Posted by Bender 2 days ago
Which means that, in practice, the US isn't governed by the rule of law anymore, but by the whim of the Czar's court.
citation?
Sure, "a lot of people in the US" ... but "half" is pushing it, unless you've got sources.
Instead, we're ruled by these two dumb, evil political parties that radical centrists treat like elemental forces of nature. It's a play being put on for your benefit. Your vote changes nothing. The Heel W. Bush administration had presided over the most consciously evil things done in both foreign and domestic policy, with the full knowledge that it was illegal, and then Golden Boy Obama came and indemnified everyone. The person who illegally destroyed the CIA torture videotapes became the head of the CIA.
The country is a joke and quickly turning into a failed state, and upper middle-class people are being distracted by sock puppets because as the top 20%, they aren't suffering in the least.
edit: advocating for the prosecution of the last administration by the next is simply advocacy for dictatorship. There is no reason for anyone to leave the presidency if civic intellectual thought has degenerated so much that they think that this is a wise or democratic thing to do. If you vote in a criminal, there's no clawback after you get robbed. The reason this is a failed state is because we're exclusively putting criminals on the ballot, from President to dog catcher. Turns out that non-criminals can't raise millions of dollars to get a job.
And then Obama came in with promises and almost immediately brought everything back to default George Bush timelines. To those of you that don't live in SF, most SF progressives HATED Obama because all he did was legitimize Bush's policies instead of acting on his promises of "Hope" and "Change". Anyone remember how he talked about abortion rights, and then immediately after his presidency said that it wasn't a priority for him? If abortion rights were passed as a federal law, we wouldn't be where we are today post Dobbs.
That is by no means a given.
[^1]: Assuming there is one.
[^2]: That is, not petulantly prosecuting those deemed to have slighted you.
However, all of this is very far away from the legality of quantum computing
That's not exactly accurate and that nuanced difference may be the key to holding the executive branch accountable, now that we're in this disastrous state of the world.
What nuances are left then? What small amount of hope can be gleaned from the ruling?
It's amazing how much of America's political stability might rest not on the law, but rather on the self-restraint of each cohort's leadership.
Conjoin that with AI able to generate billions of videos, saying anything anyone wants, and you have a real issue. 99.99% of the population can't tell or even realises much of what they watch on youtube is AI, and... it will get less distinguishable, to the point that no one, at all, will be able to tell.
Not you, I, or anyone at all.
There are already endless AI personalities on youtube, each building followers. If I wanted to upset the apple cart, I'd spawn 1000 or more "people", each with a different appearance and manner of speaking. All would dance to my tune, and all would be the most honest, trustworthy source possible.
Until, of course, I wanted to upset the apple cart. Then I'd ensure that all these personalities, insisted that all the court decisions post-office, are lies, mistruths, and designed to punish and harm and "take out the right's power".
Imagine if you have someone you've watched for 2 years. On hundreds of points, they've been blisteringly honest, never lying, always truthful. Then?
On this one thing, they manipulate you.
Who do you trust? The most honest person you've ever seen, or the impartiality of the courts?
This is the sort of long game you can play with fake personalities. No disloyalty. No breaking ranks. No bad days, or mistakes.
I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy. I've pivoted 180, I cannot see a democratic society with this level of manipulation continuing.
The con is claiming that this has anything to do with anonymity. There are 8 billion people. The idea that someone with money can't get a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand of them to lend their names to bots is a farce. The cost of a random human name is less than the cost of the years worth of tokens they'd be putting under it. Sacrificing anonymity over that is a fraud.
On top of that, we shouldn't pretend this is a new issue. In 1975 the local magnate owned the local newspaper and radio station and had relatively unbiased coverage of issues until it came to the ones that affect their own business dealings or the political ambitions of their associates.
And your disaster scenario doesn't even work when people are getting information from multiple sources. If the sources are >50% lies and exaggerations then you can spot check a small sample of the stories and notice that. (Sadly all too many current outlets fail this test.) But if, as you posit, they offered unbiased coverage almost all of the time then their coverage would be similar to every other source offering mostly unbiased coverage, until they try to mislead you, and then your "reliable sources" would be saying different things from one another because less than 100% of them are controlled by the one trying to manipulate you, which is a major red flag that somebody is lying to you.
