In amber light, the ritual begins,
Between two fingers, balanced destiny.
A flick of flame, the gentle hiss and draw—
The first deep breath of contradictions.
Four hundred thousand souls ascend each year
As gray ghosts rising from the pyre of choice.
Atlanta vanished, ashes in the wind,
LOOK THEM IN THE EYES
While you're lighting up that cigarette, 480,000 families are planning funerals this year alone. Families who would give anything for just one more day with their loved one.
You think your smoking only affects you? That's what the 16 million Americans with smoking-related diseases thought too. Now they can't walk their children to school or dance at their daughter's wedding because they can barely breathe without an oxygen tank.
Every time you choose to smoke, you're essentially telling your family: "I don't care enough about you to stick around." Is that the message you want to send to your children? Your spouse? Your parents who raised you?
That $600 billion smoking costs our nation each year? That's money taken from schools, hospitals, and communities—money that could have saved lives instead of catering to your addiction.
In a stunning reversal that has shocked media observers worldwide, Rupert Murdoch has announced a new $5 billion endowment to launch what he's calling the "Truth & Democracy Initiative" (TDI). The 93-year-old media mogul, reportedly following a secret series of conversations with Bill Gates, made the announcement from his deathbed at his Manhattan penthouse.
"For too long, I've profited from division," Murdoch allegedly stated in a press release. "It's time to rebuild what I helped destroy."
The initiative will include:
Here is a list of some of my top specific interests relating to deliberation, sense-making, and rationality:
Deliberative Democracy Tools - Systems for structured citizen participation, including participatory budgeting platforms and stakeholder engagement tools
Argument Mapping & Visualization - Platforms for making reasoning explicit and visually representing dialectical structures
Deep Thinking Environments - Slow media and platforms designed for thoughtful engagement rather than rapid interaction
Belief Tracking Systems - Tools for attestation, commitment to positions, and tracking belief revision over time
What is required for people to reach consensus in public?
To be specific, I'm talking about written statements in public that individuals will attest to.
It seems necessary that participants are sufficiently:
This release brings major performance improvements to tensor operations, particularly in matrix multiplication and convolution, along with experimental ROCm/HIP and SPIR-V support enabled by CubeCL runtimes. It also introduces foundational features for multi-backend compatibility and adds new quantization operations.
Support for ONNX models has been expanded, with additional operators and bug fixes for better operator coverage.
As with previous releases, this version includes various bug fixes, further performance optimizations, new tensor operations, and enhanced documentation.
Consider this code. Please pay attention to how .style() derives from element. The rest is not important for the point I'm hoping to make here.
/// Centers `element` horizontally and vertically inside `canvas`.
/// Returns a `Node` struct containing the calculated position and dimensions
/// of the repositioned `element`.
pub fn center_element(element: &HtmlElement, canvas: &Canvas) -> Node {
let dim = bounding_client_dim(element);
let pos = centered_pos(&dim, &canvas.dim);
{