Prohibition was repealed.

I don't disagree. Personally I think the Federal government got too powerful after the civil war & we really don't even have the same type of government that the founders envisioned.

I'd be somewhat in favor of an Article 5 convention so long as any changes had to be subject to a vote like the President is elected. The Electoral Collage system is absolutely brilliant & gives the individual vote maximum power because a handful of voters can change the outcome of an entire election. If people really want something they need to get out and vote. If you stay home you can't complain if the other side doesn't.

Anyway, good luck to us all.

Well you're not wrong. Most people forget the 9th & 10th amendments and what they actually say.

9. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
        - Basically saying, "just because we listed a few specific Rights here, that doesn't mean those are the only ones The People have."

10. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
        - The Federal Government is not permitted to just assume new powers because we didn't specifically restrict it here. If it's not specifically listed in this document the government cannot do it.

How far afield of these rules has the Federal strayed? How much longer will The People tolerate it?

Wait, what?

The Constitution is a restriction on the powers of the Federal Government, not on Anthropic. The Federal Government does have the ability to "regulate commerce" under what is called the Commerce Clause in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3.

I'm not sure what particular law(s) c/would apply here - if any - however I'm certain various courts might have to render a judgement.

You can. With a browser plugin called "Short Stop".

10 years using Duolingo, 4 years in Diamond League, and earlier this month I just had enough of the low-quality AI bullshit.

Out. Done. Gone. Waste of my time, every damn day.

The decline in quality and accuracy was just too much. As an English speaker learning a handful of other languages and concentrating on two, it was interesting to me that the first real noticeable patterns of errors and general slop were actually on the English side. Increasingly obtuse questions or statements, ok fine, I will spit those back in French or Spanish with good accuracy. I don't have any issue whatever with the occasionally-dark humor or the gender related topics that might push others' hot buttons, and I appreciate the occasional foray into curious stories and situations. But... over the past year there has been an increasing level of nonsensical AI-generated questions, erroneous answers accepted, multiple correct answers, etc etc... and it's obvious that no actual native speaker looked at a lot of the new content -- either from the native or foreign perspective. A couple years ago there was an increasing level of having to hit the button for "You should have accepted my answer." But for the past year, it's become a daily occurrence to have to hit the button for "You shouldn't have accepted my answer." The latter is a clear indication of AI slop and drift in the language models, and lack of QA. Real human QA is not optional, and Duo has apparently dispensed with it entirely. The result is gameified garbled nonsense. Playing the game was fun for a while (seriously, still in Diamond league for more than four years straight), but the goal is language learning not to compete with other stupid little games on my device. Feh. Done. Cancelled my subscription, et je vais dépenser cet hundred bucks de mon argent pour un spritz et une charcuterie chaque après-midi pour le reste de l'été.

Castillo de San Marcos - Built at Sea Level in 1672.

Castillo de San Marcos - Still at Sea Level in 2025.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

How is this of any significance to humanity? Seems like a weird way to waste both time and money.

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

Now all my crappy code will crash much faster. ;)

I made my chat font Comic Sans because I think it's funny that the "Supreme Allied Linux Commander" for our organization (me) uses Comic Sans on Skype For Business. Keeps 'em on their toes.

This is the exact same method by which Grubhub/Doordash/Postmates/etc get a large portion of their business: by getting their phone number and/or spoofed site listed as a search result or even in the google maps listing for a site nearest the searcher's location.
Of course Google won't "fix" the problem; it's a source of advertising revenue, and general boost to user engagement.

But Brave Browser has no problem blocking them.

The point of advertising is to generate demand (want). The more you can influence people to want your product, the more of your product you're going to sell.