I agree.

I think the filibuster is vitally important as a last-ditch way to stop really bad laws. But there SHOULD be a high cost to using it. It SHOULD gum up the works. Because if it doesn’t, then it becomes status quo that getting something through the Senate takes 60 votes instead of 50 because the losing party will always filibuster. That’s not a good way to run things.

Ever consider where your food comes from?

With respect sir (or madam), you are personifying the ‘ivory tower elite’ attitude that so many conservatives make fun of. 'I matter, others don’t.

You think there’s no culture in rural areas? That you need a giant festival to have culture?
That corner shop that has 100 transactions an hour… where do you think the bread they sell comes from? The flour? The avocadoes on the avocado toast? (sorry, I had to :P ) Sure as fuck doesn’t come from the city. You can write the rest of the nation off as unimportant and then see how unimportant they are when your fridge is empty. They matter.

the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane.

And the idea that Queens should be able to dictate policy that applies nationally including Nowhere, UT is just as insane.

Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.

I’ll give you that- most of the conservative platform these days is a bit on the batshit side.

But there’s other parts that make sense. Take guns for example. A liberal in NYC has the 11th largest army in the world 3 digits away. Police response time is seconds or minutes. So ‘nobody needs a gun’ is a common urban liberal position.
Go out in rural areas, there might be two deputies for an entire county with police response time in the range of 30-120 minutes if at all. And that county may have 4-legged predators like bears, wolves, etc that can threaten humans. So that guy wants a GOOD gun to defend himself and his family, because if there is a problem nobody else is gonna arrive until it’s too late.
The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

Guns are just an example, but that overall is why I think the electoral college has a place. House is based on population, Senate based on statehood, Presidency is in the middle with influences both from statehood and population. That’s a good way to go.

And FWIW, I also support INCREASING the population representative in the House. The current cap of 437 has not served us well with the expanding US population, and there’s now over 700k citizens per representative. That’s far too many to get voices heard, and one rep covers far too many disparate people. And it also in the House increases influence of smaller states (to a minimum of 1/437th).
I believe the cap should be raised to a very large number, perhaps several thousand. It may no longer be possible to have the entire House convene in one building, but technology has solved that problem. If you have one representative for every say 10,000-25,000 citizens, it becomes much easier for a representative to truly represent their citizens in detail and gives a citizen much greater access to his or her representatives.

I am not trying to invalidate anyone’s ideas.

But rural voters and urban voters have different needs. Neither is ‘wrong’.

For example- the urban voter might have a lot of gangland gun violence, so they push for strong gun control.
The rural voter OTOH has a police response time of 20+ minutes or more, and real threats to life and property from four-legged predators so they want real useful guns to defend themselves.

Neither is wrong for pushing their particular needs. They just don’t acknowledge the other exists.

Quite frankly if you’re going to say urban people are ‘normal people’ and rural people are ‘backward and insane’, then I’m quite in favor of reducing your own influence (and I say that as a liberal voter and registered Democrat). Good government recognizes that one size doesn’t fit all.

And what of the House? It’s largely based on population. If the White House and the House of Representatives are both population heavy then the Senate is entirely outnumbered.

The point is supposed to be that the House is population based, the Senate is state based, and the Presidency is somewhere in the middle.

To give some background on this, the huge magnetic field in an MRI machine is created by a superconducting magnet. A magnetic coil submerged in liquid helium that keeps it ultra cold has virtually no resistance, so the electricity can keep going round and round and round like a racetrack without being bled off by resistance. This lets the machine maintain a very high magnetic field with very little power input.

An MRI technician can gradually ramp up or down the magnetic field power by slowly adding or removing current from the magnet. To retrieve the officer’s rifle, they could have slowly ramped down the power with a magnetic power supply while the magnet stayed cold.

When the guy slams the emergency button that does what’s called a quench. It adds resistance to the magnet, which starts turning that power into heat, and that heat boils off all the liquid helium and rapidly ramps the magnet down to zero. This should only be done if for example a patient is trapped in the machine by a metal object or similar emergency, because it damages the magnetic coil and also boils away the liquid helium, which itself is worth thousands of dollars.

