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Terr

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  • Mar 21, 2025 @ 12:47am

    I worry less about evidence exposed to an adversarial trial and more about how one piece of evidence will create a false pretext to search for more, which probably won't be suppressed since the police will nudge-nudge-wink-wink be acting "in good faith." There's also how faked evidence could be cited to pressure someone into a plea deal, but police in the US are already allowed to tell giant lies if it means securing a confession.

  • Mar 21, 2025 @ 12:44am

    Fraudulently fabricate probable cause... with a computer!

    Soon: The software is going to hallucinate something which "justifies" an arrest, search, or warrant, and then police are going to claim they are in the clear since it was "in good faith". As it gets trained on similar content, it will do so more and more often, and police will be more-and-more pleased with the "mistakes" in their favor.

  • Mar 21, 2025 @ 12:04am

    Also, it's a fictional character in fictional story

    To make it even worse, what we're really seeing is part of a hidden puppet-play around a fictional "AI" character, like:

    AcmeBot is very helpful robot that never swears. One day AcmeBotwas told about an article, which said X. When asked to summarize, the bot answered:
    Then that cut-off-at-the-end document is passed to an algorithm which has no ego and doesn't know its own name, which adds more words based on the kinds of documents it has seen before. The AcmeBot character is "smart" or "careful" or "polite" in the same way that a character named Santa Claus is "kind" or "immortal", it doesn't mean the algorithm is any of those things.

  • Mar 20, 2025 @ 11:41pm

    "What views are those?"

    And Meigs shits on it because “conservative views” (you know the ones…) aren’t gaining a foothold at Bluesky.
    To reproduce what I think is the source, for anyone who isn't familiar with it but will probably recognize the phenomenon:
    Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? Con: LOL no...no not those views Me: So....deregulation? Con: Haha no not those views either Me: Which views, exactly? Con: Oh, you know the ones

  • Mar 15, 2025 @ 11:41pm

    Both you and the other AC need to read more carefully:

    Read it again: The argument here is also not that impeachment articles need to be formally introduced yet. The object is to get to the point where they viably can. Even just getting articles drafted to be displayed and discussed is an important start
    The point is to get a draft out for the court of public opinion. That is not the same as getting the House of Representatives to vote and pass them, but it is a necessary prior step.

  • Feb 15, 2025 @ 02:48pm

    Stupid things don't always fail

    Don't overestimate villains of the past just because they had spiffy uniforms. Internally the Nazi was a shitshow, and their worst atrocities were presaged by a lot of really stupid unworkable unscalable ideas. For example, a plan to deport their "undesirables" to a conquered island territory, where they would exist in extraterritorial legal limbo.

  • Nov 06, 2024 @ 10:10pm

    Alternately, to consider how "metadata" would have led to the hanging of many heroes of the American revolution, in the form of a fictitious report to the British monarchy: Using Metadata to find Paul Revere

  • Aug 09, 2024 @ 02:35pm

    Adults do care about age verification.
    any drop in usage must have come from adults “caring” about verification.
    Is that a deliberate strawman, or a failure of reading-comprehension? No, these are not the same:
    1. Adults do care about keeping the under-aged from seeing certain content.
    2. Adults will personally boycott any site that doesn't have age-verification measures.

  • Aug 09, 2024 @ 02:29pm

    “Today’s filtering software is far more effective than what was available twenty years ago”
    This claim is at odds with the fact that children are seeing far pornographic content
    Not really, both can be true at the same time. Filtering software is better, but the real barrier used to be sites demanding payment rather than advertising models. Plus most kids couldn't drag the family desktop into their bedroom, etc.

  • Aug 09, 2024 @ 02:25pm

    Age verification isn't a solvable problem[,] Not in the real world, anyway.
    The reverse, really: It's solvable in the physical world but not digitally. The Least Bad solution is for sites and services to return metadata so that real-world devices (purchased and observed by real-world parents) can throw up a parental-lock screen. It's not perfect, but it avoids a giant screwy panopticon and Age Police, and fairly puts most of the implementation-costs down onto the same people who are insisting something be implemented.

  • Jul 22, 2024 @ 11:58am

    To this day I still reference The Dead Alewives' D&D moral panic skit from 1999: "I cast magic-missile at the darkness!"

  • Jul 20, 2024 @ 08:30pm

    Exactly, hypocrisy--and getting away with crimes--is a demonstration of power, and power is both the governing principle and their principle of government.

    'The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
    -- 1984 by George Orwell