You and everyone else that’s using Firefox. It’s one of the dumbest “features” that’s ever been added to Firefox and that’s quite an accomplishment considering the long history of adding stupid features nobody asked for.

Where do you think they got the water to fill the reflecting pond?

This is maybe going about things backwards. We definitely need to get bribes out of politics, particularly those coming from corporations (aka PACs) because they make it more profitable to hold specific opinions hence it’s paramount to overturn citizens united. On the other hand if you reduce overall pay for politicians (I.E. money not tied to particular political stances) then that discourages anybody who actually needs money from holding political office thereby turning it into a game exclusively for the rich to play when they’re bored.

What we need is regular people holding political offices so ironically we probably want to make it more profitable to hold the office not less, but we definitely need to make that the only money politicians earn while in office. The tricky part here is how to kill the usual corporate lobbyist loophole where some corporation promises a politician a cushy job doing essentially nothing for high pay in exchange for voting a specific way.

and why old all platforms need consistent server-side validation across APIs, account services, and databases

FTFY.

Regular search engines have feedback mechanisms that limit how effective that is. The click through and bounce rate are used to adjust rankings and as more and more people look at the fake info and then ignore it it will naturally fall out of the top results and get buried. LLMs though don’t have that feedback, once something is ingested and baked into the model it’s there forever. The fake info doesn’t need to look believable enough to fool a human, just self consistent enough to fool an LLM with its tiny context window.

Personally there’s a lot of things I’d change about our government, and a lot of things that I think need to be changed but I’m not entirely sure what would make a good replacement.

I think getting rid of the Senate makes some amount of sense, but only if paired with a number of other changes. I’d first make it clear that constitutional rights apply equally to everyone and can not be revoked, and just as importantly that corporations are not people and have no constitutional rights. Corporations can have rights but only by passing laws to explicitly grant those rights. I would make it so that congress requires a 3/4ths majority to pass a new law, but only a simple majority to repeal one. This ensures that it’s hard to restrict rights for people, but easy to remove restrictions, and conversely that it’s hard to grant rights to corporations and easy to repeal them.

I would outlaw first past the post voting for any partisan office. There are a number of other good options that could be used instead (star voting for instance seems to produce really good results), but just about anything besides FPTP is preferable.

I would remove the electoral college. It’s often justified as a bullwark against a populist leader, but that very clearly has not worked, and a better solution is to just better educate the public.

I would consider making voting mandatory, and make election days federal holidays.

I would extend the basic human rights to include access to food, water, shelter, and basic utilities such as electricity and Internet (this would not preclude having to pay necessarily, but fees should be commensurate with capability to pay them), as well as make most (all?) criminal fees and penalties be proportional to a persons wealth (thereby eliminating the current system where any crime that the penalty is a fee is only a crime for the poor).

I would severely tighten anti-monopoly laws, E.G. having an outright ban on acquisitions and mergers for any company that doesn’t have at least a dozen healthy competitors.

I would require laws to be periodically re-passed in order to stay on the books. There are far too many obscure laws that aren’t even enforced but still stick around for prosecutors to go fishing for when they decide they want to intimidate someone. The big laws, the things that violate a persons well being or rights like murder or assault could be baked into the constitution, but the small stuff like littering and jaywalking, or more controversial things should be forced to be periodically re-evaluated to decide if they still make sense today, or if they need to be rewritten or tweaked in some fashion.

There’s probably a load of other things that should and would need to be changed, but that’s just a few things off the top of my head.

I think I understand what he’s trying to get at. The US government is essentially a fun house mirror of the British one. The British had a house of lords and a house of commons, one represented the nobility and the other the commoners. The US mirrored that but instead of nobility our “house of lords” represents the state, that’s the Senate. The House of Representatives meanwhile represents the people (aka commoners, hence why representation there is proportional to population), while the Senate represents the wealthy that run each state.

If the goal is to become an actual democracy instead of just saying we are, then eliminating the Senate would seem to make sense. The downside is that that eliminates one of the checks since you’d only need to get a bill past one chamber of Congress instead of two. On the other hand with the way the two party system currently runs it’s essentially the exact same state when one party controls both chambers so it’s not really a huge leap.

