Are you a cat?

The ol Texas loophole.

Quarterly profits is the only goal? Guess we’ll only think 3 months ahead.

And instead we get politicians worse than VEEP. Ouch.

They said with suspicious confidence…

Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.

The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It’s like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.

If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you’ve got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).

Has this shown to be effective at stopping bots? It seems like you’d just be a few bad actors to ruin the system

I don’t think so. The main reason Facebook is so bad is it’s engagement algorithm. It is designed to maximize user engagement to sell adds, and it does that by putting outrage inspiring posts in front of users so that they have an emotional response and stay engaged. Using a human voting system instead of an outrage algorithm to determine what content people is exactly why I enjoy this platform over the other social media platforms.

Is there still rage bait here? Of course! Is it systematically shoved down your throat? No.

I was assuming you’d make an account with the ID for the govt instance and use anonymous accounts for all other browsing. At least that’s what I would do.

I’m not familiar with web of trust. What does that mean?

I believe there is existing precedent from SCOTUS that official government Twitter accounts were not allowed to block citizens accounts due to it being a ‘public square’. So that was a govt official taking the action of silencing someone’s ability to respond to them on social media protected by 1A. If the PLATFORM had blocked that user it would have been perfectly valid, since the GOVT did not silence a citizen’s speech.

I believe having the govt run the instance would make the entire forum subject to 1A in a way current social media is not. Would love a constitutional scholar to chime in, but that’s my argument.

I also don’t get the impression there is a large bot presence here today. I do think if the platform was used as a normal communication network between constituient and representative it would probably become a target for foreign and domestic bots.

Yup. The people pushing AI are not concerned with the social or economic reprocussions of pushing AI. They just want line go up.

The “Don’t Look Up” greed + willful ignorance will crush us all.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Oh yeah, location sharing will have almost no effect those risks. Totally agree.

Just disagreeing that low probability of occurrence automatically means the risk assessment should be low.

Risk assessment is probability and severity. The probability can be vanishingly low, but if the severity is astoundingly high then acting like a high risk situation could be appropriate.

Take asteroids. The last planet killer to hit us was 94million years ago. A rudimentary estimate could put the probably as 1:94mil. The severity of an asteroid impact of that magnitude is off the charts, so it is reasonable to consider it a risk and act accordingly to spend resources to search for and track asteroid trajectories.

The severity of abduction, murder, and rape is probably pretty high for most people, so considering it a risk even with a very small probability is not unreasonable.

This was my first thought too. I guess clouds are scary to me now.

I agree it feels very slow, but identifying the correct action and then building consensus around that action takes time. Once consensus is built it is very stable though. That is supposed to be the biggest benefit of democracy; stability built through coalition.

I’m loving this saga. Better love story than Twilight.

Thank you for the write up. That distinction makes a lot of sense.