Rage isn't sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has ~~wanted~~ waned to the same degree as among Trump's base.

Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.

But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don't think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn't quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he'd been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.

So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.

Hmm, is this a new take on the "Stop Doing Math" meme?

I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn't good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.

The Twitter deal got canceled, so the interview was posted to YouTube instead. Which, honestly, is the better service for long form video.

I don't think that's right.

The way we operated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had much, much more consideration to the humanitarian toll on civilians, compared to how Israel is currently running their military operation. Even before either invasion, too, the US military knew there was going to be complex and difficult "nation building" afterward.

Take, for example, the way the US and UK troops cleared out Fallujah: leafleting and warning of the assault and specifically letting the civilian population leave before aggressive bombardment. There was controversy about whether military aged males were improperly identified as combatants, but women and children made it out.

The controversy about a cease fire in Gaza is exactly that: letting civilians avoid the places where fighting is happening. The US devoted resources to making that possible, but Israel isn't protecting those goals to the same degree or manner.

As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.

It'd be hard to actually meet that premise, though. People are getting hurt.

Child abuse imagery is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims. Extending that financial/economic analogy, seeding that economy with liquidity, in a financial sense, might or might not incentivize the creation of new authentic child abuse imagery (that requires a child victim to create). That's not as clear, but what is clear is that it would reduce the transaction costs of distributing existing child abuse imagery, which is a form of re-victimizing those who have already been abused.

Child abuse imagery is also used as a grooming technique. Normalization of child sexual activity is how a lot of abusers persuade children to engage in sexual acts. Providing victimless "seed" material might still result in actual abuse happening down the line.

If the creation of AI-generated child abuse imagery begins to give actual abusers and users of real child abuse imagery cover, to where it becomes more difficult to investigate the crime or secure convictions against child rapists, then the proliferation of this technology would make it easier to victimize additional children without consequences.

I'm not sure what the latest research is on the extent to which viewing and consuming child porn would lead to harmful behavior down the line (on the one hand, maybe it's a less harmless outlet for unhealthy urges, but on the other hand, it may feed an addictive cycle that results in net additional harm to society).

I'm sure there are a lot of other considerations and social forces at play, too.

That might be, but the tug back and forth at least gives the ISPs pause before going full bore into engineering (or contracting for) non-neutral arrangements. Why invest the time, money, and effort into something that is only sometimes legal?

The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products "sold by Amazon" was a guarantee that there wouldn't be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.

Now they don't police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the "SEO" of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they're susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.

It basically makes it so that they're no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it's worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.

It's kinda liberating to peek under the hood and confirm that society, like the internet, is mostly held together with figurative duct tape, that someone put there as a temporary fix that became semi-permanent. The concept of technical debt for software and technology projects exists everywhere, including in the backlogs of what our government agencies, court systems, and corporate organizations are doing (and what they simply haven't done yet).

But the whole thing is still pretty resilient. The individuals who make the decisions that feed into the unimaginably complex web of interdependent relationships and rules might not actually understand every detail, and mostly aren't even benevolent actors who want the best for everyone, but the system as a whole still trudges along, mostly making life better than if the system didn't exist at all. And once you learn how at least some parts of it work, you can make some changes here and there for the better, either for yourself or for the people/issues you care about or for the entirety of the system.

Sounds like most people commenting in this thread are going through some challenges right now. I'm hoping things turn around for everyone soon.

I've been having a great week.

• I got myself a working install of Linux on my laptop. I still have things I need to fix, but I've made it further than I actually expected in just 2 evenings after work.
• My kid is making great progress with learning how to swim.
• My job remains stressful but I had a few little victories that will make my September much easier than expected (or at least clear the plate a bit so that even if some things happen, they won't pile onto an existing shit sandwich).
• I just bought some really awesome tomatoes at the farmer's market, and can't wait to incorporate into sandwiches starting tomorrow (tonight I gotta go buy some fresh sourdough to really complete the entire effect of a delicious sandwich). I love tomato season!
• I made it back to the gym for the first time in a month. Lots of travel in July (mostly work, but also a family vacation in the middle) put me in hotels without room in my schedule to do any real workouts, although I guess I walked way more than I normally do while traveling (one day I hit 15,000 steps almost entirely in airports). I feel better when I'm working out regularly, so being home is helpful for resetting that part of my routine.

I'm feeling pretty great! Sending good vibes to everyone else in this thread, whether they're having good weeks or bad weeks.

Exactly. There are legitimate concerns about whether law enforcement should be able to subpoena "third party" records (including video recordings) with a process less than a full blown warrant supported by probable cause, as determined by a neutral judge, or whether government should be able to compel the retention of records for a later after-the-fact search. That's a discussion worth having.

But voluntarily recording and retaining video means that the person who controls those records can choose to do what they want with it. Imagine if some homeowner had these cameras, and had their own home burglarized, and tried to turn over the video evidence of the crime, but the courts were like "whoa wait did you get a warrant for that?" It doesn't really change anything to have it be cloud hosted, or easily shared with a button, because that "share" functionality works for non-police recipients, too. Doorbell camera footage gets shared all the time on social media, sometimes because it's funny or interesting or otherwise worth viewing.