I've seen people make that argument before, that there is no difference. You can make that argument if you want, but if you can't provide a viable candidate then you're not helping anything.

Let me be extra direct here. I have never seen a candidate in a race I could vote in that I agreed with 100%. Frankly anytime I meet someone who tells me they agree with a politician 100% of the time I tend to want to tell them they need their head examined (unless they are themselves a politician, in which case doubly so). Even politicians like Bernie Sanders I don't agree with 100% of the time.

Complaining about the rules is not productive. We've seen what the SCOTUS will do about such arguments, we can't get help from them either. The only way to advance is to support someone who will actually do something useful. Pretending that they all do the same shit doesn't help either; there are meaningful platform differences. Just because Drumpf has held every position on every issue doesn't mean he doesn't stand for anything, either - he's actually followed through on some of his (very worst) initial promises.

I don't think so. I think this is another step in the enshitification process of offering you up to advertisers as a hog-tied roast on a silver platter. You ARE the product they're selling. Apple and Microsoft will welcome this as a good and just means of protecting children and fully support every effort to force users to identify themselves and give the companies all that succulent personal information that they currently have to pretend they don't have. When ordered to hand out that information to every program and website, they will be able to claim they're just following the law. Once every ounce of privacy and anonymity is stripped away, your account will simply follow you around they will simply know everything you do because the OS tells them exactly who you are and you will not be able to log into a computer without verifying your identity.

And the children that are installing Linux sure as hell won't be restricted by any such law they could ever hope to conceive.

I mean, really, we should all be calling this what it is: The initial steps to forcing your OS to dox you. The "dox-yourself" laws. Internet ID. Anyone that ever pretended any of these laws were ever intended to to anything to "protect children" is selling you and obvious lie or has fallen for an obvious lie.

Given the reference list, I suspect not ChatGPT, but rather https://magisterium.com/

Your post history contradicts that. The correct statement is that you are against governments that are not run by your Lord and Savior. For you, the first rule that needs to go is the separation of church and state, you want to fuse the two forever together.

Don't pretend you wouldn't celebrate it as a great step forward if your Lord and Savior were the one promoting it, instead of the current leader.

Though ultimately, this could be an improvement for drivers and trucking companies. The logs truckers are legally required to keep and carry are a substantial burden. If the government can track it instead that could allow the drivers to spend more time actually driving and less time doing paperwork. You should be celebrating that as it means they have more time to do actual work.

Under strict supervision, yes. Unfortunately there is no supervision left as there are only two people working for slashdot and they both have real jobs in the outside world that pay the bills (Taco of course left years ago).

And don't ask about the unicode support they were working on 20 years ago...

Right now the contest is between fascists and cowards. The "independents" cannot compete with the way the system is set up. I'm sorry that is the case, but we all know it's true. Yes third parties can win governor's races and other such non-federal seats but they don't exist where national policy is made. You can go vote for your favorite third party candidate or for Mickey Fucking Mouse if you want. If that makes you feel better about yourself, great. It's marginally better than not voting at all, but only marginally.

Smart money is on a Lenin-style mausoleum for Trump with a body permanently preserved in a top-secret cocktail of preservatives. Not that he hasn't already begun that process with his diet...

Like . . come on.

So that leaves only $100k to pay everybody who had to babysit it

*gestures wildly at the corn industry*

Like the US doesnt have heavily subsidized industries?

I too wish to rage at how bad an argument the chinese room is.

Searle's Chinese Room is a 3-card monty con. There's a room with a man consulting a book. Slips with Chinese characters comes in, he consults the book following it's instructions, writes out the lines of the characters, and passes the slips out, which is a legitimate conversation in Chinese. He argues the room on the whole understands Chinese, but the man in the room does not. And so AI is fake or some bullshit. This is a crock. The book is magic and obviously conscious and sentient. Such a book would have more pages than there atoms in the universe. That's the trick Searle pulls. In the original paper he's even dodgy about if it's a book or a filing cabinet. The man, the room? Who gives a fuck? You've got a magic book that can talk to you!

INSTEAD, let us imagine the same thought-experiment, except this time instead of a magical book, there's a box with a small child from Guangdong inside. This is the Mandarin Room. Now, nothing here is any different than Searle's bullshit concerning the room and the man. 100% identical on their end. The child tells the man what strokes to make on the paper. ooooo aaaaaah Does the man know mandarin or not? Let's debate this for 40 years! But it's all bullshit because the source of intelligence and the location of where the knowledge about mandarin language resides is obvious and definite. And talking about the room as a whole is a pointless waste of philosophical drivel.

Searl damaged the AI industry with this second only to that Perceptetron book that supposedly proved neural nets could accomplish much. We could have had TensorFlow in the 70's!