LAPD (or more specifically, the California taxpayers) are in for a pricey repair bill.

Then how do you stop urban concerns from completely trouncing rural concerns? Voters from rural areas have valid concerns which are largely opposite of urban voters. If you get rid of electoral college, candidates will campaign in major cities and that’s it. Nobody else will matter.

For anyone downvoting me- you should know I’m a liberal-libertarian registered Democrat from Connecticut, who’s very much against Trump and most of the BS today’s GOP is peddling. I just don’t think disenfranchising anyone who doesn’t live in a city is the answer.

I don’t always side with either Republicans or Democrats. I just want good government. And I am 100% in favor of repealing the procedural filibuster. I think the filibuster is a valuable tool that is important for defeating certain bad legislation, but it should not exist as a way to make sure any and every contentious legislation requires 60 votes.

If someone feels that strongly about something, let them get up there and read the phone book into the record for six hours.

Most welcome!

A little background on the NYPD and firearms
Back when most departments were transitioning from revolvers to semi-auto, NYPD held on to revolvers for quite a while. Their revolvers used double action triggers, which means pulling the trigger both rotates the cylinder and also cocks the hammer. This means the trigger pull is long and heavy, you have to pull it a long distance back and with a good amount of force.
With pistols, the longer distance you have to pull the trigger and the harder you have to pull, the less accurate you are. Pulling the trigger moves your hand and puts force on the gun itself which can throw off your aim.
Many officers would ‘pre stage’ the trigger, pulling it halfway back to an indent where the pull gets slightly harder. This is a horrible practice that no one should ever do, because it means you might unintentionally discharge if you get jostled, but it made them more accurate when it came time to actually fire so they kept doing it. NYPD didn’t train it out of the officers even though it is against virtually every firearm guideline.

So then the department switched from revolvers to semi-auto pistols, mainly for the magazine- average semi-auto pistol holds 17 rounds, revolver holds 6. But they used striker fired pistols- these guns have a shorter, lighter trigger pull as the only thing the trigger does is move a catch to release already stored spring tension into the firing pin. That can make you much more accurate because the force of pulling the trigger moves your aim off, so less force needed to pull the trigger means more accuracy.

Problem was, a lot of officers had muscle memory from years or decades of carrying the double action revolver so they would try to pre-stage the trigger. And that would of course fire the gun when they didn’t want to.

NYPD’s solution to this was to simply make the trigger on their semi-autos really really really hard to pull. They had a custom spring designed that increased the trigger force- a semi-auto usually requires about 4-6 pounds of force to pull the trigger, they put a 12 lb spring. That allowed the officers to apply pre-stage force from their revolver days without discharging the weapon. Still absolutely horrible practice, but this stopped the unintentional discharges.

This had the side effect of course of making the guns relatively inaccurate. When you have to squeeze the trigger with that much force, it throws your aim off. And especially when you are in an emergency situation and adrenaline is pumping, it’s hard to shoot accurately when you need to pull that hard. But it stopped the unintentional discharges so they went with it, since the force had a lot of old-timers.

And, for a very long time, they kept issuing these 12lb trigger guns even to new recruits, many of whom had never fired a gun before and could be easily trained to use a standard trigger with proper trigger discipline. So now THOSE officers were accustomed to 12lb triggers.

For the record, no other police department in the nation did this. Every one of them transitioned from revolvers to semi-autos without much problem, because they did not tolerate bad trigger discipline to begin with. And while some recommend a slightly stiffer trigger than the stock trigger, NYPD is literally the only one with a 12 lb trigger.

It wasn’t until 2021 that NYPD started to back off, and started issuing new recruits weapons with ‘only’ 8lb trigger springs. That is still fairly high, but those 4 lb less makes it a lot easier to shoot accurately.

Point of all this– When I hear that NYPD is shooting multiple bystanders, I’m not surprised. Unless those officers first hit the streets in the last couple of years, they are still using the 12 lb trigger and it’s not surprising they have shit accuracy and are shooting bystanders.

It’s a problem of NYPD’s own making though.

The only way you can do this, is if the only service you use the provider for is storage. Encrypt the data before you send it to the provider and then they don’t know what they’re storing.

