That's what they're trying to claim, yes.

It's not a flawless argument, however. At it's broadest, a swap could basically refer to any financial transaction whatsoever. Courts generally frown on such promiscuous definitions, however, and the CFTC and SEC have both issued several clarifications on how they interpret that - For example, they don't consider insurance as a swap, even though by any reasonable interpretation insurance is absolutely a form of swap, and the way swaps are used in practice (prior to this gambling nonsense) is almost indistinguishable from a type of insurance.

That said, Minnesota and New York have a serious uphill battle ahead. Feds just love throwing around the "supremacy" clause, and rarely care whether or not their rules make the least bit of sense. NY does have a pocket ace, though, in that both Kalshi and Polymarket are both based in NYC; they may not be able to force the CFTC to play nice, but they can make life hell for both companies if they so choose.

You mentioned whatever a human policeman can see and memorize. That's the difference.
If all policemen had a photographic autobiographical memory, eyelids which never closed, required no sleep, were connected to a distributed consciousness which never forgot anything they ever saw and allowed them to collaborate across vast distances, and furthermore could be inexpensively placed at every intersection... I'm confident the founders would have outlawed them.

It would still be encrypted at rest. This was someone opportunistically walking off with a milk-crate full of hard drives, not a sophisticated attack on their network.

Of course, you could still be right - I've grown numb to how often people fail to communicate sensitive information over alternative secure channels. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see the instructions, including the password, written on a post-it note slapped right on the drive itself.

"Persons" means not tracking and logging everyone that walks by via facial rec. "Papers" refers to your identifying documents - Like your license plate or IMEA. "Effects" refers to your possessions, explicitly including mobile ones, like say a car or phone. Every aspect of Flock's business model violates the 4th amendment...

...That said, you're not wrong because Flock is a private company and we Americans are apparently dumb enough not to make the connection between corporate mass surveillance for the government's benefit, with mass surveillance by the government itself.

How is a couple years of apprenticeship where you are paid any worse than 4 years of college plus debt?

Maybe a second responsible party should examine everything before something is published? This is how it works in many places.

I don't understand your problem with the way apprenticeship is done. It's always been like this! Even in IT.

What the hell is that? Is that a salesman in PC-speak?

The fact we've all gotten used to workarounds for laptops' abysmal battery life isn't a palliating factor, it's a condemnation.

The weird part is that main value of youtube premium is ad free everywhere with no real hassle.

And instead of just offering people "cheap ad free tier", they instead bundle more and more crap with it and keep increasing the price, while waging long term war on ad blockers.

The obvious question is: "If these claims are true, what was his legal defense doing?"

It's literally the job of defense lawyer to bring up all those problems in court. That's why you get one appointed to you in anglo nations if you can't afford one. And if case was really as bad as this claim is, even a shit tier public defender should've been able to get it tossed, since his client has obvious defense of "this is not me".

If you need a permit from the government to criticize the government...

The limiting factor for top models is primarily hardware.

You're right that you're not going to get Kimi K3 performance, requiring roughly 600GB of VRAM to run, from a small number of 24GB consumer GPUs. You're also not going to get closed-top-model performance, because you simply don't have any way to get the weights.

If we're talking about K2.7, Deepseek R1 Distilled, Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.2 though - All of which can be run locally -The question really becomes what you expect from them. They're all strong models that know more than we (individually) do about 99% of topics. A "high-school level education" is more than enough for most humans to get by in the world. Now imagine a "high-school level" understanding across every topic. It's not doing calculus, but it can tell you what patterns to use. It's not writing Shakespeare, but it can likely recite most of his works to you from memory. It's not going to come up with a clean-room reimplementation of Windows 11, but it can check your syntax and tell you the function prototypes of every publicly-available library in every programming language without breaking a sweat.

More importantly, to the GP's point - Is a model "smart" enough to understand you're trying to abuse it necessarily better than one that just carries out your orders successfully? Case in point, lately I've found Gemini's new "watcher" blocks a good 90% of my totally legit questions before the question ever makes it to the real model. Umm... No thanks? The best AI is the one that works, not the one that gives the deepest philosophical reason for saying no.

His podcast Better Offline is squarely targeted at people who are very much online. Indeed his entire gig is the epitome of online living.

If Ed Zitron really felt better offline, he wouldn't be making a living off of a podcast and constant AI bashing.

Not that I necessarily disagree with him though... It's just that the messenger doesn't really befit the message.

Very much so! Unfortunately, they're still vaporware.

Or more accurately, I'd very much like a $10k BYD, but Detroit has bought DC wholesale to block any meaningful competition for Ford's Coal Roller 150.