SirEDCaLot

Doesn't have to be a crypto miner. Just has to be any sort of computationally intense task. I think the ideal would be some sort of JavaScript that integrates that along with the captcha. For example, have some sort of computationally difficult math problem where the server already knows the answer, and the answer is then fed into a simple video game engine to procedurally generate a 'level'. The keyboard and mouse input of the player would then be fed directly back to the server in real time, which could decide if it's actually seeing a human playing the correct level.

Ok Cool. I would point out that back in the '90s, we gave big telecom a bunch of money and deregulation in exchange for 40 megabit fiber everywhere. We didn't get it, not for a decade or three. So I'm just saying, whatever is put on offer here should be performance-based.

Fairly expensive, as you'd need a new disposable submarine for each execution.

Most execution is actually pretty barbaric. The multi drug cocktail used for executions in the US is a horrible system that was designed by a non-doctor. The first drug knocks you out, the second drug paralyzes you, and the 3rd drug stops your heart. Problem is if they don't give you enough of the first drug, you can be awake while your heart is being stopped which is apparently quite painful, but since you're immobilized you can't communicate that at all.

The only humane way I am aware of to kill a condemned person would be have them breathe pure nitrogen. Nitrogen is all around us- the air we breathe is 80% nitrogen so the body doesn't react negatively to it. But without that 20% oxygen, the brain asphyxiates and dies in just a few minutes. The prisoner would simply pass out and not wake up.
This protocol is often used to euthanize laboratory animals as it is considered among the most humane.
It's pretty fucked up that lab rats get a better death than humans.

In our town we had a Tesla shoot through red traffic lights near our local school barely missing a child crossing the road. The driver was looking at their lap (presumably their phone). I looked online and apparently autopilot doesn’t work with traffic lights, but FSD does?

There's a few versions of this and several generations with different capability. The early Tesla Autopilot had no recognition of stop signs, it was literally just 'cruise control that keeps you in your lane'. FSD for sure does recognize stop signs, traffic lights, etc and reacts correctly to them. I BELIEVE that the current iteration of Traffic Aware Cruise Control (what you get if you don't pay extra for FSD or Enhanced Autopilot) will stop for traffic lights but I could be wrong on that. I know it detects pedestrians but its detection isn't nearly as advanced as FSD.

I will give you that in theory, the time-of-flight data from a LiDAR pulse will give you a more reliable point cloud than anything you'd get from cameras. But I also know Tesla is doing things with cameras that border on black magic. They gave up on getting images out of the cameras and are now just using the raw photon count data from the sensor, and with the AI trained it can apparently detect edges with only a few photons of difference between pixels (below the noise floor). And I can say from experience that a few times I've been in blackout rainstorms where even with full wipers I can barely see anything, and the FSD visualization doesn't skip a beat and it sees other cars before I do.

Would you still feel the same about Tesla if your car injured/killed someone or if someone you care about was injured/killed by a Tesla?

As a Level 2 system, the Tesla is not capable of injuring or killing someone. The driver is responsible for that.

But I'd ask- if a Tesla saw YOUR loved one in the road, and it would have reacted but it wasn't in FSD mode and the human driver reacted too slowly, how would you feel about that? I say this not to be contrarian, but because we really are approaching the point where the car has better situational awareness than the human.

If we can put extra sensors in and it objectively makes it safer why don’t we? Self driving cars are a luxury.

For the reason above with the loved one. If you can use cameras and make a system that costs the manufacturer $3000/car, and it's 50 times safer than a human, or use LiDAR and cost the manufacturer $10,000/car, and it's 100 times safer than a human, which is safer?
The answer is the cameras, because it will be on more cars, thus deliver more overall safety.
I understand the thinking that 'Elon cheaped out, Tesla FSD is a hack system on shitty hardware that uses clever programming to work around a cut-rate sensor suite'. But I'd also argue- if they can get similar performance out of a camera, and put it on more cars, doesn't that do more to overall improve safety?

