That’s the appropriate reaction to many of these so-called threats to society. Internet chat rooms, generative AI, drugs, opioids, guns, pornography, trashy TV, you name it. I think it’s been pretty well demonstrated throughout history that the majority of the time some ‘threat to public safety’ comes out and a well-meaning group tries to get the government to shove the genie back in the bottle, the cure ends up being worse than the disease. And it’s a lot easier to set up bureaucracy then to dismantle it.

The sad thing is, whatever regulation they set up will be pointless. Someone will download an open source model and run it locally with the watermark code removed. Or some other nation will realize that hobbling their AI industry with stupid regulations won’t help them get ahead in the world and they will become a source for non-watermarked output and watermark free models.

So we hobble ourselves with some ridiculous AI enforcement bureaucracy, and it will do precisely zero good because the people who would do bad things will just do them on offshore servers or in their basement.

It applies everywhere else too. I’m all for ending the opioid crisis, but the current attempt to end opioids entirely is not the solution. A good friend of mine takes a lot of opioids, prescribed by a doctor, for a serious pain condition resulting from a car accident. This person’s back and neck are full of metal pins and screws and plates and whatnot.
For this person, opioids like oxycontin are the difference between being in constant pain and being able to do things like workout at the gym and enjoy life.
But because of the well-meaning war on opioids, this person and their doctor are persecuted. Pharmacies don’t want to deal with oxycontin, and the doctor is getting constant flack from insurance and DEA for prescribing too much of it.
I mean really, a pain management doctor prescribes a lot of pain medication. That’s definitely something fishy that we should turn the screws on him for…

It’s really infuriating. In my opinion, the only two people who should decide what drugs get taken are a person and their doctor. For anyone else to try and intrude on that is a violation of that person’s rights.

I agree it’s hypocritical, but for different reasons.

I think a nude/sex scene can be important to the plot and add a lot to the story- in some situations. Yeah it’s often thrown in as eye candy to get more viewers, but sometimes it counts for a lot. Look at Season 1 of Game of Thrones for example- there’s a couple sex scenes with Dany and Khal Drogo, and IMHO that does a lot more to further the story than to show T&A-- the first one Dany’s basically being raped, but as the season goes on you see her start to fall in love with Drogo and it becomes more making love. Hard to get the same effect without sex scenes.
Same thing anytime you have two people in bed- crappy unrealistic TV sex where the girl never takes her shirt off and then cut to half a second later they’re both wrapped tightly but conveniently in sheets can break suspended disbelief.
So I can sympathize with an actor who agrees to artistic nude scenes or sex scenes because they’re important to the plot, but then has that specific 20 seconds of video taken out of context and circulated on porn sites.

At the same time, an actor doesn’t get to order the audience to experience the film in any certain way. Just as you say about ‘the piano’, it depends on how you watch it. It’s not illegal to buy the film, fast forward to the nude scenes, and stop watching when they’re done. So to think you get any sort of control over that is hypocritical, it’s like ordering a reader to read the entire book and not share passages with a friend.

I’m not fine with that, as it will have wide-ranging repercussions on society at large that aren’t all good.

But I fully accept it as the cold hard reality that WILL happen now that the genie’s out of the bottle, and the reality that any ham-fisted legal attempt to rebottle the genie will be far worse for society and only delay the inevitable acceptance that photographs are no longer proof.

And as such, I (and most other adults mature enough to accept a less-than-preferred reality as reality) stand with you and give the statists the middle finger, along with everyone else who thinks you can legislate any genie back into its bottle. In the 1990s it was the ‘protect kids from Internet porn’ people, in the 2000s it was the ‘protect kids from violent video games’ and ‘stop Internet piracy’ people, I guess today it’s the ‘stop generative AI’ people. They are all children who think crying to Daddy will remake the ways of the world. It won’t.

Probably the best idea yet. It’s definitely not foolproof though. Best you could do is put a security chip in the camera that digitally signs the pictures, but that is imperfect because eventually someone will extract the key or figure out how to get the camera to sign pictures of their choosing that weren’t taken by the camera.

A creator level key is more likely, so you choose who you trust.

But most of the pictures that would be taken as proof of anything probably won’t be signed by one of those.

I’m not talking about the copyright violation of sharing parts of a copyrighted movie. That is obviously infringement. I am talking about generated nude images.

If the pencil drawing is not harming anybody, is the photo realistic but completely hand-done painting somehow more harmful? Does it become even more harmful if you use AI to help with the painting?

If the pencil drawing is legal, and the AI generated deep fake is illegal, I am asking where exactly the line is. Because there is a whole spectrum between the two, so at what point does it become illegal?

