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Scarred (warning: a bit dark)

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A small, dark room. From behind, we see a deathly pale young girl hunched over inside a human cage, in the very center of the room. No lights fight back the gloom; the environment is pervasively dead. The young girl’s posture is that of a zombie; her body is lifeless, and her head is held up in only the most drooping position. The stench of urine drenches the musty air. As we move around the cage to get a closer look, we see that deep, dark circles ring around her eyes. Her hair is a mess, probably unwashed for months, not that we can tell from this dark shadow. Suddenly the door slams open. Blinding light flashes across the room and in steps an old crone. She holds out a key and unlocks the girl’s cage. Click! “Wake up. You be a good girl and eat.” We see the girl in the cage open her eyes as the old lady throws bread crumbs at her naked body. “You will rot in here forever for your sin. Do you understand me? Repeat what I just said.” Slap! The hag lands a blow across her face f
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Neural Networks and AI (2007) Has AI really advanced much?

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  It is widely held that the human brain is the most sophisticated object in the universe, but is it really? Early this century, guests on a radio show entered a dating contest. They had to chat with a random strangers on the phone and pick their favorite to be their dates. To their complete shock, all the guests had ended up picking someone named Alice . No, not the person, but Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity.  In the immediate aftermath, thousands of people on AOL Instant Messenger found out that their best friends were actually bots all along, much to their sadness. How can any of this be possible? The answer lies in understanding the structure of the human brain and using computers to imitate it. The brain has been found to be structurally very simple, being just a huge number of synaptic connections and their respective connection strengths. These are called neural networks because the brain is a network of neurons, while the computer stimulation of the brain is cal
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State of the stock market May 2023

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 This video has me convinced that from now (May 2023) until a recession the stock market won't be doing well, despite a nice run recently. Mainly it boils down to the stock market historically tracking the M2 money supply , which has been going down. You can look at the graph going down. It will keep going down as interest rates are kept high and the Fed does quantitative tightening further reducing the money supply. It will only be when a recession hits and the Fed drops interest rates, pumps fresh money into the system, that the stocks will resume the bull run. When this happens, the market should be real amazing. What would I bet on now? I would do treasuries like TMF (or TLT) which go up dramatically when recession hits. The Fed believes that it will take an entire year before interest rates are cut, but recession is more likely to hit much sooner, and therefore interest rates cut much sooner.
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The Hospital Room (short story)

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  I've had it since I was born. It started to get worse as I grew older, until I couldn’t be around more than two people. Two weeks from now, on my fifteenth birthday, I'll go into surgery. They're going to take it out, that thing in my brain that's made me a freak my entire life. I'm going to be normal.                 I stopped writing in my journal as Dr. Isa walks purposefully into my room, immediately followed by Moss, my only friend. My father had hired the boy to play with me while I spend these lonely days in this hospital. He was wearing deep black, which did not seem to fit with the hospital setting but he was an autistic, and that was all the explanation one needed. Unable to talk, I had to read his mind. “Hi Adda,” he thinks. Looking at him, I tried to narrow in on his thoughts, but as usual his mind was too calm to get much of a reading. Isa glances a peak at Moss and frowns, then continues scrutinizing over a daily reading of my biological norms. I
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Coach Jimmy (story story)

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Coach Jimmy While I stood staring at the rows of empty bunk beds down the long, narrow room, a rusted iron door straight ahead of me suddenly popped open.   Randy took a leap toward me, stopped, and brought out a stuffed white bag.   He gave me a mischievous grin. “Hey!   There you are, Philip!   I’ve got another surprise for you here in this bag,” he said as he looked into the bag.   “We’ve got a lot of Snickers, Hundred Grand, Butterfingers, Twinkies, a bunch of cakes, and a whole mess of other sweet stuff!” “Wow, you got free candy from that minimarket owner again?” I asked.   The minimarket owner near our guitar camp enjoyed the buzzing sound of rock music in our rehearsals, so he often generously donated free candy and other junk foods. “Yeah, that nice store owner gave me this big ol’ bag when I bought a pack of gum just right now.   Problem is, Coach Jimmy hates us eating all that junk food ‘cause it hurts our guitar playing.” Coach Jimmy was the head of our guitar camp, w
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My new about.me page

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 I made a new about.me page : https://about.me/philzhou Check it out!
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Philosophical thoughts on welfare

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  The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimates that at least 3 million American men, women, and children will be homeless for at least some part of each year [1] . Record numbers of people sleep on the streets because they cannot keep up with the rising cost of living in the growing economy. Despite this growing economy, homelessness and poverty has actually grown in the past 20 years [2] and will accelerate as Iraqi War veterans join the ranks of the homeless. The American community suffers because the homeless consume a disproportionate amount of public resources, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per person. They also often wreak havoc upon commercial areas and residential neighborhoods and damage property. A possible solution to America ’s homeless problem is for the government to engage in a massive welfare program to feed and shelter the homeless, but this money has to come from somewhere, in this case the taxpayers. It would be a burden on the work
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