In the example above, if the car didn't have the self driving package because the guy couldn't afford it, wouldn't you prefer that a decent but better than human self driving system was on the car?

Don't have the paper, my info comes mainly from various interviews with people involved in the thing. Elon of course, Andrej Karpathy is the other (he was in charge of their AI program for some time).

They apparently used to use feature detection and object recognition in RGB images, then gave up on that (as generating coherent RGB images just adds latency and object recognition was too inflexible) and they're now just going by raw photon count data from the sensor fed directly into the neural nets that generate the 3d model. Once trained this apparently can do some insane stuff like pull edge data out from below the noise floor.

This may be of interest-- This is also from 2 years ago, before Tesla switched to occupancy networks everywhere. I'd say that's a pretty good equivalent of a LiDAR scan...

I'd do a few things.

First, make signing up computationally expensive. Some javascript that would have to run client side, like a crypto miner or something, and deliver proof to the server that some significant amount of CPU power was used.

Second, some type of CAPTCHA. ReCaptcha with the settings turned up a bit is a good way to go.

Third, IP address reputation checks. Check IP addresses for known spam servers, it's the same thing email servers do. There's realtime blacklists you can query against. If the client IP is on them, don't allow registration but only allow application to register.

he fact that a given piece of policy is designed to reduce crime and save lives and does you no harm isn’t good enough

And this is the core of the pro/anti debate, right here.
I accept that gun control proposals are intended to reduce crime and save lives. I accept that anti-gun people generally have the best intentions, they want to save lives (I do too).
I (along with most pro-gun people) just don't believe that gun control laws will have a significant effect on reducing gun crime or overall making our society safer.

Also, let's talk about Democrats. I feel I have some authority to speak on this subject as I am personally registered as a Democrat, and I come from a very blue state (Connecticut). I identify as liberal-libertarian- I think the married gay couple should have AR15s to defend themselves, their adopted children, and their legal marijuana farm from criminals, secure in the knowledge that universal health care will be there for them if they get hurt. I suspect we'd agree on a great many ways the GOP is utterly failing our nation.

But one thing that infuriates me about the left these days is an inability to even consider the possibility that we are wrong about anything. There's the Left side, the Correct side, and the wrong side. And if you don't support most of the liberal agenda you're the so called deplorables and fuck you.

I'll give a perfect example- the AR-15 rifle. There's a big push to ban AR15s and similar rifles.

But consider FBI expanded homicide table 8. About 300-400 people each year are killed by rifles, that includes both 'assault' rifles and other rifles like hunting rifles.
To put that in perspective, about 300-350 people per year get struck by lightning. Getting struck by lightning is so rare we make jokes about it.
In comparison, every year about 800 people (mostly children) die from being tangled in their own bedsheets. And about 180,000 people per year in the US die of obesity-related issues.
So WHY are we burning tons of political capital and alienating all gun owners to ban something that is statistically not a serious threat to our society? If we put half that much effort into fighting obesity, we'd save 10x as many lives.

This has been promised for literally years. But it shows how out of touch they are- they think people are closing their subs and leaving over mod tools and if they make the shitty ad infested non accessible official reddit app have mod tools everyone will be happy.

People aren't leaving because of fucking mod tools. People are leaving because of lack of respect. People are leaving because Reddit said the quiet part out loud- that we are only there to provide them content and ad impressions and what we actually want doesn't matter one bit to them. That thousands or millions of users expressing anger is "noise" to be ignored.

Tell your users their strong opinions are 'noise' and those users will go be noisy elsewhere.

I won’t push a button that forces us into a no-compromise position. And anyone who would is the enemy of progress. Is the enemy of the entire human race.

I don't EVER suggest no compromise. I don't EVER suggest that nothing should ever change (and I agree that is anti-progress). I suggest that ignoring a previous compromise is disingenuous. I say that it's valid to say 'we compromised last year, we're living the compromise today, why should I compromise again if I get nothing in return?' And I suggest we should focus on doing what we agree on, rather than fighting over what we don't.

So here's a compromise I (as a pro-gun person) would agree to.
You get universal background checks. