Elsewhere, I was in a discussion about the power requirements for an AGI that can handle all the things a humanoid robot will be asked to do. Current estimates are the human brain is roughly the equivalent of an exaflop processor. Germany recently fired up their new exaflop supercomputer, which is the most power efficient in the world. It draws 18.2 megaWatts (and the hardware takes up ~120 racks). I anticipate that a humanoid robot that can properly execute an order like "Go through the house, collect all the dirty dishes, load them into the dishwasher, and run it" will be a fancy peripheral for a closet full of computer gear drawing more power than the entire rest of the house.
On Wednesday this week, Trump signed an executive order that requires the Dept of Defense -- excuse me, Dept of War -- to sign long-term power purchase agreements with coal-fired power plants to provide power for military bases to keep those plants running. Separately, that the Dept of Energy will provide at least $175M for maintaining and upgrading coal-fired power plants in Appalachia. The EO includes a provision that the PPAs cannot infringe on the authority of other executive branch agencies. I have SO many questions about how they're going to make this work within the constraints set by FERC.
My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
The problems west of the Divide make the ones to the east look fairly moderate. Snow timing has changed just in the almost 40 years I've lived here now. Having April snow bail us out has become a fairly regular occurrence. Not so much on the west side.
Why don't they just use snow cannons?
[imagining what Mr. "Why not nuke hurricanes?" could say to the problem]. Next he would likely see water conservation as the root cause.
I wanted to post this from today's Guardian. I didn't look at the Focaldata source link, but I thought the charts shown in the Guardian article were pretty interesting:
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a profound shift in the global order, according to new analysis. A report from Focaldata, which analyses UN voting records, reveals how Washington’s “America First” agenda has started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China. In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory, with significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term.
My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
I used to teach this science fiction short story by Paolo Bacigalupi at least once a year in my writing class, and it never failed to get my students thinking a lot more deeply about the water issues we face in the western US:
It's imagining a desertified West with a weak federal government and interstate conflict, with parts of the Southwest unsustainable for living due to water demands.
Interesting story for looking at our current situation through the eyes of a potential future.
Meanwhile, I'm unable to ride the local trails at the moment because So Cal has had rain, and will have more again at the start of next week. It's probably not enough to save the local snowpack in the Sierra, but it damn sure is going to help give us a little margin before things start to dry out and get hotter again.
lj: we seem (in "Recent Posts") to have had 11 new posts in the last 14 days, but as far as I can tell we do not have a current Open Thread (the last one I found is from January 8th). Would it be possible always (each month- isn't that their lifetime?) to have one, with that name, going simultaneously with the others? Speaking for myself, I really miss them.
How are things in Memphis?
Yay for the people of Minneapolis, assuming the words Homan says have some connection to reality. But where are those withdrawn troops going? What other swing states are infested with the worst of the worst?
Don't know which thread to put this in, but I have just seen this in the Independent - the subheading says "Pullout from Minneapolis comes as Trump's approval ratings on immigration enforcement have thanked":
The Trump administration is ending the “surge” of thousands of immigration and law enforcement agents to Minnesota that sparked months of protests and led to the shooting deaths of two American citizens who were protesting the federal presence there. White House Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters in Minneapolis on Thursday that there has been a “big change” in state and local officials’ willingness to assist in providing some support for federal operations in the state and said there has been less of a need to deploy “quick reaction forces” to protect agents from protesters. “With that and [the] success that has been made arresting public safety threats and other priorities since this search operation began, as well as the unprecedented levels of coordination we have obtained from state officials and local law enforcement, I have proposed — and President Trump has concurred — that this surge operation conclude a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week,” Homan said.
He added that “a small footprint of personnel” would remain in the area to supervise the transfer of “full command and control” of immigration enforcement in the state back to the ICE field office that has been in Minneapolis for decades. Homan also said he would remain in Minneapolis “for a little longer” to “oversee the drawdown of this operation” while stressing that the massive deployment of agents that had been dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” by administration officials was in fact “ending.”
