IHeartBadCode

My fellow person. Friend of mine in Nashville has been purged three times 2018, 2020, and 2022. Because they thought his insanely common name was dead. No notice, no letter, no info, just silent gone from voting and every year without fail since 2018, he has to head downtown to let them know that he is distinctly not dead.

And today is the day he'll head downtown to "double check" that he has not yet again been purged because if he doesn't, he'll miss the local elections that happen on August 1st.

They're not just asking for random people to be taken off

Yes. That's how this works. They are indeed taking random people off the rolls. I'm glad this hasn't randomly happen to you and I am thankful that this only happen to me once in 2016. But yeah, buddy. It's just "random" grab bag of who they think needs to be purged. I get it, you haven't had it happen to you, so you think it's one way, but buddy, the people who do the purging are just straight up bad at their jobs. And they don't provide any kind of logic or reason on why they removed any specific person and there's zero legal recourse to hold them accountable.

Now what's worse. Imagine if you're someone who doesn't have the time to head down to the election office every two years because you're just trying to make ends meet. The randomness is what they're banking on getting some of the folks who don't have time to double check their status.

Buddy, I just... I'm just glad this hasn't happened to you. But you're talking out your butt on this "isn't random people".

And what exactly is there to stop the opposition from doing the same thing?

Process. The same that that puts barriers on this discussion from AOC. The entire impeachment process is the understanding of the people who created this country, to have a political process that is departed from the legal process. That's why being impeached doesn't also mean criminally convicted and vice versa. Historically, if you were a vassal of the lord and had your fief removed, you couldn't hold court with your lord AND you basically were penniless with the potential to end up in jail. The entire impeachment process is to separate those two things. That's why the process is spelled out fully in the Constitution and the execution solely left to Congress to implement.

There entire point of an impeachment is to execute some political justice without having legal justice married to it. What stops anyone from just abusing the process is the process itself and what it indicates for functioning government. If the goal is have no functioning government, then there isn't anything that stops anyone from abuse. But no functioning government means that those in Congress would lose power, and a loss of power means they become less enticing for lobbyist to enact agendas, for people to seek recourse, and for States to enhance power within the vacuum.

So an abuse of that power would end with them loosing more and more power. This is the same reason why Congress has had a hard time really pinning impeachment and contempt charges and have talked about inherent contempt for Garland (which inherent contempt is basically using Congress to enforce a contempt charge via the Sergeant-at-arms doing the arresting and Congress inventing a "trail" system all of their own outside of the Judicial system... which by the way SCOTUS way back in the 1930s, the last time this was used, indicated that THAT specific instance was not a violation of habeas corpus, but trying to ring Garland up on inherent contempt and trying to put him in Congress jail, would be such a complex process and likely wouldn't survive a habeas corpus challenge, but who knows at this point? For all we know SCOTUS may be completely cool with Congress tossing people into Congress jail without a proper trail. But of course that brings with it ALL KINDS of ramifications about our Federal government jailing people in a a jail completely ran by Congress and outside the entire legal system, but I digress).

Long story short, all of this stuff is political process. And you do all of this to further a political agenda to the public. But if the public isn't backing that action, it has the ability to backfire in that entire you don't get to come back to Congress or you weaken the overall power of the Federal government. So you have to look at the long term goal of anything you want to do with this process. Like the inherent contempt vote got delayed after the first Presidential debate. Biden's performance was so bad that Republicans feel that they got what they wanted. The whole Garland audio tapes, the GOP wanted them so that they could play back the tapes to the public and show that Biden was losing his marbles. But now since the debate, there's little reasons for the GOP to go down the tossing Garland into Congress jail and going down a path that's likely to not play well for anyone except their most harden supporters.

The process limits the process. That's what prevent the whole "same thing".

Are we going to replace the court?

