I like summer and if that racist shithead Michael Richards disagrees I’m doubling down.

It takes work to turn them into useful search engines. Set up librewolf. Drop in at least a search and a fetch agent. Wrap it in a some prompts to make sure you get actual links.

On my extremely non-scientific scale I’d rate that setup somewhere between barebones Kagi and pre-enshitified Google in terms of results.

I’m hopeful that an actual agent framework will do a better job that’s significantly more work. If you just log onto a SaaS LLM you’ll get very unpredictable search results.

Right. I forgot that Americans think anything older than 100 years is ancient history.

No they absolutely weren’t. Commonwealth only worked to promote cooperation between member states. It was not like it had any real power over any of the member states.

How would you categorize the status of Canada vis a vis Britain before the Balfour declaration?

No because if they tried, it wouldn’t work. Which makes Canada NOT a vassal state. And it wasn’t not even in theory.

Do you realize that’s exactly what, “For all practical purposes…” means?

It depends on how pedantic we want to get.

Technically, Canada was a vassal of the UK until fairly recently. The laws dismantling that technicality started in 1926 and were mostly finalized in 1982. They still have an odd vestige of that where the Canadia monarch is defined as whoever happens to be the British monarch at the time.

For all practical purposes, the Brits haven’t held sovereignty over Canada in ages.

While the US was never officially Canada’s suzerain, the vast differences in economies, militaries, and populations mean that diplomatic and trade negotiations are tilted in the favor of the US.

The whole advantage of soft power over hard power is that it enforces vassalage without looking like it’s enforcing vassalage.

It would be pretty messed up if the punishment came before the crime.

My point, in this case is that the crime has been ongoing. Bullying and harassment aren’t new. What’s new is that we now have a lot of it recorded. This gives us an unprecedented ability to prosecute a class of crimes that people have been committing with impunity.

The biggest downside is that it would likely be short-lived. If there were a bunch of headlines about people getting giant civil judgements, bullies would probably learn to be more careful about generating evidence of their crimes.

That would likely initially focus on attempting to hide the videos from the general public but I suspect they would eventually learn that doesn’t work; courts can compel discovery. They would probably also try to modify their on-screen behavior so it doesn’t technically qualify as a crime but I expect they would mostly fail at that.

That said there would likely always be some cohort of dumb criminals who continue to record their misdeeds. We still see cases where people discuss their crimes over unencrypted email and we still see cases of criminals taking selfies with their crimes

Sort of.

I am making an assumption that there are some people who are likely highly motivated to take action. Parents often care about bullying of their own children, even when the rest of the school doesn’t. We wouldn’t need all parents to care, just a few of them.
I’m not assuming that lawyers are generally willing to work for free but I do assume that they like money and are willing to take cases on contingency, if they think the case is strong enough.
I’m also going on my understanding that video evidence tends to be fairly strong and that this translates into a higher probability of a favorable judgement with less work on the lawyer’s part.

So it’s less that I’m making an assumption than that I’m asking where the gap in the above reasoning chain lies.

Can someone explain why this isn’t actually a solution to an old problem? We used to have issues with various forms of harassment that were not addressed because they relied on unreliable testimony. Now we actually have people creating hard evidence of their actions.

The behaviors described in this article are banned in every school I or my children have ever attended. How difficult would it be for the parents of any of these victims to hire a lawyer to absolutely wipe the floor with these people? Don’t these videos basically put the perpetrators heads on silver platters?

The book is available online from several sources. You can get it from a giant retailer or directly from the publisher. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/how-to-sell-a-genocide/

Libraries are an other great booster. Most libraries let patrons request books to add to the collection. They can typically borrow books from other libraries in their network. They also track how many people borrow books and how long the wait lists are.

There’s a substantial school of philosophy that holds that continuously celebrating the first time someone from group X does thing Y tends to degrade public opinion of X, rather than supporting it.

The reasoning is that if the public mostly hears about group X in terms of the first time they did something that someone else has done, it entrenches the idea that group X is behind whoever did it first.

It essentially claims that celebrating firsts is initially good for group X but becomes negative over time. They would point out that the promise of “paving the way” rarely pans out. We saw the first woman elected as prime minister in 1960. People born then could be grandparents today and it’s still relatively rare to see women as the head of state.

From that perspective such articles would better support various groups if they focused on the accomplishments of the subjects rather than their identity. We don’t generally celebrate Ada Lovelace as the first female programmer; we celebrate her as the first programmer.

Note that I’m also making an assumption in terms of goals. The above only makes sense if you believe that it’s more important for an article to convince non-believers than to reassure believers.

The average Windows users isn’t making the OS decision at all. They’re told by their boss that the company uses Windows and they’re given a Windows laptop.

When they get that laptop they sign something with fine print that tells them not to mess with the OS or they’ll get fired.

How do those suckers support themselves or their families when they get fired for violating the corporate IT policy?