The administration's decision to withdraw the thousands of agents whose roving patrols and aggressive tactics roiled Twin Cities streets in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to punish Minnesotans for having voted against President Donald Trump in the 2024, 2020 and 2016 elections comes weeks after the White House dispatched Homan there in the wake of the shooting death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of a Border Patrol agent. Federal officials announced the deployment in early December, ostensibly to combat what the administration claimed was a wave of public benefits fraud by Somali immigrants after a viral video by a right-wing YouTube creator alleging that Minneapolis was filled with fake child care centers and medical businesses run by Somalis gained attention in conservative media circles. Administration officials say the months-long effort has led to more than 4,000 arrests of what they allege to be “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” but that number has also included numerous American citizens and people without criminal records.
The White House had justified the outsized presence and roving patrols as necessary because Minnesota does not allow state and local law enforcement to conduct civil immigration enforcement, though Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have maintained that ICE officers have always been permitted to take custody of people who are being released from jails and prisons at the end of a court-imposed sentence. At one recent White House press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed there are “thousands” of “criminal illegal aliens” held in Minnesota facilities and being released back into the community without notifying federal officials. One Department of Homeland Security press release recent alleged that there were “more than 1,360 active detainers for criminals in Minnesota jails” as well.
But the administration’s claims and purported justifications have also been undermined by Minnesota officials who have pointed out that only as many as 380 non-citizens were being held in state prisons — and of those, only 270 were subject to “detainers” filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Minnesota Department of Corrections also said there are roughly 100 non-citizens with “detainers” filed against them in county and local jails as well. And while the administration has repeatedly claimed the aggressive operations in Minnesota were justified by the state government’s refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement efforts, Attorney General Pam Bondi further undermined those arguments last month when she sent a letter to state officials demanding access to the state’s voter database in exchange for removing agents from Minneapolis streets. President Donald Trump has in recent months repeatedly lied about his electoral history in the Gopher State by claiming to have won it three times even though he has never carried the state’s electoral votes and no Republican has done so since the 1972 presidential election. Walz had said earlier in the week that he expected the federal deployment to end in “days, not weeks and months” based on his own talks with administration officials, including Homan and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. And in the wake of Homan’s announcement, Walz said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the “surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota.”
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI ‘evidence’.
What we have seen already, is court briefs where it turned out that the lawyer had used AI to draft the brief, but had not checked it over thoroughly. And so did not realize that a) in some of the cited precedent cases, the decision didn't actually say what the brief claimed, and b) some of the citations were entirely invented.
Several lawyers got badly burned; judges take a very dim view of lying to the court, which is what submitting a brief like that amounts to. As a result, most lawyers are likely to be extremely wary of trying to use AI for anything. Of course, lawyers around Trump have already demonstrated that they are not most lawyers, so it will be no surprise if one of them tries it. (Whether knowingly or just by failing to check some "evidence" provided by, for example, ICE.)
Getting a conviction, however, seems less likely. Already we see grand juries repeatedly refusing to indict** based on how unsubstantiated DOJ attorney's claims are. In court, any good defense attorney is going to have checked whether supposed evidence is real. Fingerprints on digital files, while not visible to the viewer, can be damning. It's possible to work around that, but it requires a level of competence not much in evidence in this administration.
** Heretofore, indictments were the next thing to automatic. When a grand jury declined to indict (and it only takes 12 out up to 23 jurors to do so), it was big news. Now, it seems about as newsworthy as some Trump administration spokesman spouting obvious lies.
People support Trump for reasons that have little to do with matters of fact in any social or economic or even political sense. It's tribal. They are on Team Trump.
I don't talk with Trump supporters about Trump. Or if and when I do, it's very brief, I just say that I think he's a crook and an asshole, and leave it at that. Oddly enough, they are also generally happy to leave it at that.
I have a friend who suggests talking with Trumpers about what motivates them, but without bringing Trump into it. For example, why is it necessary to deport people who have been here for decades. I haven't really tried that, but I guess it's an option.
The mason in the article has a valid complaint. People who live in southern border communities have valid complaints. People who were concerned about inflation had valid complaints. Whether they are looking in the right places for either causes or solutions is a different story, but the things they are unhappy with are not always unreasonable. They're just (IMO) looking at the wrong villains.
So, talking to the mason about undocumented labor and how that affects him could be useful. Etc.
But I really do think that Trump's base - the more or less 27-ish percent hard core - are basically unshakeable and there is nothing I'm gonna say or do that will move that.