I’ve seen it proposed that cops should have to start carrying essentially malpractice insurance that they pay for out of their own pocket and that would cover payouts in the event that they get sued. This would have the added advantage that all those “bad apples” that somehow always seem to end up transferred to new precincts instead of fired and banned for life wouldn’t be able to get anyone to insure them effectively banning them.

Spam was never done with “burner phones” in the first place, it’s mostly done via VoIP through shady telecoms companies that can’t be bothered to validate their customers. Due to the age of the phone system it’s incredibly easy to spoof phone numbers because it’s essentially a trust system. Phone exchange A talks to exchange B and says phone number 123 is calling number 456. How does exchange B know that it’s actually 123 calling? They don’t at all, they just trust that exchange A is telling the truth. It’s really hard to get into the system, but once you’re there you essentially have unlimited power with virtually no safeguards in place.

Basically from a security perspective the phone system looks a lot like the 1980s internet, there is technically some security in place, but significantly less than there actually should be.

Pretty sure the average person dies at two hegseths over the limit.

Sure they do, it’s called money. Like all US politicians (and many in other countries as well) they vote as they’re paid to vote.

Priority one in any attempt to fix the US needs to be overturning citizens united. There’s an admittedly long list of other things that need to be done as well, but getting corporate money out of the equation is a significant force multiplier.

That’s how you know it’s probably a good idea.

Personally I’d go a step further and regulate algorithmic feeds in general. It’s pretty clear at this point that feeding people a steady drip of content picked to maximize “engagement” above all else has done incalculable damage.

Dude is officially the least popular president in American history.

Unfortunately that only means something if Republicans refuse to vote for him, and most Republicans I know would vote for literally anybody running as a Republican just to minimize any chance of a Democrat getting elected. About the only way I could see Republicans refusing to vote for the Republican candidate is if we were in some bizzaro world where the Republican candidate was a black queer woman and the Democrat was a white straight man (although I would happily pay thousands of dollars to witness the absolute knots all the racist Republican bigots would tie themselves into trying to square that circle).

It’s kind of weird that they’re trying to bucket a bunch of religions under a single moniker anyway. They’re all related sure, but if you’re going that route you might as well go all in and just make the category Abrahamic religions.

Fundamentally that has always been the problem with Christianity, none of them can agree on whether the others are “real Christians” or not, and half of them hate the other half. LDS is just the latest and kookiest of the lot (although I admit it’s exceptionally weird, only Scientology has it beat and that “religion” was literally thought up as a way to scam idiots).

I game almost every single day, and haven’t booted Windows in years. In the last 3 years I haven’t actually had any game I wanted to play not be able to run in Linux. I’ve had one that crashed non-stop, but judging by the thousands of complaints from Windows users about the same thing that wasn’t a Linux problem.

So yeah, gaming is no excuse, you can game just fine under Linux as long as the devs don’t intentionally block Linux like what happened with Destiny 2 (which Bungie just summarily executed so they can dump more cash into the trash fire that is Marathon, RIP Bungie I await the bankruptcy announcement).

Doesn’t even need that, the physics of it just doesn’t work. There’s basically no way to cool it and no way to power it. Anyone who thinks a space data center is a good idea has failed high school level physics.

Will it though? I could easily see Trump just writing off the deaths of any service members as a favor to his best buddy Putin or even ordering them to help Russia with the invasion. Best case scenario he just has the entire base stand down and sit on their asses while Russia does what it wants. He’s already indicated he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about NATO, and it’s not like he’s ever let little things like laws or treaties stop him before.

Need to bring back the concept of leper colonies and dump all these anti-vax and anti-pasteurization people in them. Quarantine them away until enough of them die off that the rest decide maybe this was all a really dumb idea.

That said his instincts (or rather prejudices) align most closely to the Republicans, mostly due to the Republicans spending every year since Nixon more closely aligning themselves with racists and Christian nationalists (aka Nazis).

Except for the slight problem that those 5 AI agents cost the same as 3 people so you could have skipped the agents, just hired 3 people and gotten 400% output instead of 120%. Yeah it takes longer to scale up and down, but exactly how volatile is your industry that demand is fluctuating that much month to month?