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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think there’s nearly as many as you think. It’s a perception bias, the few that there are stick out a lot because they are hilariously stupid so you read about them a lot and it seems common.

Keep in mind that in the US, about half the households are armed. And the half that own guns own enough guns to arm the other half. There’s more guns than people in this country. If they’re truly was a significant overlap between very stupid people and gun ownership, the nation would be like a roadrunner cartoon with Yosemite Sam type a shootouts and people firing into the air on every street corner. That is seriously not the case.

They generally are.
Problem is there is a tiny little overlap in the middle of that Venn diagram, and that tiny overlap seems to be responsible for a great deal of problems.

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.

A stupid (as in, not intelligent) analogy.

Bomb laws don’t stop bombers. You CAN buy hardware store ingredients and make a bomb. Most people don’t do such things.

The point of the bomb law is so when they get a tip and raid someone’s house and find a few bricks of C4 wrapped in nails with a clock attached, they have something to arrest him for rather than saying ‘we have to wait until you use this to hurt people’.

But that’s also because that bomb has very few legitimate uses. There aren’t neighborhood bomb ranges where people go to compete and practice. You can’t use a bomb to hunt or protect yourself from 4-legged predators when in the woods. There aren’t bombing tournaments. You can’t use a bomb in self-defense or to protect your home or family. There ARE legitimate uses for bombs in mining, agriculture, industry, etc but those are uncommon and thus highly regulated.

A gun has many legitimate uses, and tens or hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans use guns legally every day. Neighborhood gun ranges host classes, practice sessions, and competitions / tournaments. Guns are used for hunting and defense from predators in the woods. A gun can defend your home and family from intruders. And a small concealed pistol can be used to defend against street crime.

That was for Beeper Mini which was an attempt at imessage on android.
I don’t think the new version runs the homeserver on the phone; with the new version you can still participate in federated chats and use the desktop client so I don’t think it majorly changed in that way.