I miss a slide out landscape keyboard - but even Swype I feel like has gotten worse with time. I just can’t shake the feeling when I use it that I spend half my time or more deleting and trying again to get the words I want.

Smartphones. I used to have a Droid 4 with the slide out landscape keyboard, and that was peak mobile computing. I don’t care if Swype is better than it used to be, it’s no replacement for physical buttons - whenever I type anything more than a couple words long on my phone I spend like half the time deleting and retrying when it guesses the wrong word. Never had that problem typing with my thumbs.

Also, physical buttons make emulation doable on a phone in a way that on screen buttons and keyboards do not. Back when I had a physical keyboard I played games on my phone all the goddamn time - now I basically only use it as a web browser, because any other use case is painful in comparison.

I’m glad some qwerty phones are making a comeback, but they’re all in the portrait orientation which has always felt way too cramped to me. A Droid 4 with a modern screen/battery/processor would be my dream device.

As we all know, getting more militantly progressive because you see the repeated failures of the liberal worldview is exactly the same as getting more conservative because you own more property 🤡

True. I didn’t become a commie until I was almost thirty, young me was so idealistic.

tHeSe MeN wErE vIoLeNt TyRaNtS

The kulaks and the monarchists and the nazi collaboraters deserved it. Communists have been vindicated by history every single time.

I won’t deny that people can do multiple things at once, I just don’t agree with the premise that voting matters in the current paradigm.

If you had enough people to do the thing, then you would be able to protect members of the group at a local level while national orgs realign and/or get replaced.

But nobody has a large enough group of people to do the thing. In the absence of a large enough group of people to do the thing, voting is a purely personal decision that will not effect the outcome.

As I’ve said elsewhere, to fix it from within the system itself you would need a bloc of people willing to punish one of the parties for moving right by withholding their votes and their donations. To fix it from without the system is also possible, but would require some “authoritarianism” in the form of people with guns. Anything else is just people flailing around ineffectually and getting mad at others who aren’t flailing in the ineffectual way that they prefer.

Either way you’ve got the same problem: getting a large enough group of people together who are willing to do the thing. Socialists of all stripes have been trying to crack that egg for over a hundred years and the only ones who had any success were the ones that managed to get the peasants on their side because peasants have a certain amount of class consciousness that proles don’t.

If choosing red or blue doesn’t work, and choosing another option also doesn’t work, then what good does feeling self righteous about your decision to pick one over the other do? Unless you’re suggesting that the shitty reality of our situation is that we’re fucked and nothing will work at all no matter what - which is a level of defeatism that I don’t think is very helpful either.

Perhaps if both sides were not so awful, people wouldn’t feel compelled to meme about them.

Lemmitors: You don’t understand! I’m not voting for Slightly More Rotting Corpse, I’m voting for the Slightly More Rotting Corpse administration. Yes it’s true that both of them support nuclear warfare along the Mexican border, but Rotting Corpse would be dropping more nukes with higher frequency on the climate refugees so we have to vote for the lesser evil.

the engine’s running and the wheels are attached, these extra bolts probably aren’t important.

Borat sucked and its aged to be even worse.

First time I saw this movie I didn’t get it. On rewatch I liked it, and over the years I feel like I’ve come to appreciate it more and more. Dunno what it is about it, I don’t really enjoy any other movies like it.

Why would I want my prompt to be private if I don’t want to use the result in some malicious way

Do you think that the only thing people use AI for is making deepfakes and CSAM? AFAIK the most common use is generating porn. Now, I don’t think generating regular porn is “malicious”, but I certainly understand why most people (self included) want to keep what they generate private.

I suppose you would also be fine with every one of your google searches being in a database? Every video you’ve ever watched, even the ones in private browser tabs?

introducing the AI transparency act, which requires every generative prompt to be registered in a government database

How many times can I say “social context” before you grok it? There’s a difference between a picture taken by a doctor for medical reasons and one taken by a pedo as CSAM. If doctors and parents are being nailed to the cross for totally legitimate images then that strikes me as evidence that the law is too rigid and needs more flexibility, not the other way around.

Who will be the judge?

The same people that should judge every criminal proceeding. Of course it’s not going to be perfect, but this is a case of not letting perfect be the enemy of good. Allowing generated or drawn images of sexualized children to exist has external costs to society in the form of normalizing the concept.

The argument that making generated or drawn CSAM illegal is bad because the feds might plant such images on an activist is incoherent. If you’re worried about that, why not worry that they’ll plant actual CSAM on your computer?

there cannot be developed a scale or spectrum to judge where the fake stops and real starts

Ah, but my definition didn’t at all rely on whether or not the images were “real” or “fake”, did it? An image is not merely an arrangement of pixels in a jpeg, you understand - an image has a social context that tells us what it is and why it was created. It doesn’t matter if there were real actors or not, if it’s an image of a child and it’s being sexualized, it should be considered CSAM.

And yes I understand that that will always be a subjective judgement with a grey area, but not every law needs to have a perfectly defined line where the legal becomes the illegal. A justice system should not be a computer program that simply runs the numbers and delivers an output.