I mean, yeah, that's the goal. SCOTUS has had about a dozen cases that they've overturned decades long, and in some cases century long, established rule. One or two per lifetime of a justice is a lot to completely overturn. This court has overturned nearly a dozen long established rulings. The entire point of a justice system is to bring about stability to the political process. Congress answers to the public, and the public can change their mind often, so random laws flying over the place isn't unusual. SCOTUS is not elected and thus they faintly answer to the public. So they need to have some stability to maintain legitimacy. Even Robert's talked about this in the ruling that overturned Roe and felt the majority was going too far.

So I think if the court itself is saying that it is ruining their own legitimacy, bringing them up into the political process to answer to these statements the court itself is making is fair game. And I don't think that's unfair to mention in that whole process. Judges don't answer to the public, so justices that massively change the landscape in short orders of time, are shaking the stability they're supposed to be building. If SCOTUS wants to rewrite the law of the land, it needs to be gradual not as fast as possible.

it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.

It physically lives encrypted in your RAM and only temporarily. Remember TPM exists.

I guess. Technically. I don't usually count encrypted without the ability to decrypt as useful, but, I'll give you the up arrow because technically correct is the best kind of correct.

Gustafson said in a statement following her defeat. "What we have to say about giving birth and everything related to it is secondary to whatever the men of the Republican Party want."

Any woman in support of the GOP is asking for this outcome in the end. Subjugation at the heel of their man. Someone elsewhere had mentioned Uncle Tom's, folks who kowtow to those who would enslave them in desperate acts for a glimmer of affection. Fundamentalist see people as pawns, not friends, not allies, not equals, but as tools to further their agenda. That's why towards the end, Uncle Tom was flogged to death by the very people whom he sought to curry a modicum of favor.

Similar story is Phil Valentine, mocked the COVID virus, derided any notion of a vaccine. Did exactly as his Republican peers did and said. Wanted nothing more than to kiss up to Trump and had bigger aspirations in the political sphere than his talk radio show provided. Got sick from COVID, spent the remainder of his life suffering to catch a breath alone in a hospital. There was a big moment of silence and remembrance on the radio the next day, by the end of the week it was "Phil who?" The people who he sought to have elevate his status in life forgot about him the second his situation turned unfavorable to their agenda.

Today, outside of his family, the majority of people who remember him are the exact people he mocked and taunted on his radio show. And it's not a remembrance of who he was that those people remember him, it's a cautionary tale. One doesn't get "into the group" with fundamentalist. You simply exist in the group until your utility runs out and then you are removed from the group as demonstration of the group's resolve.

Go in reverse of so much that's come before the court should be grounds for most of them coming under impeachment.

Like that should kind of be a rule. If any court made up of at least 40% the prior overturns case law more than 50 years old absent a constitutional amendment or Federal law laying the foundation for such an overturn, should be brought before the Congress on impeachment inquiry.

Like the whole way they've redefined the 2nd within the last ten years that overturned 200 years of prior understanding, that alone should have most of them barred from federal office for the rest of their lives. And how they redefined it without so much as a Federal law to point to or a hint of a Constitutional amendment suggesting the way they've made it now.

A literal garbage court sits the bench. What's worse is that one day the lean in the court will change and Republicans will cry about judges legislating from the bench.

If they don't replace Biden, we will get another Trump presidency

One, they aren't going to replace Biden. Two, that outcome they aren't entirely concerned about. There's some who look at that and go "Biden couldn't possibly win now" and the thing is there's an insanely small amount of people who are at this point undecided. We could have the election tomorrow and the vast majority of people know which button they are pushing and there is nothing that's changing that outcome.

It's basically Trump vs Harris at this point, but with Biden still being a stand-in, Harris doesn't have to get up there and show how little she can tango with Trump. That would actually move the needle. If Biden started pushing daisies tomorrow that would actually change the calculus.

But this debate, as far as I know, zero people have changed their mind about who they are voting for. The RNC is going to nom a felon. The DNC is going to nom a zombie. Neither group is making sane decisions at this point in time because none of them give a shit. They aren't replacing Biden just like the Republicans aren't replacing Trump. We are all on this short bus full of Senior Citizens to hell for better or worse. Kicking and screaming all along the way, this is who have for November.

