evolving on Earth comes at the expense of increased entropy of the Sun.
I'm partial to the hypothesis that our universe is actually a giant black hole in some kind of larger universe. The Big Bang was really the formation of our universe's event horizon. Cosmic inflation is the result of stuff falling into our universe, adding to its mass-energy -- there is no dark energy, our universe is just accreting mass-energy from something larger.
As for what the larger universe looks like -- in this model it may be impossible to know because the event horizon is impenetrable. It could be a much larger universe or it could be something else, like a higher dimensional one.
Life in the universe is pretty unfavourable! A rare thing indeed. Where it has evolved I think it is less about entropy and more about the nature of the matter - atoms, molecules. Particularly carbon and water. And the way they can replicate themselves through chemistry. That had to obey entropy but is not driven by it. Light scattering off the atmosphere will do the entropy trick well enough!
Given the past week, I think “there's no real possibility of the transatlantic defence alliance suddenly completely failing” is wishful thinking.
In his last term Trump wanted to pullout of NATO[1], but “cooler heads” prevailed. Now these moderating forces are no longer members of his cabinet. So he will doubtlessly try officially, through legal means, or unofficially, by weakening NATO to the point where its guarantees are no longer believed, to withdraw.
The only real moderating force preventing official withdrawal is the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024”[2] which “prohibits the President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO without approval of a two-third Senate super-majority or an act of Congress”.
There is no real moderating force preventing unofficial withdrawal.
I do agree that the wider guarantees offered by NATO aren't now what they were, particularly for states that Trump feels shouldn't have been members in the first place. His recent comments on Poland (strong support given) followed by his subsequent comments on the Baltic states ("tough neighbourhood") show that.
My point though was on the UK/US defence relationship. This has always been a transactional arrangement, and there's benefit on both sides from it continuing.
> Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
Which they did. Please tell me which exact aspect of the Budapest Memorandum did US not follow through?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[2]https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/g-s1-104190/capitol-riot-trum...