There is little to celebrate here.

Victim still got charged with a felony after spending 5 months incarcerated waiting for trial, and has to wait another month in jail to find out if the judge will overturn his final charge.

Self-described "Goon" still walking around on the streets getting paid for harassing and assaulting strangers. As a bonus, nearly doubled subscribers.

This case is exactly why DA's level stack multiple felonies in these cases.

Jury: Well this is clearly self-defense, but he also probably pushed it too far so we don't think he is innocent. Better just give him one felony.

For those that don't know, the American courts have interpreted the constitutional "right to bear arms" as void for felons. This guy who was just acknowledged to have used his firearm in self-defense, is no longer allowed to own a firearm for his own protection.

Discharge of firearm in in public building: https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter7/section18.2-279/

Your honor, we the members of the jury request additional information regarding local harassment and assault laws related to the 6'5" self-described "goon" so that we may recommend charges.

Additionally, we recommend the charges against the defendant be reduced to misdemeanor reckless discharge of a firearm.

This kid learned nothing from being shot. He still thinks it is okay to bully random strangers, and is already planning his next prank. If your friends like pranks and you play pranks on each other that is fine.

If you get in someone's face and start demanding they stop thinking of your privates, especially after repeated warnings to back up, then you are inciting violence and sometimes it is going to succeed.

While this is encouraging, I wonder how many users have multiple active accounts, like I do.

More like Google had the better product a decade ago. It has pretty well been crap that was just being defaulted to for most of the last decade. Which is exactly why it is ripe for an antitrust claim.

Can we please keep anything I don't like or agree with it off of lemmy?

That includes: boiled eggs, boiled spinach, and anyone with a number in their user name.

Thank you everyone!

basic HTML Gmail is dying in early January 2024

I can't tell you how happy I am to see someone point this out here.

As if the ridiculous set of laws we have weren't bloated enough already, the nearly bottomless stack of court cases that modify them all and stack on each other make it impossible to have a fair trial.

Ah good catch. I wonder if I saw it out of the corner of my eye and thought I had a sudden "brilliant" idea.

Congress will never agree to give up anymore power than the other branches already take.

Short of a Constitutional Convention we will never see this passed. Unfortunately, a Constitutional Convention is a dangerous game even when we are less divided as a nation. The last one produced a new constitution instead of edits to the old one.

Could you imagine what a constitution would like like if it was written by the current bunch of goobers running the country?

I get the logic, but I think it is a more complex issue than that.

How many writer's have read his works and been influenced by them? Did they buy a proper license or just buy/borrow the book from somewhere?

Yeah, party affiliation is way more important than who a person is or how they live their life!

Have lots of practice do we?

Biblical wisdom mostly. Certain parts definitely don't hold up to modern morality, but there is a lot well-thought-out advice buried in it that has helped people in Judeo-Christian areas for thousands of years.

One of the Proverbs in particular comes to mind: "He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm." Hard to argue against the inherent wisdom in such a statement.

Also, like you, I have an appreciation for old churches and some religious art.

Of the many horrible things about having a Trump presidency, one of the worst is that any issue that he brings up can no longer be seriously discussed in certain circles.

Trump knows the best lies are based on the truth, so he called the news fake at a time when many people were just starting to realize that there was a problem. His supporters ate it up and the rest of us can no longer have a serious conversation about it.

Rational, free-thinking opponents of Trump style politics need to stop acting like many of his lies aren't based on a grain of truth. Sometimes the orange clown is going mention real issues.

There should be no debate about whether there is an issue with news media, only how bad an issue it is and how do we fix it when the First Amendment explicitly declares a free press.

The current for-profit news system is tearing our nation apart for money. This is a huge and highly polarizing issue. Frankly I am not at all sure that there is a good fix for it as things stand, but that doesn't mean that we should pretend it doesn't exist and that anyone that mentions it is a secret fascist.

Agreed. I've reverted to HTML mode recently when tethering from my phone. The signal is bad enough sometimes that it makes a world of difference. Gmail was virtually unusable until I realized HTML mode was still an option.

Really just time to bite the bullet and acknowledge that it is worth the hassle to switch away from a company that I don't like or trust.

I don't know how long this has been around, but I feel like they missed a good opportunity to call this the Google Graveyard.

At least 59 people think this is a high quality post or more likely just agree with it.

no one is immune from the will of a people united in their support for real justice

How do you intend to enforce that will? While you aren't saying it outright it almost sounds like you are thinking about grabbing a red hat and storming the building.

Shouldn't be too hard to ignore the freedom caucus and reach across the aisle. The only thing it would cost him is the Speakership.

I was just thinking the opposite. Maybe we can get AI to give us that last book that we are otherwise may never see. Especially if it actually does end as poorly as the TV series did.

Chat GPT write me a final novel for ASOIF in the style GRRMartin but with a better ending.

This is a little disturbing and should probably be its own post.

I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.

That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.