If you think Biden can win after the world saw the debate performance, you're delusional.

The DNC brass, they don't care, it's a Tuesday to them if they lose. If Trump gets into power and rounds up all the gay people and shoots them in the head, hey I guess we'll get on that in 2028 or something is what the DNC has to feel about that. It's not that pressing a matter for them. And if Biden wins, the Republicans will just obstruct November 6th, the day after the election, just like they obstructed on January 6th. It is water under a bridge if Trump loses.

You know I heard all this nonsense about "we just need to get Trump out of office" back in 2020. And I knew the day of the 2020 election, Trump isn't going anywhere. If Trump loses 2024, Trump isn't going anywhere. What people ought to be concerned about isn't Trump sticking around, it's when Trump dies off. Because we're not getting rid of the crazy, we're just going to get version 2.0 of the crazy.

The people most affected by whatever outcome happens, those are the ones that are going to take the win or loss the hardest. But the political parties, and especially the RNC and DNC, all of this is just drops of rain on the glass. They are not replacing Biden, that is who we have unless he specifically croaks before we can get to the election.

So if you do not like Trump, you push the Biden button or just stay home. That is the strat here from the DNC. But there's so little undecided here, there is no energy to change course. If say the undecided was like 20%, maybe. But everyone knows whose button they are pushing, these debates aren't going to change that.

If Biden doesn't win in November, Biden wasn't going to win in October of last year. There are zero things either candidate can do that could change some number of people's minds at this point to radically change the outcome of this election. Any everyone is quite aware of this, that's the reason the DNC is going to send in a geriatric senile man and the RNC is going to send in a pompous felon.

The election is already over, we just haven't cast the ballots. The debates are just bread and circus.

The whole thing is from the DNC and RNC perspective is like that Futurama poster, "you gotta do what'cha gotta do." The DNC is NOT replacing Biden unless he literally dies before we get to the election. That is the only way who is on the Democratic ticket changes.

I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don't think there's any debating this aspect.

At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn't want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don't because "reasons". We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don't because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or "it's complicated". And then there's China demonstrating at small scale that it's doable. So instead we say "oh well it wouldn't scale" or "oh well you stole all that tech" because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they'd like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can't do right now because their hands are tied.

For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I'm not going to debate it. But there's still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they're showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you're willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying "well oil interest are holding us back". No, there's only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It's a lack of will power.

Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they're false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don't because oil companies don't want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they've got right now.

We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this "oh we couldn't possibly do that here in the US" is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

I mean, great, we're all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don't get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

I mean yeah, let's call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let's not forget all the damn windows we've broken ourselves in our glass house here.

Another thing is that Uncle Tom was eventually flogged to death by the people whose admiration he so desperately sought to win.

Fundamentalist only see things in measures of what helps them obtain what they want. Once the utility of someone is over, they have zero compunction with turning on the person that helped them and riving them to nothingness as demonstration.

Usually, there's a coupon that lets you get a medium 1 topping pizza and a stuffed cheese bread (+1 free dip), for $7 each item. That said, I absolutely recommend making your own pizza dough if you have the time for it. Way better tasting pizza.

Remember those ads long ago from Microsoft where everything was a to the edge display? And your taxi cab window was also a display? And the sidewalk was a display? And some random piece of plastic was also a display? And your fucking desk, surprise, is also a display but also one you type on! And so on...

Good times.

I mean all of that looked cool I'm sure at the time, but all of that would be horrible to use, structurally unsound, and require device interactions unheard of.

Unfortunately, this patent is likely just an echo of a project that will never see the light of day

This patent is likely a "we would love to use this to sue someone remotely trying anything that might look like this, but isn't someone who has a legal team that could convince a judge to send us home with our tails between our legs." This kind of shit gets pulled by Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, et al all of the time. It's to ensure their continued ability to keep new entries in the industry away.

you could never have a place that full of screens without ads being everywhere

I audibly laughed.