Actually I was thinking about this some more and I think there is a much deeper issue.

With the advent of generative AI, photographs can no longer be relied upon as documentary evidence.

There’s the old saying, ‘pics or it didn’t happen’, which flipped around means sharing pics means it did happen.

But if anyone can generate a photo realistic image from a few lines of text, then pictures don’t actually prove anything unless you have some bulletproof way to tell which pictures are real and which are generated by AI.

And that’s the real point of a lot of these laws, to try and shove the genie back in the bottle. You can ban deep fake porn and order anyone who makes it to be drawn in quartered, you can an AI watermark it’s output but at the end of the day the genie is out of the bottle because someone somewhere will write an AI that ignores the watermark and pass the photos off as real.

I’m open to any possible solution, but I’m not sure there is one. I think this genie may be out of the bottle for good, or at least I’m not seeing any way that it isn’t. And if that’s the case, perhaps the only response that doesn’t shred civil liberties is to preemptively declare defeat, acknowledge that photographs are no longer proof of anything, and deal with that as a society.

It will be interesting to see that tested in court. I don’t think anyone would complain about for example a pencil sketch of a naked celebrity, that would be considered free speech and fair use even if it is a sketch of a scene from a movie.

So where does the line go? If the pencil sketch is legal, what if you do a digital sketch with Adobe illustrator and a graphics tablet? What if you use the Adobe AI function to help clean up the image? What if you take screen grabs of a publicity shot of the actor’s face and a nude image of someone else, and use them together to trace the image you end up painting? What if you then use AI to help you select colors and help shading? What if you do each of those processes individually but you have AI do each of them? That is not very functionally different from giving an AI a publicity shot and telling it to generate a nude image.

As I see it, The only difference between the AI deepfake and the fake produced by a skilled artist is the amount of time and effort required. And while that definitely makes it easy to turn out an awful lot of fakes, it’s bad policy to ban one and not the other simply based on the process by which the image was created.

A stupid (as in, not intelligent) analogy.

Bomb laws don’t stop bombers. You CAN buy hardware store ingredients and make a bomb. Most people don’t do such things.

The point of the bomb law is so when they get a tip and raid someone’s house and find a few bricks of C4 wrapped in nails with a clock attached, they have something to arrest him for rather than saying ‘we have to wait until you use this to hurt people’.

But that’s also because that bomb has very few legitimate uses. There aren’t neighborhood bomb ranges where people go to compete and practice. You can’t use a bomb to hunt or protect yourself from 4-legged predators when in the woods. There aren’t bombing tournaments. You can’t use a bomb in self-defense or to protect your home or family. There ARE legitimate uses for bombs in mining, agriculture, industry, etc but those are uncommon and thus highly regulated.

A gun has many legitimate uses, and tens or hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans use guns legally every day. Neighborhood gun ranges host classes, practice sessions, and competitions / tournaments. Guns are used for hunting and defense from predators in the woods. A gun can defend your home and family from intruders. And a small concealed pistol can be used to defend against street crime.

That was for Beeper Mini which was an attempt at imessage on android.
I don’t think the new version runs the homeserver on the phone; with the new version you can still participate in federated chats and use the desktop client so I don’t think it majorly changed in that way.

Other countries have less gun crime sure. They also have a functional health care system, including mental health care. They have culture that doesn’t glorify violence and better emphasizes connections with fellow humans and collaboration rather than confrontation.
Behavior like bullying that in the US often elicits a ‘boys will be boys, let them work it out’ reaction would get kids severely disciplined or kicked out of school in most other civilized countries.
Other countries didn’t defund their mental health systems in the 1980s, turning a great many violent and mentally ill people out on the streets. I’m not a big Reagan fan generally but that policy did irreparable harm to the US.
And other countries don’t treat addicts like criminals, locking them up for years with violent criminals where they themselves become violent. Other countries treat addicts like medical patients.

So yeah other countries do a lot of things better than the US, in terms of cultivating a less violent more inclusive society. You can’t just point to gun policy and say THERE THATS THE ANSWER THATS ALL WE NEED.

you say the lions share of murders are committed by drug gangs, but that’s ignoring the majority of gun injuries are self inflicted.

Quite correct. Somewhere between 2/3 and 4/5 depending on the year of gun deaths are suicides. It’s why I hate most ‘gun violence’ numbers because they include suicides to get to a ~30k/year number (homicides are 10-12k/year most years) while the term ‘gun violence’ strongly suggests crime done to others.

