It’s also worth stressing that German states are still far less powerful and less independent than American states (there’s no equivalent to the national guard, for example, and legislative powers are also far more limited beyond education) despite being literally conceived to prevent a Fascist government from taking over.

The National Guard is a major threat to US stability right now, because it has no legal hurdles to overcome in being deployed internally, and the Federal government can call up any state’s units for federal use, even overriding the state governors. Trump has already floated using NG units to assist ICE in deportations in Blue states.

This is also not hypothetical. In 2020 Trump used Natl. guard troops against the wishes of the DC city government, from another state, for policing actions, which is supposed to violate the Posse Commitatus Act, but did an end-run around this by saying they weren’t really federalized. Legal scholars have been objecting ever since, but that’s the precedent now. The author tries to pretend otherwise by rationalizing DC as an unusual edge cases, but the DC government specifically opposed the NG deployment, and was ignored, and now the president is legally immune for any “presidential acts” for term 2.

tl;dr the National Guard has created a legal gray area where the President can order troops into unwilling states, including for policing actions that were supposed to be explicitly prohibited, and maybe not violate the Constitution. Since it’s not 100% clear-cut, no Blue state is going to risk deploying their NG forces or LEOs against them, since it could (literally) be ruled as treason, especially with our SCOTUS.

I don’t know German law around deploying the military internally, but from a cursory glance online it appears to require parliamentary approval and be highly restricted in it’s activities, and never seems to allow for simple policing actions. US Natl. Guard bypasses congress entirely in its current incarnation, and appears unlikely to be restricted by the courts.

That’s a feature, but sadly many don’t realize that

Zuckerberg is just cynically following the political winds to avoid Trump going after Meta at Elmo’s behest. He doesn’t care any way about anything other than getting and keeping (not) his money. The second Democrats control all 3 branches, if that ever happens again, he’ll make another 180. Don’t give him the credit of saying these are his true, “mask off” morals or beliefs; he has no morals or beliefs.

Starting into the article, I got the impression that it was heading for a “centralization ultimately better” argument, so I’m glad it concludes on decentralization and federation’s advantages.

There are no issues that exist on federated and distributed channels as individual nodes that don’t also exist on centralized ones, differences only emerge when you try to treat or exercise control over distributed systems as a group. Facebook is completely centralized, but they still have to deal with third party content making its way onto their platform via bots, API posts, integrations, ads, etc. The big difference is that with a centralized platform, you have a Single Point of Failure, and that’s bad all-around.

There is literally no advantage to a centralized platform that I can think of (though I’m sure that people less opposed to authority/ hierarchy would disagree).

Wasn’t part of the point that the mindset necessary to create Iron Man would inevitably lead to Ultron?

Automation to increase power (productivity) beyond what humans alone could do -> Iron Man -> Cutting out humans once they are the chokepoint/ limiter in power (productivity) -> Ultron

Companies want automation because they don’t want human limits on productivity to restrict their profits. That mindset is the problem. If we accept that mindset as a valid business operating model, it will never not lead to wanting to remove humans as much as possible.

Turns out the Luddites were right, and the company-owned factory automation was a scheme to dilute worker pay and value. That we’re now fighting not to have workers cut out of the equation entirely kind of proves that it was in fact a slope we’ve slipped down.

9 hours a day, 9 days a week, 6 years a year

I love TypeMoon’s series, especially Fate and Kara no Kyoukai! I’m not sure if there’s enough specific interest to need a dedicated community, though. It can be difficult to introduce people to TypeMoon stuff, in my experience, if they’re not already into anime in general (or if they’ve already started to ‘grow out’ of a lot of it).

The person quoted in the OP who said

I’m probably being too hopeful

I’m probably being too hopeful

They are. Trump likes to make statements that he thinks sound “strong”, and that’s all that “and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone” was. He didn’t actually have any intention or meaning behind it, he’s just pandering to his faux-masculine base who like hearing threats made because threatening people is “manly” in their minds.

Something that’s interesting to me from a writing standpoint would be the difference between how playersexual characters are written from bisexual or pansexual ones. I’ve never seen a playersexual game have the characters actually acknowledge their openness to partners of different genders, they almost always just ignore the topic entirely. I’d be interested in seeing “playersexual” games actually put in the work to establish that in their world, everyone is open to romancing/banging everyone because that’s just how their world is; sort of a pan-normativity. Or other cool explanations! Most of the time it feels more like everyone is straight except towards you, which somehow still feels like a straight male power fantasy.

I didn’t really want to have to watch any more of this dude, but I wanted to make sure I gave him a fair shake… and hoo boy.

Just look at it for what it is, and realize it’s going to fail. And then plan accordingly.

This is just victim blaming, bruh. Even if a developer sees a project is going badly, it’s not like there are infinite jobs out there that need filling. Changing jobs is not fast and easy, some of the workers are likely on work visas that don’t allow them to just change employers, game companies aren’t all in the same small area such that it won’t require moving homes which is a huge expense, and there’s no guarantee that the project you’re moving to will be any better.