When the blind guy does the routing on the PCB.

HVAC suffers from loss over distance. Large distances like what's between the western US deserts and the eastern seaboard would suffer large losses to heat via HVAC.

HVDC can solve this, but that requires an investment into this kind of infrastructure. Moving the batteries is using a preexisting infrastructure because the assumption is that new infrastructure won't be upgraded. We will build new so long as a ROI has quick turn around, another assumption here being that long term profit planning won't happen so everything needs to be planned to have profiting within two or less years. But we won't build new if usage of that new happens a decade later.

We could totally send the electrons over, but sending the batteries over is adding a bunch of assumptions that people won't want to do massive investments in basic infrastructure to facilitate that, so we've got run with what we have that can ensure profits in a fairly rapid pace before investors bore of it or the next election cycle tosses everything in chaos.

I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it's impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that's just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

There's a reality to these tools. That reality is they're helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.

Tech vendors have also been falling over each other to tell the world how they are including GenAI in their offerings as the leading AI companies attract feverish attention from investors.

Because you can't hype it up for investors if you call it what it actually is. Fancy auto complete. And don't get me wrong, I love me some of the tools out there. But this stuff is being absolutely way over hyped.

It's good to go into this stuff with realistic views. Will it do all your work? Absolutely not. But what it will do is do a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can get more things that require your specific attention done.

The level of "sky is falling and we're all going to be enslaved by AI" is literal bullshit to sell more stocks and create a bubble that will absolutely pop.

Forgot the final bullet points

• US Government does jack shit in terms of legal ramifications for breaking law.
• Musk pledges to break US law once again.

Just a reminder that the last of the tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 for citizens ends in 2025. The flat 21% rate for businesses tax cut will continue long after that point.

The Republicans are the ones who passed the TCJA with the whole point being that they would run on this plank hard in 2024. The reason the income tax on people are ending in 2025 was because the House and Senate (both controlled by Republicans at the time) couldn't agree on a unified measure and decided to instead use reconciliation to move the TCJA through. And they're planning exactly this same tactic if they win in November.

Because they don't want a solution, they want a never ending problem.

This court is absolutely raring to go on major questions. In the past, when Congress left things wide open, the High Court usually gave deference to the agency to handle the details. Examples are things like:

• Congress: "Protect endangered animals" - Executive: "I've created a list of what I think is endangered."
• Congress: "Build a highway between Chicago and the Mexican border in Texas" - Executive: "I've come up with a way to string already existing roads and upgrade them to create this road."
• Congress: "Ensure that companies pay the full cost of environmental damage" - Executive: "I'll will bill them for CO₂ released into the air"

Congress doesn't list in massive detail every single possible permutation that's possible in law. That would create thousand page laws. But as EPA vs WV has shown us, the Supreme Court wants incredible detail. So we get the over 300 pages of new law that indicate six gases, fifteen different levels of municipality, and over ten thousand different industries plus all the various ways those three things interact with each other, to address what was "missing" from the original grant of authority for the EPA.

And the thing is, Republicans will bemoan these large tomes of text, saying "how can we know what's in it?" That's them breaks. If the Supreme Court say "a government agency can not do XYZ because it doesn't say XYZ in the law" then that means we have to be very detailed about what's in the law. That's how we get thousands of pages per law. That's kind of the reason why prior Courts didn't harp on this stuff. The President changes every four to eight years, regulation can change at that rate too. Law change very infrequently. So that whole EPA vs WV result, CO₂ regulation was something that basically bounced every time we swapped parties, NOW it's in law and it's going to be there for decades.

The ISPs are getting ready to shoot themselves in the foot here. Because if NN is enshrined in law, NN is here to stay. As long as it's a regulatory process, it can change President to President. But push come to shove, if Congress really wants to, they can enshrine Net Neutrality into law. And it only took the Democratically led Congress in 2021, three weeks after the SCOTUS case to pass the new 300+ page law giving the EPA those new powers explicitly.

That's the thing, the Republicans in the 118th Congress have shown they can not get anything done. They've pass 64 laws so far, most of them are renaming Post Offices and reupping funding to VA hospitals. They've spent almost 65% of the time in committee investigating various impeachment hearings. It's so weird how they've had a majority in the House, could have worked on budget related things, and they've barely talked about the impending tax increase that's coming once the tax cut act of 2017 runs out next year. They literally had planned to run on that sole thing back in 2017, that's why they set it up to expire during an election year, and not a peep from them this year on it.

Meanwhile the Democrats in the 117th Congress passed 362 laws, with bangers like the CHIPs act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the whole turn about is fair play with the whole EPA vs WV case. Because they took the majority they had and got things done.

So ISPs better hope Republicans can keep the mayhem up forever, because if Democrats do get into power in the House/Senate/and President. This whole stunt with the Supreme Court they're pulling could massively backfire on them. Because if NN gets into law, well then it's way harder to undo that.

AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged

Man you wouldn't guess how airbrush artist felt when Photoshop came around.

Psss... Let me let you in on a secret. It's not just this guy.

Say no to SaaS as much as you can

I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don't work in that profession.

With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they're going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won't be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.

I mean this comes from the House led by GOP who have spent so much time in committee that they have past:

checks notes

64 laws, most related to renaming post offices.

As a comparison, the 117th Congress (the last one) which was led by Democrats passed 463 laws including the CHIPS law, the Inflation Reduction law, the Infrastructure bill...

In fact, the 118th is on track to be the least productive Congress in modern history. And it's not just because of all of the inquires that have gone nowhere the GOP have lead, though that has eaten about 60% of their time on the Hill. The GOP has dealt with massive infighting that prevents even themselves from getting things done.

"too little too late"

Man they could have centuries of time on their hands and wouldn't even do basic things like pass a budget. The GOP has demonstrated quite well that they don't have the ability to enact their platform. And mostly because they're too damn busy posing in front of cameras and trying to score sound bites. Like just the other day Comer was talking about how he'd like to arrest Fauci and the thing is, Comer has a degree in Agriculture and mostly majored in those aspects. He doesn't even have the functional knowledge to actually indict anyone, much less the ability to maintain the massive amount of litigation.

Like he can say that, but the odds of any kind of successful indictment is slim to none. I mean for fucks sake, he sits on the Oversight Committee ex officio, shit he likely doesn't even know what that means.

A large part of the modern GOP are people who are horrible at their job and have very little understanding of how Government works. MTG just a few weeks ago was talking about some sort of "law" and what it really was, was a regulatory hearing on review of rule making. Not even new rules or regulatory processes, just the usual self audit. Lady doesn't know the different between slip, law, bill, and rule. But she'll be the first one to open her mouth about who is and is not a doctor.

A lot of them are very poorly educated in how anything works. And they objectively demonstrate that lack of knowledge on a fairly regular basis. And they're pretty unabashed about it too.

So yeah, that "too little too late" that's some rich bull. You know my Grandfather used to say: "If you are ever worried about professional politicians, just you wait till the amateurs get here." He made that in reference to a Governor of Tennessee Ray Blanton, but fuck if it doesn't apply here.

From Cara:

We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation

Okay I wanted to talk real quick about this aspect. Lot's of folks want AI to require things only held in copyright. And fine, let's just run with that for sake of brevity. Disney owns everything. If you stick AI to only models which the person holds copyright, only Disney will generate AI for the near future.

I'm just going to tell you. The biggest players out there are the one who stand to profit the most from regulation of AI. And likely, they'll be the one's tasked by Congress to write drafts of the regulation.

