Remember that the burden is on them to show it. But the reality is that when they bring up irrelevant shit like that and try to say that your issue isn’t covered under warranty, it will be on you to “remind” them of that burden, and tell them that what they are trying to do is absolutely fucking illegal under Magnusson-Moss.

It is good and reasonable to be continually skeptical of the people and organizations we get involved with, and I appreciate your warning and looking out for bad organizations.

On the other hand, my experience in politics leads me to believe that if you sit around waiting for the perfect allies, you will usually be waiting alone for a very long time.

Looking at this group, it looks like in my state (Utah) they have been key support for a couple of well respected local nonprofits that have done great work on RCV and anti gerrymandering. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing to me.

I think it’s a mistake generally to view Republicans as the enemy. Even if they are in a leadership role like in the RNC. For example, in Utah, nothing gets done without Republican approval. So saying “I won’t work with you because you’re Republican” here is a losing strategy to make changes. And we now have the beginnings of progress on RCV.

So I think we should continue to be vigilant and watch out for the first signs that people are acting in bad faith. But if we want our ideas to be popular, we are going to need to learn to (without compromising our own values) build a bigger tent.

Love this album.

“911 please help I’m dying”

*message disappears because you have admin rights

Rose was secretly in bed with the deep state.

Awhile back I was at an event where I happened to sit next to a Moms for Liberty chapter leader, and she turned to me and uttered the most insane conspiracy theory I’d ever heard about how “they” deliberately sunk the Titanic because everyone who opposed the creation of the fed was on board.

Of course it’s Mike Lee.

Fuck Mike Lee.

“Here’s muh pocket constitution” Mike Lee.

We are sick of him here in Utah and made a serious effort to get an independent in Congress instead, but fell about 10 points short :(

I was there in 2017 or 2018 and set up a Shadowsocks server before I went with whatever the latest mitigations were that I could find at the time. My server wasn’t completely blocked, but ended up getting throttled to hell after a few days.

Why not? I thought fivethirtyeight helped me get a handle on the political odds in 2020 and 2022.

Rail also has a sort of hidden economic benefit in that once you overcome the network effect, it boosts economics on a larger scale. Some people in China thought it was crazy for the government to build high speed rail at the speed and scale that they did, and that it would never compete with flights, etc. And yes, the line all the way out to Xinjiang is not profitable and subsidized by other lines. But the overall benefit to the Chinese economy by connecting all the major cities together can’t be underestimated.

Now that it’s happening, I don’t quite know how to feel.

I certainly don’t feel sorry for Tiktok though.

Absolutely nothing. But imagine you’re working with some people and everyone’s constantly posting porn in the group chat. You’re just trying to kind of exist and get your work done. You might start to feel pretty uncomfortable with that culture.

There’s definitely a line between sex positivity, and including other people without their clear consent.

But the idea isn’t to keep anyone from seeing it. The idea is simply for a lusty image not to be used in academic papers (probably also better that it’s not used in college classes too).

I love pictures of scantily clad women more than almost anyone. But even I can agree that the Lena image sends the wrong message to women joining the field.

Yeah wireguard is really nice, but it drains my battery pretty quick on Android.

Yeah, we were shocked. We’d ask some basic questions from their resume like “which tool do you prefer, a or b and why?” Mostly just trying to coax out some jargon that you’d really only know if you actually ever used the tool. We would get a long pause and then a wordy response basically just summarizing things. It sounded exactly like how chatgpt would respond.

I’ve seen this on the hiring side as well, with applicants giving responses directly from chatgpt.

Soon hiring will just be LLM talking to LLM.

Yeah but Google started putting these home screen ads on Nvidia shield also.

Not super up to date with that though because the second they did I switched to a custom launcher.

Legally they can’t force you to show your receipt. But refusing to show it could constitute probable cause for employees to detain you while they sort things out(shopkeeper’s privilege). Detaining you could constitute false imprisonment, though Colorado courts recently ruled Walmart not liable in that regard. The store could also choose to ban you.

ACLU v Ashcroft and ACLU v Reno are really interesting to read, if you haven’t already.

Part of the conclusion of the court at that time was (at least regarding the CDA):

In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve

In ACLU vs. Ashcroft, the court ruled that less restrictive measures like Internet filters should be used, rather than the law in question (COPA).

I kind of think an argument exists that a system like what you mentioned with cryptographic keys could be a “less restrictive measures” given today’s technology. But I think we should still be careful, and keep in mind that nearly all pornography (with the exception of obscenity – a very narrowly defined category) is speech that enjoys strong protections under the First Amendment. So any decisions around restricting this free speech, regardless of our good intentions in protecting our children, can have unintended negative consequences around first amendment speech in general.

I assume the goal is not actually to keep kids from watching porn but rather to have a chilling effect on it

Probably a safe assumption. It’s difficult to tend towards other conclusions when the state of Utah has declared pornography a public health crisis, for example. Children are often just a means to an end in laws and public conversation. But don’t forget that most of these kinds of “protect the children” laws are often rooted in some sort of good intentions, so I can’t completely ascribe malice to the actions of these lawmakers. Evil is often wrapped in good intentions.

By the way, part of the Free Speech Coalition’s arguments in Utah was around the impossibility of actually implementing age verification as no system actually exists in Utah to enforce that. Utah’s law essentially ducks the first amendment by outsourcing enforcement to private action rather than government action. Scary stuff.