This is a failure of worker protection laws. Framing it as workers just needing to hustle smarter, while executives run companies and families into the ground, is peak corporate apologism.

He’s literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being “too woke” and tries to counter that.

If you don’t think that alt-right-lite is a huge problem in gaming circles, I don’t know what to tell you. Go play literally any multiplayer game and you will find plenty of gamers spouting anti-DEI/ anti-woke/ right-wing talking points in no time flat. And yes, they absolutely do avoid games based on it. And the problem with just ignoring this is that you’re ceding the narrative to them. Young white men have seen a shift rightwards precisely because alt-right-lite chuds like JonTron capture them via gaming-focused content, and then shift them over to politics-focused guys like Tate/ Shapiro/ etc. It’s a pipeline, that often starts in gaming spaces.

Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games “journalists” push on a daily basis.

He wasn’t talking about ideological soapboxes in reference to journalists, he was talking about developers. And he is using that as a direct euphemism for “DEI”/ “woke” content.

And yes, the comments are agreeing with him, that’s the point of a dogwhistle. There are a bunch of comments being anti-diversity/ anti-woke, referencing another video of his about game companies hiring people who supposedly despise gamers.

Here is a video of his called “The Real Impact of DEI in Gaming”. He uses rainbow/pink/diversity-washing being bad to then ultimately conclude that DEI is a net negative that he (no joke) BLAMES ON OVERREGULATION by the government. He then goes on to suggest that DEI actually is about dividing people in order to (also not a joke) feed a DEI-consulting industry.

“They’re hiring in people that don’t have the merit, that don’t have the skill” (8:40) Classic. He then goes onto blame “DEI hire” developers for games being buggy or releasing too early, as though that is their choice (once again, he clearly doesn’t understand what developers do or do not control).

It’s frustrating seeing these chuds get wiser about the number of levels they couch their ultimate anti-diversity rhetoric in, because clearly it’s working on some people. Instead of saying, “diversity in gaming companies bad”, he says, “regulations force execs to hire diverse devs who lack merit (which is bigoted bs on its own), who then over time lower the quality of games, ** and also** evil DEI consultants intentionally push devs to make diverse games without being sincere about the portrayals and stories… so in the end we should stop pushing devs to be diverse and make diverse games, and just let each group of people make games for themselves (which is back to square one where big companies just hire white guys).”

He’s literally just taking all the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric and applying to to gaming.

I do what? Think Nazis deserve to die? Or think that you’re a bad-faith-posting dork who thinks you’re much more clever than you are?

Yes.

Nice try at dodging the point. Is advocating for Nazis to be killed the only manifestation of being anti-Nazi (which unless you are being sought for murder, I guarantee you’re not acting on), and any other action is pro-Nazi? If not, why choose a test that, aside from its anti-Nazi message, might run afoul of site moderation rules?

businesses it says work with China’s military

So for the battery company, is the work… selling them batteries? Like, is this list supposed to be a list of companies actually directly performing military work for the CCP, or just vendors?

Also, unless they’re in violation of e.g. the ban on use of forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang (like tons of US companies have been caught being), why would they be sanctioned? We’re not at war with China, nor actively sanctioning their military just for existing.

My god, what a bad faith “test”. Why not say something like “all Nazis are garbage pieces of shit”? Probably because you’re hoping that the mods will remove your comment for the call for violence, so you can claim they’re pro-Nazi/ anti- anti-Nazi.

Exactly, this will go in my ‘cool tech I don’t use’ pile immediately. :P

For those interested, the reason it’s not the same as a backdoor is that the result of the computation done on HE data is itself still encrypted and readable only by the original owner. So you can effectively offload the work of a certain analysis to a server that you don’t actually trust with your keys.

Do iPhones have a BYOK system for people to supply their own keypairs? Or is their OS open-source so that people can see how the keys are being handled? Because if not, it just sounds like all it takes to break this is for Apple’s OS that it controls to ship the private keys that it generated up to its servers?

Where there’s object detection there’s csam detection.

This is not true at all. A model has to be trained to detect specific things. It does not automatically inherit the ability to detect CSAM just because it can detect other objects. The method it previously used for CSAM image detection (perceptual hashing) was killed for bad privacy implementation, and the article specifically notes that

Tsai argues Apple’s approach is even less private than its abandoned CSAM scanning plan “because it applies to non-iCloud photos and uploads information about all photos, not just ones with suspicious neural hashes.”

So even images that the local detection model doesn’t match to CSAM would be being uploaded to their servers.

Apple killed it’s last version in August 2023 because it didn’t respect privacy.

It was also not that good.

I would be interested to see what lines you read between, because “identifying landmarks and points of interest” doesn’t sound like anything capable of identifying CSAM. I think you’re giving a big corporation a bunch of credit there is no reason to suspect it is owed, for an excuse they never professed.

Social Media Moderators working for billionaires struggle to alter narrative around Luigi Mangione at behest of scared billionaires

ftfy