In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily

And the thing is, is Photoshop even "human-made art"? I mean that was the debate back in the 90s, when a ton of airbrush artist lost their jobs. And a large amount of Photoshop that was done, was so bad back then we had the whole Ralph Lauren, Filippa Hamilton thing go down.

So I don't disagree with safe from AI places. But the justification of Cara's existence, is literally every argument that was leveled at Photoshop back in the 90s by airbrush artist who were looking to protect their jobs and failed because they focused way too heavily on being anti-Photoshop that the times changed without them. When they could have started learning Photoshop and kept having a job.

I think AI presents a unique tool for artist to use to become more creative than they have ever been. But I think that some of them are too caught up in how CEOs will eventually use that tool as justification to fire them. And there's a lot of propensity to blame AI when it's the CEO's writing the pink slips, just like the airbrush artists blamed Photoshop, when it was newspapers, the magazines, and so on that were writing the pink slips.

I just feel like a lot of people are about to yet again get caught with their pants down on this. And it's easy to diss on AI right now, because it's so early. Just like bad Photoshop back in the 90s led to the funny Snickers ad.

Like I get that people building models from other people's stuff is bad. No argument there. But, open models, things built from a community of their own images, are things too but that's all based on the community and people who decide to be in a collaborative effort to provide a community model. And I think folks are getting so hung up on being anti-AI, that it's going to hurt their long term prospects, just like the airbrush folks who started picking up Photoshop way too late.

There's not a stopping Disney and the media companies from using AI, they're going to, and if you enjoy getting a paycheck, having some skill in the thing they use is going to be required. But for regular people to provide a competitor, to fight on equal footing, the everyday person needs access to free tools. Imagine if we had no GIMP, no Kitra, no Inkscape. Imagine if it was just Adobe and nothing else and that was enforced by regulation because only Adobe could be "trusted".

Honest question. How does their service "replace" an open source LLM? If I've got locallama on my machine, how does using their service replace my local install?

Similar story, I had a junior dev put in a PR for SQL that gets lat and long and gives back distance. The request was using the Haversine formula but was using the km coefficient, rather than the one for miles.

I asked where they got it and they indicated AI. I sighed and pointed out why it was wrong and that we had PostGIS and that's there is literally scalar functions available that will do the calculations way faster and they should use those.

There's a clear over reliance on code generation. That said, it's pretty good for things that I can eye scan and verify that's what I would have typed anyway. But I've found it suggesting things I wouldn't remotely permit to things that are "sort of" correct. I'll let it pop on the latter case and go back and clean it up. But yeah, anyone blind trusting AI shouldn't be allowed to make final commits.

Tagged: WIP

Refusing a subpoena by Congress isn't what Bannon is hoping for. If you believe that Congress is investigating is outside their scope, it's too political to be a lawful investigation, you still have to answer the subpoena and then testify under oath your belief as such. This was something pointed out in Watkins.

So the only way SCOTUS can overturn the conviction is finding some new ability to ignore a subpoena, which I'm not sure how they can justify a new power without it also coming off as SCOTUS removing Congressional power, a clear violation of the separation of power.

You can walk into a hearing and literally sit there and not answer. You can indicate that they're full of themselves. Your 5th Amendment right overrides government oversight in personal matters. They were seeking Bannon's involvement in the Jan. 6 attack, he literally could have gotten up there, gave them the middle finger, indicated his fifth amendment right, and sat there with arms crossed the rest of the time. And he totally could have had SCOTUS get him off scotfree with a Watkins argument, the end.

But if you DO NOT even fucking go, well you've just shot yourself in the foot. Because now, SCOTUS has to invent something to save your dumbass, and reasons to invent a new thing that could potentially backfire are based on how much it's worth it to them to do such.

Literally guy could have done all kinds of things to make this easier for him. Just not showing was quite possibly the dumbest way to do it.

Man, the edited video is just extending a few frames and letting it go on longer than the actual video. Yeah, Biden goes to sit down first, and is doing a little squat while the person is welcomed to the stage, but the video on Reddit's Conservative subreddit is just cut right at the point he sits down and the last few frames are extended a bit.