If bad things happen to them, personally, or to someone in their family or close circle of friends, it could make a dent. Other than that, it ain't gonna happen.
Oddly, the nearest thing to really undermining his base support that I can think of was Trump et al saying that people shouldn't carry firearms to a protest. If there's one thing that might pry some of his base away, it's any hint of weakness around the 2nd A.
The paranoid style has always been a significant factor in the US. They aren't going away.
In early 20th century photographic evidence was challenged because photos were easy to fake. Arthur Conan Doyle famously fell for fake fairy photos (alliteration coincidental) and in turn used the argument in 'The Lost World' (where the claim that the dino photos were fake gets countered by presenting a living pterodactyl; movie adaptations tend to replace it with a T-Rex for effect).
I think we face a double danger: 1) people believing convincing fakes and 2) people not believing reality taking it for convincing fakes.
The 'filling the zone with <semisolid digestive final product>' is based on exactly that. They recognized that they can win by making people believe nothing is real anymore (just 'opinion') or making it near impossible to find the truth in a deluge of untruth (and meaningless garbage for further dilution). Some will believe anything said loud enough, few will seek the actual truth and a majority stops trying and turns away disgusted but passive. One can run the show with that mixture.
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI 'evidence'. I believe that this is just a matter of time and would guess that it will first be tried on a (surviving) ICE victim by using AI doctored footage 'proving' that the victim tried to assault ICEistas with a deadly weapon first.
It comes down to this, social media is a communications technology that we are only just starting to adapt to. AI is another technology we will have to learn to use properly. Eventually, we will figure out how to use them without them being used abusively. The operative word being eventually.
Unfortunately, it will take us a while. Those of a historical bent might look at how our (great) great grandparents eventually dealt with "yellow journalism". Then, as now, a new technology for distributing information blossomed while distributing lots of misinformation. Over the course of decades, most (by now means all but most) people figured out that the tabloids were not reliable sources. Amusing, perhaps, but not reliable.
The challenge, once again, will be surviving while we figure out how the adjust and then roll out those adjustments across the population.
If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
Makes me recall a now-humorous memory. One summer my father sent me to spend a week with one of his cousins who owned a family farm. What did I get from that week? A life-long determination to acquire skills that would let me work in a climate-controlled environment where I didn't have to lift heavy things. Or put my fingers in the near neighborhood of rotary machinery with blades and no safety cover.
These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
Combines, like cars, are computers on wheels. Or tracks. And almost autonimus. Though the custom cutters may not have cutting-edge equipment, their customers may not have digitized field layouts.
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
Many years back now, the Colorado General Assembly was considering a bill, introduced by rural Republican members, that was basically a license for the sheriffs' departments in rural counties to hassle short brown ag workers. Once word got out, the eastern plains wheat farmers began getting calls from the custom cutters** saying they were just going to skip Colorado if the bill passed. Typically something like, "All my crews are legal, but I'm not going to put them at the mercy of your sheriff's asshole deputies." The bill died.
** Custom cutters are groups with one or more big combines and a bunch of trucks who harvest vast wheat fields when they're ripe. It's migratory work, starting in Texas and moving north as the summer progresses. Really erratic work. If it rains you can't harvest, and sometimes getting the job done in time means working by headlights all night long. Farmers, or even small groups of farmers, can't afford big combines. These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
The Department of Homeland Security data undercuts a central, load-bearing mythdeployed by right-wing media and the Trump administration to justify its nationwide crackdown on immigrant communities — namely, claims that ICE and Border Patrol are going after the “worst of the worst.” In fact, nearly 40% of people in ICE custody have no violation other than a civil immigration infraction.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Thread”
The robots are coming.
Elsewhere, I was in a discussion about the power requirements for an AGI that can handle all the things a humanoid robot will be asked to do. Current estimates are the human brain is roughly the equivalent of an exaflop processor. Germany recently fired up their new exaflop supercomputer, which is the most power efficient in the world. It draws 18.2 megaWatts (and the hardware takes up ~120 racks). I anticipate that a humanoid robot that can properly execute an order like "Go through the house, collect all the dirty dishes, load them into the dishwasher, and run it" will be a fancy peripheral for a closet full of computer gear drawing more power than the entire rest of the house.