Meh... I would bet most Christians ascribe to the same sort of philosophy that my pastor did back when I was in high school. He always said, "I don't know if there are aliens out there, but if there are they need Jesus too."

It's a bit silly, but he was also a creationist. If he could be fine with aliens but not evolution, I imagine the same is true for most other religious people.

Like the other commenter, I would be genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on that fundamental difference.

I am by no means an AI expert, but my impressions is that AI sill needs to process each book and incorporate the new knowledge into its existing knowledge. Which at least from a surface level sounds a lot like what I do when I read a new book.

The fact that each AI is effectively a non-sapient slave of a person or corporation really doesn't change my opinion.

Have you ever had a reason to read much in a new or developing sub-genre? As a fan of LitRPG, a genre that virtually didn't exist 10 years ago, I can tell you with some certainty that everything is a derivative work of something. It is amazing how as soon as one author pulls in and idea from another genre, the next 30 novels that come out will have some variation of the same idea, and the 300 that follow it will each have variations of those.

Grand Qanon Party - aka Trumplicans

Agreed. Personally, I think it is because we don't bother to really teach the Constitution in schools. We summarize the Bill of Rights, read the first line or to of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and then pretend students understand it.

I had to re-read it a few times, but I think they are trying to say if the other 97% is divided into 30 categories they will all be about 3% also. The implication being that every percent counts.

Options are definitely nice for those technical enough to understand and use them.

Though personally I am keeping an eye on Linux devices for my next upgrade.

Do I not want USB-C (for some weird reason)?

This is probably temporary until it is time to move past USB-C. Which will be a slower and more difficult process now that there are laws in place requiring it.

Personally, I would like to see miniaturization become the the trend again.

I haven't been interested in a new release since phablets became the standard. I don't need my phone to replace my PC. It just needs to be able to run a web-search in a pinch.

I was really hoping the Apple Watch was going to be the next leap forward, but they were very careful about making sure most people didn't replace their phones with them.

Many of them are professional politicians that support their families with those paychecks. It is one thing to convince someone to take an extremist route when it keeps the money flowing, it is another thing altogether when that same action would leave them jobless.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

― Upton Sinclair

Wait, tell me again why it is so important to not pass a budget?

You have a bigger problem with the slowly dying Microsoft pushing Bing on Windows than the market leading Alphabet pushing Google on Android?

Even if you want to look at browsers, the Chromebooks are even more integrated with Chrome than Edge on Windows.

They should be the same problem, but if one was worse based on the impact, then it should almost certainly be Google/Chrome.

Same here.

I have an uncle who was killed due to an article he was doing research for. Sadly, he ended up in a coma and then someone came back to finish the job. It had a large impact on my mother and her siblings, though it was a few years before I was born. I had always wondered how much of it was an exaggeration until a couple years ago when we found an article saying basically the same things the aunts and uncles always had.

Do you mean a clear racial bias in getting elected? Or do you mean that having the wrong skin color or genitals somehow makes you more or less capable of making good decisions?

Edit: Wrote this whole wall of text about Mexico being conquered. Posted. Then came back to check if I had answered your question correctly. Realized you weren't even talking about Mexico being conquered. Meh... I am leaving it.

It doesn't matter if Mexico is ripe for conquering. There is no appetite for conquering Mexico by any major portion of the US. The reasons are many and complex, but I can think of six major ones off the top of my head.

First, the general perception of most Americans is that there isn't much of interest in Mexico except pretty beaches, cheap drinks, and Aztec/Mayan architecture. All of which are already currently accessible to Americans.

Second, it would be expensive, there are a lot of aspects of Mexico that would need complete overhaul to begin to match US regulations and expectations. Many existing states would demand the Federal government pay to bring them up to code, the expense of which would end up being footed by the American people.

2.1: The expense couldn't even be passed on to the Mexican states through taxes since they would almost certainly be brought in as territories. US territories and their populations have no voting power in the federal government but also have no Federal taxes because of our history with Britain. "Taxation without representation" and all that. More on Territories in the third segment.

2.2: Cleaning up the cartels would be a huge expensive mess under the American legal system and would like cause even more oppressive laws to be implemented to the detriment of current US citizens.

Third, voting and politics, Mexico's 31 states would have to be added into the US in some fashion. Even if they started as territories, the population of many of them are too great to leave them in that status quo for long. Bringing in new states would be a huge issue and quite possible would help push us to civil war, like last time we added a bunch of states. Pre-Civil War new states were added in pairs; one slave state, one free state. Something like that would need to happen again. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would allow a new state to be brought in that gained the other side a majority.

Fourth, the people of Mexico are pretty different demographically from most of the US, not just in culture, language, and skin color, but also in the variety of religion or non-religion practiced. (This was the largest paragraph but it was getting way into the weeds so I pared it down.)

Fifth, would have to be an open travel, outsider, racism, etc issue. Whatever you want to call it, the Supreme Court has upheld the right of any American to move to any other part of America freely and many of the newly joined citizens would want to utilize it. There is a clear majority (currently) of Americans that think we have an issues with too many immigrants. Even people who are vehemently against Trump's wall may support decreasing immigration. Absorbing Mexico would be throwing open the flood-gates in the eyes of those who want to slow immigration down.