The actual problem is that people don't bother to do the spot checks when the source is telling them the pretty lies they want to hear. Which is nothing new and has very little to do with AI.
I know it's super annoying to have someone rain on your "but THIS stuff is REALLY bad!" parade, but that the rulers are corrupt isn't new. It's just new to a lot of people.
The Democrats haven't even run a real primary since 2008, and H. Clinton makes a good case that that one wasn't even real; Democratic elites had got together and decided that a black face would be perfect to make sure that no one was punished for the financial fraud and worldwide torture program that had just occurred - Clinton was simply too personally repellent to get away with pardoning, even rewarding, evil.
What happened after 2001 is that the country was turned over to the executive and the judiciary, and congress just decided it was going to act as a passive conduit of billionaire wishes. Both parties deciding that votes needed 60% to pass made the job something you could nap through. It's no coincidence that they're so old they're barely sentient now. Clever Hans could do the job.
The only people dumber than extreme Republican partisans in this country are extreme Democratic partisans. They are all treating this as sports while people are dying, because they're doing better than they ever have. Democrats shoved an ancient confabulating corrupt racist into the White House as the reply to an ancient confabulating corrupt racist. The first time in history that the public asked for the last president back, it was the least popular president that had ever been elected, and Democratic partisans still stand around with their fingers in their ears blaming the celebrity.
Can you see a problem here, a failure of the intended system of checks and balances?
In more than 85% of cases brought against the administration, lower courts have ruled that the administration has broken the law.
So, you can decide if you think SCOTUS overruling those decisions is an indication of a problem, or justice winning out.
I also don't care when an administration says "We will find a way to ...." - I care about whether they do so, and do so in accordance with the law. The Biden administration followed SCOTUS rulings on its orders, and AFAIK, did not find workarounds for any of the things you mention.
"We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I've got a pen, and I've got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.."
Biden admin lost CDC eviction prohibitions case and immediately enacted new slightly different prohibition and Biden defended the effort as it would take time to be stopped.
“Whether that option will pass constitutional measure with this administration, I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” Biden said. “There are a few scholars who say it will, and others who say it’s not likely to. But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are in fact behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/housing/566230-biden-buys...
Sources:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anatomy-screw-biden-evi...
Dunno, how can you say that for sure when we don't actually know how to make a practical quantum processor? The bigger issue is that we are scaling up manufacturing of approaches that have not been made to work.
I remember a meeting where the project manager pointed out that we were due to send some test boards to a customer. I pointed out that we didn't have a design yet. The PM then asked why we couldn't send them some boards anyway. I suggested that since the boards wouldn't work that we could just cut out some green cardboard and add some component shapes with a magic marker thus saving significant time and effort.
It turned out that I was not as funny as I thought I was...
The article doesn't make it sound like this is "going towards existing approaches". I totally get that you may not support these company's approaches to quantum processer design, but we'd be getting rather into the weeds if that's the hair we're splicing.
I have to say, though, I have no idea what the management is thinking when they hire such clueless PMs. Even worse, I have seen clueless product owners who had no idea about the domain we were in. I guess a recent example could be Ive designing the Luce.
Maybe I am just envious. Maybe I just wish I could BS my way through life like these characters do.
In most cases, even the PM doesn't know this. They were specifically selected to not think too deeply. Anything you say that is brutally correct and they take the wrong way is received as mean and arrogant. Those incidents give management some ammunition if they ever want to get rid of you.
It’s easy to drop a story like this, get a win for investing in the future, and then quietly disassemble it as soon as the cameras turn away.
Or, it would be easy, if this administration didn’t consider laws beneath them.
"Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/cheating-on-q...
So if I steal from someone and spend it fast enough, I wouldn't be responsible anymore and can get away with it? That's how that sounded to me.
* eh. I'm not a lawyer.
Yes, these contradict each other somewhat.
Hint: it doesn’t give warm fuzzies.