ricecake

The reassuring thing is that AI actually makes sense in a washing machine. Generative AI doesn't, but that's not what they use. AI includes learning models of different sorts. Rolling the drum a few times to get a feel for weight, and using a light sensor to check water clarity after the first time water is added lets it go "that's a decent amount of not super dirty clothes, so I need to add more water, a little less soap, and a longer spin cycle".

They're definitely jumping on the marketing train, but problems like that do fall under AI.

What stops people now? Like when people sell videos, articles of clothing, and such on sites like Only fans and what not is there policies that somehow punish people for offering more money for someone to meet up?

Most services that are sex work adjacent are extremely paranoid about not becoming associated with prostitution. The website itself can be held liable if they're found to harbor it.

Additionally, the risk of criminal penalties deters people, as well as the risk of social embarrassment from something coming to light. Legalization removes those concerns, and so demand increases.
To continue with the prohibition comparison: prohibition can never succeed, but it does reduce consumption. There's a segment of the population who would be willing to partake in whatever is being prohibited, but isn't interested enough to break the law of work through the criminal connections needed to make it happen.

The import of sex workers isn't really to do with the physical diversity. It's more to do with the willingness of the people, or lack thereof. Tricking someone from a poor country into coming to the US and then extorting them into prostitution is unfortunately often more cost effective than charging people more money.
It's why you see so many billboards and signs around international airports informing potential victims of human trafficking that they have rights and can get help.

It's why countries with more prosperous economies and democracies have higher levels of trafficking into them. People, on average, have more economic opportunities that don't involve prostitution and a greater tendency towards self determination.

Eh, anything interesting is going to be inside and out of sight. The desert is so big that people aren't going to be sneaking up on it without you noticing.

We're not going to rely on obscurity to keep our research sites secure. People who have worked at similar secure sites report parking at the meeting building, changing into their work coveralls, going through a security screening and then being driven for an hour or two in a bus with blacked out windows to work in a sealed building with no windows before being driven back in similar conditions.

Using your existing classified development facility has the advantage that you can keep activities at it at a roughly constant level, so anyone watching from a satellite can't tell if there's more or less activity that would indicate something interesting. Just make sure that a dozen busses show up every day, regardless of how many people are in them.

It's similar to how you can tell the Pentagons level of alert by looking at pizza delivery wait times at off hours on Google maps.

So, in case the main point of that part of my comment wasn't clear: I agree that legalization gives better opportunities to reduce harm, and that the goal is reduced net harm.

That being said, there's empirical evidence that legalization does increase human trafficking: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/

Tldr: legalization makes a substitute for trafficking available, but it also increases demand. Unlike alcohol, you can't scale the population of willing women on demand, so if demand scales faster than the substitute trafficking can increase past what was there before.

Something being the right way to reduce harm doesn't mean it doesn't have downsides, or increase another sort of harm to a lesser degree than what's reduced.
Being able to acknowledge and address the dual nature of harm reduction mechanisms is important to discussing them frankly.

With the porn issue, as well as prostitution, you have the unfortunate conflation of two different positions: "I don't want bad things to happen to women", and "I want everyone to follow my moral code".

It's an unfortunate reality that increases in demand for industries that can leverage human trafficking leads to an increase in human trafficking. It's not irrational for someone to be concerned with that.
For those people, discussion about how legalization has aggregate benefits, or how the legalization enables regulations that permit the outcomes to be better even though it's more common.

With the latter group you really can't argue effectively because their position wasn't arrived at out of concern for outcomes. Sexual assault being bad doesn't make something else not bad.

People used "function as a service", "managed *" or "compute as a service" for a bit, but serverless actually seemed to capture the gist of it for customers better. It may be marketing speak, but it does seem to be an effective shorthand for the value it provides.

In that example, he doesn't actually care about a wall. How does a wall benefit him? He cares about diverting money to his pocket, maintaining power, and staying out of prison.

The supreme court already gave him personal immunity for most acts he takes while president. He could literally order Thomas arrested for corruption and there's nothing the court could do to him.

Musk has utility while he potentially helps secure votes on appointments that matter for significant goals, but securing those appointments is also desirable for other Republicans, so musk isn't key to those plans.

That's the thing isn't it? You can't actually buy political influence, the closest you can get is the wink and nudge.
The only lever they have is threatening to not donate again.

Trump doesn't care if they donate to the GOP again. He's not running again. Musk and friends have served their purpose, or very nearly so. The promise of their donations can be leveraged to get the votes needed to ensure appointments that can help keep trump in power or out of jail at the end of his term, be they administrative, judicial or military.

Money can be useful to power, but it's not itself power.

I mean, if we're being technical we also can't be sure that when police shoot someone in the chest that that's what caused the person to die.

The press does have a tendency to avoid ascribing blame to police if they can avoid it. That doesn't make it not an egregious case of jumping through hoops to avoid it, and really quite scummy.

A restrained man was beaten for a while, and then died. If I handcuff someone to a table and then me and some friends beat him while he doesn't resist, including stomping on his crotch, absolutely no one will hesitate to say that I was filmed killing the man.

beating preceding New York prisoner’s death

New levels of passive voice to mask accountability unlocked!

Seriously, it's such a stretch to not say "video of prisoner being beaten to death".

Eeeeh, more debatable since someone would actually need to write the capability for the bot to talk to the platform. It's still a much lower threshold, but it's not a free ride.

They don't actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it's not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it's not a great textbook.

Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
It's also difficult to cite as a source because you can't actually specify who you're citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.

Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn't a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.