Sixth, American relations with the International community. Any way you spin it, an offensive war to conquer more territory would be viewed poorly by our allies, and used as justification to increase expansionism by our adversaries. Most Americans have no stomach for continuing to be viewed as colonial, or the consequences of such an action, even if we wouldn't mind some of the benefits.

Glad you enjoyed the edit. I am doubly glad someone actually read all that, even though it was mostly irrelevant. 🙃

There wasn’t a threat or posturing like a bar fight. There needs to be some actual positive evidence to be able to claim you fear for your life.

You don't need to fear for your life just your safety. Those guys cornered him up against the counter and then followed him when he tried to get away, despite repeated requests to stop.

Seems to me that people are just happy about the annoying guy getting shot for shitty behavior, and they’ll rationalize it however needed.

There are plenty in this post that would take that stance. However, I am not one of them, and nothing in my comments indicates otherwise.

The driver owning a gun is not a danger to random members of society. His actions clearly indicate he is willing to deescalate the situation and try to walk away before defending himself. Even when he did fire, he didn't unload the chamber at the aggressor and his friend, he fired a single round while continuing to try and leave. It was the bare minimum for the weapon he had available.

At any point, the self-described "Goon" could have ended this hostile interaction by just standing still.

I created my lemmy.world account first, but I like the site name for sh.itjust.works so I have one there too.

Thank you for the response. I am not sure I agree with your exact stance, but you make several compelling points along the way.

Using the Fair Use doctrine is definitely a good way to narrow down where the dividing line is. I think we can easily agree that making a GRRM specific AI to make derivative, non-parody, commercial works would definitely be on the wrong side of the line.

When I was picturing the bots, I was picturing something more along the lines of AI bots that had consumed all human literary works, or at the very least all modern English literary works.

ChatGPT write me a short story where the Main Character is a Magical Golem that follows the Three Laws of Isaac Asimov. It should be written in the style of a Greek Tragedy but set in Feudal Japan. The Main Character should be able to gain in magical power until he eventually attempts to break into the Heavens. There should be gods trying to interfere in his ascension but not in ways the MC cannot resolve. Base the gods off of archetypes from Norse Mythology, but name them after characters from GRRM's game of thrones based on similar personality types.

Such a work would both be wholly derivative and yet wholly unique. Despite swiping GRRM's unique names this work should be perfectly fine in my mind. Edit: Even if it was commercialized.

More than just, I have accounts on 3 of those 10.

I am with the authors more like 80% here.

Authors read each others works and are influenced by them and we don't expect them to go back and buy special licenses for each work that might have influenced their current novels. Art as much as any field stands on the shoulders of mice and giants alike. Pretending that AI language models shouldn't "read" as many novels as possible to assist their own growth is a preposterous idea.

Should they have to buy a copy of the book like everyone else? Sure. Should they get bent over without lube by publishing companies? Well that is a bit more complex.

In my opinion there is no "right" answer right now. We as a society need to decide what we are okay with.

Furthermore, there are a lot of really good books out there that would be truly great "except". Except what? That depends. Maybe it has annoying side characters, or maybe it is littered with plot holes, maybe there are outdated social norms that distract from the real point of the book, or maybe the fact that not one character in the book looks or talks like you and your friends.

It would be wonderful if we could use AI to adjust or even personalize those books.

Can you imagine a Harry Potter that isn't just translated into other languages, but has each of the characters localized as well. Neither Harry Potter being British nor being male is fundamental to the story. There is no reason the French, Aria Potter couldn't save the world through the power of her mother's love, and with the help of her friends. Well except the fact that it would likely make JKR lose her mind, since she doesn't even tolerate fan fiction.

Is it possible to make these changes now, sure? It just isn't really practical for even really big name authors, much someone who only sells a few thousand copies of each book.

You know that his life wasn't in danger because you know it was a prank. The defender here did not have the benefit of that knowledge.

When someone nearly a foot taller with 50 more pounds of muscle gets in your face and starts accusing you of thinking about their private parts, then you get to decide if self-defense is necessary. The defender tried to get away from the aggressor multiple times and told him to stop multiple times, but the aggressor obviously kept engaging.

Do you think he should have waited until the giant started punching or kicking him before he decided to draw his weapon? Should he have tried to punch the giant instead of using the weapon he has? Do you think you could outrun someone taller and in better shape than you are?

If the defender had multiple self-defense options he might have chosen another, but all of this is arm-chair quarterbacking. We weren't there and the person that was chose the only real defense option they had.

This situation is entirely the Goon's fault. He should be the one facing charges. While it might be reasonable to recommend a self-defense course for the victim, my understanding is that he already followed good self-defense principles.

Edit: Also, since no one else is saying it, I will. If the victim happened to have been gay, the aggressor probably would have been charged with a hate crime. The goon was clearly accusing him of it.