But you know I'm going to give them benefit of the doubt (I know, I'm going to hear it from you all). They saw something on Xitter, ran with it before fact checking, and now they have egg on face. Happens to the best of us sometimes. But in the age of AI, all of us are going to need to be on our toes about things. This is just a simple edit on a video clip, AI going to allow us to straight up do all kinds of crazy shit.

We're all in this together and there's a ton of NOT AMERICANS that want us at each other's throat. We are either going to help each other get through AI or we're all going to be falling for made up shit.

Maybe that's faulty, as I haven't tried it myself

Nah perfectly fine take. Each their own I say. I would absolutely say that where it is, not bothering with it is completely fine. You aren't missing all that much really. At the end of the day it might have saved me ten-fifteen minutes here and there. Nothing that's a tectonic shift in productivity.

China is one of the leading producers of solar panels at exceptionally cheap prices. China and the Philippines are currently in a bit of a sour mood with each other. The US could step in with cheap solar panels if they were researching that, but alas, who do you think is going to be providing them with cheap LNG?

So while the story indicates that solar is at it's cheapest it's ever been. Not for the Philippines. The Philippines is a clear cut example of how the United State's continued resistance to a domestic solar panel production industry is literally hurting their long term prospects. There's a lot of nations out there that want panels and right now, China is the only serious game.

Ah. No problem. So the notion behind the "big guys are the ones that stand to profit from AI regulation" is that regulation curtails activity in a general sense. However, many of the offices that create regulation defer to industry experts for guidance on regulatory processes, or have former industry experts appointed onto regulatory committees. (good example of the later is Ajit Pai and his removal of net neutrality).

AI regulation at the Federal level has mostly circled "trusted" AI generation, as you mentioned:

But what it is doing is making it infinitely easier to spread enormous amounts of completely unidentifiable misinformation, due to being added with indistinguishable text to speech and video generation

And the talk has been to add checks along the way by the industry itself (much like how the music industry does policing itself or how airline industry has mostly policed itself). So this would leave people like Adobe and Disney to largely dictate what are "trusted" platforms for AI generation. Platforms that they will ensure that via content moderation and software control, that only "trusted" AI makes it out into the wild.

Regulation can then take the shape of social media being required to enforce regulation on AI posts, source distributors like github being required to enforce distribution prohibitions, and so on.

This removes the tools for any AI out of the hands of the public and places them all in the hands of Adobe, Disney, Universal, and so on. And thus, if you wanted to use AI you must use one of their tools, which may in turn have within the TOS that you can not use their product to compete with their product. Basically establishing a monopoly.

This happens a lot in regulatory processes which is why things like the RIAA, the MPAA, Boeing, and so on are so massive and seemingly unbreakable. They aren't enshrined in law, but regulatory processes create a de facto monopoly that becomes difficult to enter because of fear of competition.

The big guys, being the industry leaders, in a regulatory hearing would be the first to get a crack at writing the rules that the regulatory body would debate on. In addition to the expert phase, regulatory process also includes a public comment, this would allow the public to address concerns about the expert submitted recommendation. But as demonstrated back in the public comment of the debate to remove rules regulating ISPs for net neutrality, the FCC decided that the comments were "fake" and only heard a small "selected" percentage of them.

side note: in a regulatory hearing, every public comment accepted must be debated and rationale on the conclusion of the argument submitted to the record. This is why Ajit Pai suspended comments on NN because they didn't want to enter justification that can be brought up in a court case to the record.

The barrier is no longer “you need to be an artist”. It’s “you need to have an internet connection”

And yeah, that might be worth locking AI out of the hands of the public forever. But it doesn't stop the argument of "AI taking jobs". It just means that small startups will never be able to create jobs with AI. So if the debate is "AI shouldn't take our jobs, let's regulate it", that will only make it worse in the end (sort of how AWS has mostly dominated the Internet services and how everyone started noticing that as not being incredibly ideal around 2019-2021 when Twitter started kicking people off their service and people wanting to build the next Twitter were limited to what Amazon would and would not accept).