If they have to do any processing on it at all, then conceptually they need a plain text copy of it to feed into the CPU. And if they have that, there is nothing you can do to stop them from stealing it or using it.

There has been some research in this field, the concept is called homomorphic encryption. That is where you encrypt something in a way that allows a third party to manipulate the data without possessing a key. It is still very limited, and likely always will be due to the extreme difficulty of the question.

with an outside control interface that’s quite literally about as optimal as it can be.

Which is probably true, as long as you make one assumption- that the operator dedicates a significant amount of time to learning it. With that assumption being true- I’ll assume you’re correct and it becomes much more efficient than a Nano/Notepad style editor.

I’m happy to concede without any personal knowledge that if you’re hardcore editing code, it may well be worth the time to learn Vim, on the principle that it may well be the very most efficient terminal-based text editor.

But what if you’re NOT hardcore editing code? What if you just need to edit a config file here and there? You don’t need the ‘absolute most efficient’ system because it’s NOT efficient for you to take the time to learn it. You just want to comment out a line and type a replacement below it. And you’ve been using Notepad-style text editors for years.

Thus my point-- there is ABSOLUTELY a place for Vim. But wanting to just edit a file without having to learn a whole new editor doesn’t make one lazy. It means you’re being efficient, focusing your time on getting what you need done, done.

Xmpp definitely wins in privacy. What is there to privacy more than message content and metadata? Matrix definitely fails the second one, and is E2E still an issue for public groups? I don’t remember if they fixed that.

XMPP being a protocol built for extensibility means it will be hard for it not to keep up with times.

Okay so how does modern XMPP protect this? When I last used XMPP, some (not all) clients supported OTR-IM, a protocol for end to end encryption. And there wasn’t a function for server stored chat history (either encrypted or plaintext).
Have these issues been fixed?

That’s the appropriate reaction to many of these so-called threats to society. Internet chat rooms, generative AI, drugs, opioids, guns, pornography, trashy TV, you name it. I think it’s been pretty well demonstrated throughout history that the majority of the time some ‘threat to public safety’ comes out and a well-meaning group tries to get the government to shove the genie back in the bottle, the cure ends up being worse than the disease. And it’s a lot easier to set up bureaucracy then to dismantle it.

The sad thing is, whatever regulation they set up will be pointless. Someone will download an open source model and run it locally with the watermark code removed. Or some other nation will realize that hobbling their AI industry with stupid regulations won’t help them get ahead in the world and they will become a source for non-watermarked output and watermark free models.

So we hobble ourselves with some ridiculous AI enforcement bureaucracy, and it will do precisely zero good because the people who would do bad things will just do them on offshore servers or in their basement.

It applies everywhere else too. I’m all for ending the opioid crisis, but the current attempt to end opioids entirely is not the solution. A good friend of mine takes a lot of opioids, prescribed by a doctor, for a serious pain condition resulting from a car accident. This person’s back and neck are full of metal pins and screws and plates and whatnot.
For this person, opioids like oxycontin are the difference between being in constant pain and being able to do things like workout at the gym and enjoy life.
But because of the well-meaning war on opioids, this person and their doctor are persecuted. Pharmacies don’t want to deal with oxycontin, and the doctor is getting constant flack from insurance and DEA for prescribing too much of it.
I mean really, a pain management doctor prescribes a lot of pain medication. That’s definitely something fishy that we should turn the screws on him for…

It’s really infuriating. In my opinion, the only two people who should decide what drugs get taken are a person and their doctor. For anyone else to try and intrude on that is a violation of that person’s rights.

I agree it’s hypocritical, but for different reasons.

I think a nude/sex scene can be important to the plot and add a lot to the story- in some situations. Yeah it’s often thrown in as eye candy to get more viewers, but sometimes it counts for a lot. Look at Season 1 of Game of Thrones for example- there’s a couple sex scenes with Dany and Khal Drogo, and IMHO that does a lot more to further the story than to show T&A-- the first one Dany’s basically being raped, but as the season goes on you see her start to fall in love with Drogo and it becomes more making love. Hard to get the same effect without sex scenes.
Same thing anytime you have two people in bed- crappy unrealistic TV sex where the girl never takes her shirt off and then cut to half a second later they’re both wrapped tightly but conveniently in sheets can break suspended disbelief.
So I can sympathize with an actor who agrees to artistic nude scenes or sex scenes because they’re important to the plot, but then has that specific 20 seconds of video taken out of context and circulated on porn sites.