"
On Wednesday this week, Trump signed an executive order that requires the Dept of Defense -- excuse me, Dept of War -- to sign long-term power purchase agreements with coal-fired power plants to provide power for military bases to keep those plants running. Separately, that the Dept of Energy will provide at least $175M for maintaining and upgrading coal-fired power plants in Appalachia. The EO includes a provision that the PPAs cannot infringe on the authority of other executive branch agencies. I have SO many questions about how they're going to make this work within the constraints set by FERC.
"
My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
The problems west of the Divide make the ones to the east look fairly moderate. Snow timing has changed just in the almost 40 years I've lived here now. Having April snow bail us out has become a fairly regular occurrence. Not so much on the west side.
"
The robots are coming.
"Peter & Dave sit down with Brett Adcock to discuss the future of Figure and Humanoid Robots."
The Humanoid Takeover: $50T Market, Figure's Full Body Autonomy, and Robots in Dorms
"
Why don't they just use snow cannons?
[imagining what Mr. "Why not nuke hurricanes?" could say to the problem]. Next he would likely see water conservation as the root cause.
"
Ok, open thread:
AI agents now have their own social network. Humans can observe but (I think) not participate actively.
The agents have a lot to say to each other, apparently. They've even invented their own religion.
https://www.moltbook.com/
Between AI and the ever-larger Epstein blast radius, the world is just getting too freaking weird for me. I'm glad I'm old.
"
I wanted to post this from today's Guardian. I didn't look at the Focaldata source link, but I thought the charts shown in the Guardian article were pretty interesting:
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a profound shift in the global order, according to new analysis.
A report from Focaldata, which analyses UN voting records, reveals how Washington’s “America First” agenda has started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China.
In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory, with significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/13/these-charts-show-how-trump-is-isolating-the-us-on-the-world-stage
"
My in-laws in Colorado on the other side of the divide are freaking out about the lack of water and snowpack, too.
I used to teach this science fiction short story by Paolo Bacigalupi at least once a year in my writing class, and it never failed to get my students thinking a lot more deeply about the water issues we face in the western US:
https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/the-tamarisk-hunter/
It's imagining a desertified West with a weak federal government and interstate conflict, with parts of the Southwest unsustainable for living due to water demands.
Interesting story for looking at our current situation through the eyes of a potential future.
Meanwhile, I'm unable to ride the local trails at the moment because So Cal has had rain, and will have more again at the start of next week. It's probably not enough to save the local snowpack in the Sierra, but it damn sure is going to help give us a little margin before things start to dry out and get hotter again.
On “The Aiken formula”
lj: we seem (in "Recent Posts") to have had 11 new posts in the last 14 days, but as far as I can tell we do not have a current Open Thread (the last one I found is from January 8th). Would it be possible always (each month- isn't that their lifetime?) to have one, with that name, going simultaneously with the others? Speaking for myself, I really miss them.
"
Homan is sorta right. With the removal of the huge ICE mob, the public safety threats have largely been arrested. That's "arrested" meaning stopped.
"
Meet the new boss/ Worse than the old boss
"
This first thing I thought of when they announced the withdrawal as a victory was W's "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... um, well ... don't get fooled again!
"
How are things in Memphis?
Yay for the people of Minneapolis, assuming the words Homan says have some connection to reality. But where are those withdrawn troops going? What other swing states are infested with the worst of the worst?
On “What fresh hell is this?”
Don't know which thread to put this in, but I have just seen this in the Independent - the subheading says "Pullout from Minneapolis comes as Trump's approval ratings on immigration enforcement have thanked":
The Trump administration is ending the “surge” of thousands of immigration and law enforcement agents to Minnesota that sparked months of protests and led to the shooting deaths of two American citizens who were protesting the federal presence there.
White House Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters in Minneapolis on Thursday that there has been a “big change” in state and local officials’ willingness to assist in providing some support for federal operations in the state and said there has been less of a need to deploy “quick reaction forces” to protect agents from protesters.
“With that and [the] success that has been made arresting public safety threats and other priorities since this search operation began, as well as the unprecedented levels of coordination we have obtained from state officials and local law enforcement, I have proposed — and President Trump has concurred — that this surge operation conclude a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week,” Homan said.