I don’t believe we should blame a gun for suicide anymore than we should blame a knife, body of water, tall bridge/building, bottle of pills, etc. Suicide is a (shitty) personal choice someone makes for themselves. And I reject the idea that all of society should be prohibited from owning a tool simply because a suicidal person might use it to end their own life.
Suicide is a tragedy and I’m all for preventing it. But depriving hundreds of millions of law-abiding citizens from having a tool they use safely, daily, for protection and recreation is not the answer. It’s not how a ‘free’ society works or should work.

And while it was written into the constitution it was amended into the constitution, and like the 21st which repealed the 18th, could be amended out again.

Yes it could be. Any part of the Constitution can be changed. Even the 1st Amendment. Should we rewrite the 1st Amendment to ban pornography or politically unpopular speech? Should we rewrite the 4th Amendment to exclude computers and only apply to printed papers?
Just because we CAN muck with the Bill of Rights doesn’t mean we SHOULD.

you also say there are 5x defensive Gun owners. This is a made up statistic - there is no formal definition of a defensive gun owner, there is no way to shoot a gun defensively.

I said ‘defensive gun USES’. That has a definition- it’s when a law-abiding citizen uses a lawfully-owned firearm to stop or prevent a crime. The vast majority of defensive gun uses (90-95%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.
Sorry for a reddit link but click here - that’s from /r/CCW (concealed carry weapon) and it’s a filter for ‘member DGU’, IE posts where a redditor is involved in a DGU situation. I’d encourage you to read some of them.

The problem with DGUs is they aren’t tracked. Most aren’t reported to the police and those that are aren’t centrally tracked in any database like the FBI’s homicide database. That means coming up with a number is done with statistical analysis of victimization surveys. This of course produces wildly different numbers, which range from 55k-80k/year (anti-gun researcher Hemenway) to ~2 million (pro-gun researcher Lott). Personally I think the number is somewhere around 300-500k (at least that’s what NCVS data suggests) but you can draw your own conclusions. Wikipedia has a great article on DGUs.

For the sake of this argument though I go with a low number of 60k-- 12k homicides, 60k DGUs, that’s about 5x.

While it may take time - a few generations - maybe even a dozen generations - to disarm the majority of households, it’s possible.

Let’s say you do that. Let’s say you repeal the 2nd Amendment, and do ‘buybacks’ (or as gun owners call it, ‘confiscation with compensation’), and you keep this up for 20+ years. What have you actually accomplished?

Most likely DGUs would drop to near zero. FIREARM suicides would drop to near-zero, and suicides overall might drop a little (a gun is faster and works at home, a lot of people who take pills or decide to jump off a building change their mind before they’re dead and survive). This would have little/no effect on drug gangs who are usually using illegal guns anyway. And without DGUs, criminals would KNOW their victims are ALWAYS unarmed.
Spree shootings would probably become less frequent. But under 100 people per year die in such incidents anyway, despite the big headlines (you’re literally more likely to get struck by lightning than die in a spree shooting in the USA).

I therefore look at that and say even if you stop a few spree shootings, you don’t do much for gang violence, you empower criminals, and you get rid of the DGUs. I don’t see that as being an effective policy.

the majority of gun owners own guns for fun/sport. So while, yes, it is sad to ruin fun, it’s also sad to have children killed.

And if there was a direct zero-sum tradeoff between sport shooting and dead kids you’d have a really good argument. There isn’t.

Finally, you don’t have to ban all guns, you could keep say, bolt action rifles and single barrel shotguns - where sports and hunting could still continue. This wouldn’t solve all the problems but it might have saved lives multiplicatively in mass shootings.

Well that also removes pistols for personal defense.
But even if you did, what happens when some enterprising machinist with a basement workshop downloads plans for a gun or to turn a bolt action rifle into a semi-auto?

THIS is why gun bans don’t work. They’re too easy to make. The only reason criminals don’t manufacture or import them in great number is because while they’re easy to make, they’re easier to steal or straw purchase. Just because a lot of crime guns were once legal guns doesn’t mean cutting off the legal guns will make gun crime go away.

Curious for your thoughts/reactions to this?

Yeah Synapse is still largely a first gen system. There will be others.

FWIW beeper is moving towards a client side hosting model where your phone app hosts the bridges. They currently have a local hosted Signal bridge which runs on the phone…

I think the issue isn’t nudity but sexualization-- IE nude scene in context of a film is fine, chopping the nude scene out of the film is basically turning the actress into a porn star and that’s not fine. Same attitude is why the actress called it molestation. Different attitude as a society I guess.

Surprised nobody here is talking about Matrix. Open source, client side / end to end encrypted, chat history stored (encrypted) on the server so it syncs to every device, supports federation, and supports bridges so you can use Matrix to access your other accounts like Signal, WhatsApp, etc and have everything in one place.

https://Beeper.com is based on Matrix and worth a look. But you can also self-host everything.

