No, it’s from Middle English “engin”, which at the time meant a device or trick.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

gin up
(gin something up, gin up something) US English generate or increase something, especially by dubious or dishonest means: the trade press has ginned up a controversy | critics say the program is just a way for big drug companies to gin up demand for their psychiatric drugs.
origin: Middle English (in the sense ‘a tool or device, a trick’): from Old French engin (see engine).

So it’s not an offensive slur (nor a reference to drunkenness), but it is an accusation of dishonesty that people would reasonably take offense at.

We can always say “back in the second millennium”.

Neurodivergent people have always been subject to misunderstanding and preemptory judgement—maybe “cancel culture” is the current framework within which that issue appears to manifest itself, but it’s not the cause.

Adware is a DDOS attack on your attention.

Wait til the crows and seagulls learn they can follow the drones for free food.

All of your farts are the farts of millions of your gut bacteria.

For one thing, it maximizes the amount of information the census contains: if you’re splitting a group into bins, the splitting with the lowest entropy is the one with equal-sized bins. If the bin sizes fluctuate with time (as a proportion of the overall population), the amount of information the census captures will vary as well. If your definition of lower-income includes 100% (or 0%) of the population, then assigning someone to a category tells you nothing about them you didn’t already know.

Yeah, that sounds like the usual mechanism (going back at least to this “survival of the flattest” paper from 25 years ago).

I just got the impression from the abstract that they might have found something significantly different.

similar flatness-seeking implicit biases have been discovered in other stochastic optimization algorithms; here we reveal their different underlying mechanisms despite similar outcome, demonstrating the unique properties of evolutionary dynamics.

The paper’s behind a paywall, but from the abstract it seems like the main claim is that they found another mechanism for an already well-established result (essentially, that drunkards develop an aversion to strolling near cliffs). It doesn’t really suggest how their findings differ from earlier studies of quasispecies models, though.

Bonds are borrowed money—they eventually have to be repaid (with interest) from regular tax revenue.

Dick Cheney?

Even if Trump copied Nixon by resigning early so Vance could pardon him, he’d still be facing various state charges. (And he could always be extradited outside the US for war crimes.)

OpenAI Discloses 6 New Incidents of Concerning OpenAI Behavior.

I hesitate to call myself a feminist because it seems like there is a presumption of understanding women’s experiences

Being a woman is the only thing that gives someone access to women’s experiences, but being a woman doesn’t automatically make someone a feminist. Neither thing presumes the other.

My theory is that the federal nature of the US leads to a default popular attitude of hostility toward any policy that originates above the state level, unless there are commercial interests willing to pay for the marketing and campaign contributions to sell it to the people and/or legislators. And businesses aren’t that interested in an improvement that only marginally affects their profits.

Alpacas, crows, and jaguars.

Apple said his office received a tip Friday from an outside source that Moore was using a Flock camera to track a former acquaintance, and an internal investigation began immediately.

I wonder who the outside source was. Was it someone at Flock, or another third party able to monitor law enforcement searches? Or was Moore bragging to her friends about illegally stalking her ex?

• Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting
• Iain Pears’ Arcadia
• Jo Walton’s Or What You Will
• Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail
• Neal Stephanson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
• Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

I think you’d immediately collapse into a shrivelled-up ball of super-dense matter.

The Pauli exclusion principle keeps particles like electrons from occupying the same physical space, which is what makes them take up volume and gives atoms and molecules their size. If they were free to move in an extra spatial dimension, they could pack much closer together, and their volume would collapse.