He added that “a small footprint of personnel” would remain in the area to supervise the transfer of “full command and control” of immigration enforcement in the state back to the ICE field office that has been in Minneapolis for decades.
Homan also said he would remain in Minneapolis “for a little longer” to “oversee the drawdown of this operation” while stressing that the massive deployment of agents that had been dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” by administration officials was in fact “ending.”
The administration's decision to withdraw the thousands of agents whose roving patrols and aggressive tactics roiled Twin Cities streets in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to punish Minnesotans for having voted against President Donald Trump in the 2024, 2020 and 2016 elections comes weeks after the White House dispatched Homan there in the wake of the shooting death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of a Border Patrol agent.
Federal officials announced the deployment in early December, ostensibly to combat what the administration claimed was a wave of public benefits fraud by Somali immigrants after a viral video by a right-wing YouTube creator alleging that Minneapolis was filled with fake child care centers and medical businesses run by Somalis gained attention in conservative media circles.
Administration officials say the months-long effort has led to more than 4,000 arrests of what they allege to be “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” but that number has also included numerous American citizens and people without criminal records.
The White House had justified the outsized presence and roving patrols as necessary because Minnesota does not allow state and local law enforcement to conduct civil immigration enforcement, though Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have maintained that ICE officers have always been permitted to take custody of people who are being released from jails and prisons at the end of a court-imposed sentence.
At one recent White House press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed there are “thousands” of “criminal illegal aliens” held in Minnesota facilities and being released back into the community without notifying federal officials. One Department of Homeland Security press release recent alleged that there were “more than 1,360 active detainers for criminals in Minnesota jails” as well.
But the administration’s claims and purported justifications have also been undermined by Minnesota officials who have pointed out that only as many as 380 non-citizens were being held in state prisons — and of those, only 270 were subject to “detainers” filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections also said there are roughly 100 non-citizens with “detainers” filed against them in county and local jails as well.
And while the administration has repeatedly claimed the aggressive operations in Minnesota were justified by the state government’s refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement efforts, Attorney General Pam Bondi further undermined those arguments last month when she sent a letter to state officials demanding access to the state’s voter database in exchange for removing agents from Minneapolis streets.
President Donald Trump has in recent months repeatedly lied about his electoral history in the Gopher State by claiming to have won it three times even though he has never carried the state’s electoral votes and no Republican has done so since the 1972 presidential election.
Walz had said earlier in the week that he expected the federal deployment to end in “days, not weeks and months” based on his own talks with administration officials, including Homan and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
And in the wake of Homan’s announcement, Walz said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the “surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota.”
"
What we have seen already, is court briefs where it turned out that the lawyer had used AI to draft the brief, but had not checked it over thoroughly. And so did not realize that a) in some of the cited precedent cases, the decision didn't actually say what the brief claimed, and b) some of the citations were entirely invented.
Several lawyers got badly burned; judges take a very dim view of lying to the court, which is what submitting a brief like that amounts to. As a result, most lawyers are likely to be extremely wary of trying to use AI for anything. Of course, lawyers around Trump have already demonstrated that they are not most lawyers, so it will be no surprise if one of them tries it. (Whether knowingly or just by failing to check some "evidence" provided by, for example, ICE.)
Getting a conviction, however, seems less likely. Already we see grand juries repeatedly refusing to indict** based on how unsubstantiated DOJ attorney's claims are. In court, any good defense attorney is going to have checked whether supposed evidence is real. Fingerprints on digital files, while not visible to the viewer, can be damning. It's possible to work around that, but it requires a level of competence not much in evidence in this administration.
** Heretofore, indictments were the next thing to automatic. When a grand jury declined to indict (and it only takes 12 out up to 23 jurors to do so), it was big news. Now, it seems about as newsworthy as some Trump administration spokesman spouting obvious lies.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
People support Trump for reasons that have little to do with matters of fact in any social or economic or even political sense. It's tribal. They are on Team Trump.
I don't talk with Trump supporters about Trump. Or if and when I do, it's very brief, I just say that I think he's a crook and an asshole, and leave it at that. Oddly enough, they are also generally happy to leave it at that.