This is also why I am thankful for the American first amendment.
It would appear that in that user’s country, it is considered additionally a crime to take the nude scene out of context.
I think a lot of people online take freedom of speech for granted, not realizing that many supposedly civilized countries have an increasing number of restrictions on unpopular speech, critical speech, or otherwise undesirable speech like this.

Simplistic logic that sounds nice but doesn’t actually work. There are more guns than people in this country. We have significantly bigger problems with illegal drug cartels than most. Drug gangs, who have access to illicit import capability, commit the lion’s share of gun violence. The right to keep in their arms is literally written into our Constitution.
Put those things together and you have a few very big problems.

The first is that any sort of gun ban will basically fail unless you amend the Constitution, which there is not political will to do by any means. And those who want to keep their gun rights will point out that there are at 4-5x as many defensive gun uses by law abiding gun owners as there are gun homicides. So it is unlikely that you will be able to get any sort of gun ban to happen.

Second, even if you did, you could never get rid of any significant number of them. There is no national registration scheme. A couple of states have their own registration schemes but those are generally not the states with the majority of firearms. Look at other countries that had similar situations like Australia, they have had numerous amnesty periods for people to turn in firearms and they still don’t think they have a significant majority of them collected.

Finally the question is who you are disarming? Remember, the lions share of gun murders are committed by drug gangs. A gang that can import illegal drugs can just as easily import illegal guns. Or, guns are actually not that hard to make, significantly easier than drugs. Any decently equipped machine shop can crank out guns, and unlike a drug lab which has to be out of the country the machine shop has a legitimate day shift use so it can operate in the open and pay taxes.
Point is, you will end up disarming the law abiding citizens while the criminals will still be armed, and willing to sell those guns to other criminals.

I also very much want to end school shootings. I hate that we are turning schools into fortresses or prisons. I hate the teachers, who are already paid shit, have to think things like ‘time to attack a gunman with scissors’.

But I want to spend effort and money on the policy that will most likely bring that goal about. Maximum bang for buck if you will. And I’m sorry but gun control isn’t it.

The new app sucks, but that’s been true for quite some time. I have a bunch of older Sonos stuff that’s still runs their old ‘S1’ app. It works perfectly. When I need to add a zone I buy old hardware on eBay that is still S1 compatible. What this article doesn’t mention but should, is the newer versions of the new app have a much less robust privacy policy and even more stuff is being done through their cloud. It’s not necessary, it doesn’t help user experience, it just gives more data to harvest, and it’s not what consumers want.

It’s good that they are trying to right the ship. But this article nails it on the head, whatever they are doing now is way too late. Management that’s not asleep at the switch would have seen these problems before the app even launched and slammed on the brakes lest they destroy their company to get a pair of headphones out the door. And that’s exactly what they did. The trust of users is broken, that’s not easily repaired. They shipped their headphones but nobody gave a shit because the app made people want to get rid of Sonos entirely.

It’s too bad Logitech discontinued the Squeezebox line. At the time that was the biggest competitor to Sonos, they could be cleaning up right now.

This battle was lost before it started. Sad thing is, if they weren’t so goddamn obnoxious with the ads it wouldn’t even need to be a battle. As it stands, YouTube without ad blocker is damn near unwatchable.

This is exactly it for me. A problem is one thing, a problem can be addressed. But a problem whose core cause is not understood can’t be quantified or addressed.

So you have a thruster pack that’s overheating and they don’t even know why, you have helium that’s leaking and they don’t even know why, so I ask why is it even a question what to do?

I am among other things a private pilot, I fly little propeller airplanes around for fun. Lots of private pilots do stupid stuff, and some get killed as a result. I’m talking for example pilots who want to get back to their home airport, so they fly over five airports that all sell fuel without landing but then run out of gas and crash half a mile from their home airport. So there is a saying, before you do anything risky, consider how stupid you will look in the NTSB report if it doesn’t work out. And the pilot who intentionally flew below fuel minimums looks pretty damn stupid, destroyed a $100,000 airplane and lost his life so he could save 20 bucks on cheaper gas.

Point is, the same principle applies to all of the recent space disasters. Challenger was obviously not the right decision to launch. Columbia obviously a serious risk that was ignored. And that brings us to Starliner, we have serious fundamental problems that could definitely lead to a loss of ship and crew situation and we don’t even understand what is causing those problems. Now imagine Starliner fails. How stupid will that decision look? Probably even dumber than Columbia or Challenger, because unlike those two disasters we know ahead of time that something is very wrong.