So that's the argument. And there's pros and cons to each. But we have to be pretty careful about which way to go, because once we go a direction, it's pretty difficult to change directions because corporations are incredibly good at adapting. I distinctly remember streaming services being the "breath of fresh air from cable" all the way up till it wasn't. And now with hard media becoming harder to purchase (it's not impossible mind you) we've sort of entrenched streaming. Case in point, I love Pokémon Concierge, it is not available for purchase as a DVD or whatever (at least not a non-bootleg version), so if I ever want to watch it again I need Netflix.

And do note, I'm not saying we shouldn't have regulation on AI, what I am saying is that there's a lot for consideration with AI regulation. And the public needs to have some unified ideas about it for the regulatory body's public comment section to ensure small businesses that want to use AI can still be allowed. Otherwise the expert phase will dominate and AI will be gone from the public's hands for quite some time. We're just now getting around to reversing the removal of net neutrality that started back in 2017. But companies have used that 2017 to today to form business alliances (Disney + Hulu Verizon deal as an example) that'll be hard to compete with for some time.

But, but, that would be ... ˢᵒᶜⁱᵃˡⁱˢᵐ

GASP

How about cutting foreign defense spending

We could, but remember that a lot of that defense spending are people in the US' job. About 2M would be on the block for chopping.

Or getting rid of insanely wasteful farm subsidies

I mean don't stop there. Especially at just that point. Relax the restrictions for crop insurance. Reduce the barriers between farmers and grocers. Literally break up the giant grocery stores. Kroger's is a fucking bitch ass. One of the reasons we have to pay massive subsidies is because there's distinctly a lack of a free market in the farming and grocery business.

And while we're at it. Tell John Deere to fuck off.

I agree unregulated AI is problematic. At the same time, I'm cynical on what the actual measures would look like.

OMG, Thank you, this is the correct take.

Maduro has little to do with previous meddling from the United States. He's directly from Chávez who was the one who attempted a Coup on Carlos Andrés Pérez, likely what we could consider the last US friendly leader.

Chávez was the Venezuelan answer to US meddling and when he came to power. At some point we have to accept that the people and their elected government are at the wheel. Venezuela made a call to put way too many of their chips into the oil markets, no one forced them to bank so heavily on oil, they made that call themselves.

With next to nothing as a follow up, they're suffering from economic missteps. Additionally, any international help that's been extended, Venezuela has turned it down. Maybe for the best as they're worried that the international help is more foreign meddling. But again, that's Venezuela to make that choice.

What the US did is understandable to be angry about, but at some point it is less about meddling that the US did and poor economic choices and corrupt government rule that has brought about where they are today. I know a lot of people want to seriously blame the US and there's some rationale behind that. But where the Venezuelan economy sits today, that's squarely on the elected officials of Venezuela.

Now does that mean that the current situation there should make us turn everyone away? Absolutely not. At least in my opinion. I think that's where me and @dragontamer@lemmy.world will disagree. What's happening is horrible and we should not lose our humanity towards others just because it is slightly inconvenient. But that's on Congress in the United States to address as they're the ones that can approve new asylum programs.

Many countries have offered to help including the US. Venezuela doesn't want it. Again, maybe the paranoia we instilled is what causes that denial, maybe the US just makes a good effigy. But we have to accept the answer Venezuela gives about other people trying to help, that's how we demonstrate that our determination to actually stop meddling with countries south of the border. Because given the current situation there, it wouldn't be incredibly difficult for the US to setup partisans and begin an effort to overthrow the government, if they so wanted to.

As horrible the situation is, as much as we shouldn't close our border, this mess is very much Venezuela's making.

Oracle is just adopting the mafia mentality

What do you mean "just"? This has always been Oracle.

When folks talk bad about GIMP.