At the same time, an actor doesn’t get to order the audience to experience the film in any certain way. Just as you say about ‘the piano’, it depends on how you watch it. It’s not illegal to buy the film, fast forward to the nude scenes, and stop watching when they’re done. So to think you get any sort of control over that is hypocritical, it’s like ordering a reader to read the entire book and not share passages with a friend.

I’m not fine with that, as it will have wide-ranging repercussions on society at large that aren’t all good.

But I fully accept it as the cold hard reality that WILL happen now that the genie’s out of the bottle, and the reality that any ham-fisted legal attempt to rebottle the genie will be far worse for society and only delay the inevitable acceptance that photographs are no longer proof.

And as such, I (and most other adults mature enough to accept a less-than-preferred reality as reality) stand with you and give the statists the middle finger, along with everyone else who thinks you can legislate any genie back into its bottle. In the 1990s it was the ‘protect kids from Internet porn’ people, in the 2000s it was the ‘protect kids from violent video games’ and ‘stop Internet piracy’ people, I guess today it’s the ‘stop generative AI’ people. They are all children who think crying to Daddy will remake the ways of the world. It won’t.

Probably the best idea yet. It’s definitely not foolproof though. Best you could do is put a security chip in the camera that digitally signs the pictures, but that is imperfect because eventually someone will extract the key or figure out how to get the camera to sign pictures of their choosing that weren’t taken by the camera.

A creator level key is more likely, so you choose who you trust.

But most of the pictures that would be taken as proof of anything probably won’t be signed by one of those.

I’m not talking about the copyright violation of sharing parts of a copyrighted movie. That is obviously infringement. I am talking about generated nude images.

If the pencil drawing is not harming anybody, is the photo realistic but completely hand-done painting somehow more harmful? Does it become even more harmful if you use AI to help with the painting?

If the pencil drawing is legal, and the AI generated deep fake is illegal, I am asking where exactly the line is. Because there is a whole spectrum between the two, so at what point does it become illegal?

Actually I was thinking about this some more and I think there is a much deeper issue.

With the advent of generative AI, photographs can no longer be relied upon as documentary evidence.

There’s the old saying, ‘pics or it didn’t happen’, which flipped around means sharing pics means it did happen.

But if anyone can generate a photo realistic image from a few lines of text, then pictures don’t actually prove anything unless you have some bulletproof way to tell which pictures are real and which are generated by AI.

And that’s the real point of a lot of these laws, to try and shove the genie back in the bottle. You can ban deep fake porn and order anyone who makes it to be drawn in quartered, you can an AI watermark it’s output but at the end of the day the genie is out of the bottle because someone somewhere will write an AI that ignores the watermark and pass the photos off as real.

I’m open to any possible solution, but I’m not sure there is one. I think this genie may be out of the bottle for good, or at least I’m not seeing any way that it isn’t. And if that’s the case, perhaps the only response that doesn’t shred civil liberties is to preemptively declare defeat, acknowledge that photographs are no longer proof of anything, and deal with that as a society.

It will be interesting to see that tested in court. I don’t think anyone would complain about for example a pencil sketch of a naked celebrity, that would be considered free speech and fair use even if it is a sketch of a scene from a movie.

So where does the line go? If the pencil sketch is legal, what if you do a digital sketch with Adobe illustrator and a graphics tablet? What if you use the Adobe AI function to help clean up the image? What if you take screen grabs of a publicity shot of the actor’s face and a nude image of someone else, and use them together to trace the image you end up painting? What if you then use AI to help you select colors and help shading? What if you do each of those processes individually but you have AI do each of them? That is not very functionally different from giving an AI a publicity shot and telling it to generate a nude image.

As I see it, The only difference between the AI deepfake and the fake produced by a skilled artist is the amount of time and effort required. And while that definitely makes it easy to turn out an awful lot of fakes, it’s bad policy to ban one and not the other simply based on the process by which the image was created.