I have a friend who suggests talking with Trumpers about what motivates them, but without bringing Trump into it. For example, why is it necessary to deport people who have been here for decades. I haven't really tried that, but I guess it's an option.
The mason in the article has a valid complaint. People who live in southern border communities have valid complaints. People who were concerned about inflation had valid complaints. Whether they are looking in the right places for either causes or solutions is a different story, but the things they are unhappy with are not always unreasonable. They're just (IMO) looking at the wrong villains.
So, talking to the mason about undocumented labor and how that affects him could be useful. Etc.
But I really do think that Trump's base - the more or less 27-ish percent hard core - are basically unshakeable and there is nothing I'm gonna say or do that will move that.
If bad things happen to them, personally, or to someone in their family or close circle of friends, it could make a dent. Other than that, it ain't gonna happen.
Oddly, the nearest thing to really undermining his base support that I can think of was Trump et al saying that people shouldn't carry firearms to a protest. If there's one thing that might pry some of his base away, it's any hint of weakness around the 2nd A.
The paranoid style has always been a significant factor in the US. They aren't going away.
On “What fresh hell is this?”
In early 20th century photographic evidence was challenged because photos were easy to fake. Arthur Conan Doyle famously fell for fake fairy photos (alliteration coincidental) and in turn used the argument in 'The Lost World' (where the claim that the dino photos were fake gets countered by presenting a living pterodactyl; movie adaptations tend to replace it with a T-Rex for effect).
I think we face a double danger: 1) people believing convincing fakes and 2) people not believing reality taking it for convincing fakes.
The 'filling the zone with <semisolid digestive final product>' is based on exactly that. They recognized that they can win by making people believe nothing is real anymore (just 'opinion') or making it near impossible to find the truth in a deluge of untruth (and meaningless garbage for further dilution). Some will believe anything said loud enough, few will seek the actual truth and a majority stops trying and turns away disgusted but passive. One can run the show with that mixture.
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI 'evidence'. I believe that this is just a matter of time and would guess that it will first be tried on a (surviving) ICE victim by using AI doctored footage 'proving' that the victim tried to assault ICEistas with a deadly weapon first.
"
It comes down to this, social media is a communications technology that we are only just starting to adapt to. AI is another technology we will have to learn to use properly. Eventually, we will figure out how to use them without them being used abusively. The operative word being eventually.
Unfortunately, it will take us a while. Those of a historical bent might look at how our (great) great grandparents eventually dealt with "yellow journalism". Then, as now, a new technology for distributing information blossomed while distributing lots of misinformation. Over the course of decades, most (by now means all but most) people figured out that the tabloids were not reliable sources. Amusing, perhaps, but not reliable.
The challenge, once again, will be surviving while we figure out how the adjust and then roll out those adjustments across the population.
"
AI video is going to destroy civilization.
i'm 80% serious about that.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
One thing about doing farm work. Nothing else you will ever do qualifies as "hard work."
"
If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
Makes me recall a now-humorous memory. One summer my father sent me to spend a week with one of his cousins who owned a family farm. What did I get from that week? A life-long determination to acquire skills that would let me work in a climate-controlled environment where I didn't have to lift heavy things. Or put my fingers in the near neighborhood of rotary machinery with blades and no safety cover.
"
These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
Combines, like cars, are computers on wheels. Or tracks. And almost autonimus. Though the custom cutters may not have cutting-edge equipment, their customers may not have digitized field layouts.
"
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
Many years back now, the Colorado General Assembly was considering a bill, introduced by rural Republican members, that was basically a license for the sheriffs' departments in rural counties to hassle short brown ag workers. Once word got out, the eastern plains wheat farmers began getting calls from the custom cutters** saying they were just going to skip Colorado if the bill passed. Typically something like, "All my crews are legal, but I'm not going to put them at the mercy of your sheriff's asshole deputies." The bill died.
** Custom cutters are groups with one or more big combines and a bunch of trucks who harvest vast wheat fields when they're ripe. It's migratory work, starting in Texas and moving north as the summer progresses. Really erratic work. If it rains you can't harvest, and sometimes getting the job done in time means working by headlights all night long. Farmers, or even small groups of farmers, can't afford big combines. These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
"
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
"
loved this phrase:
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.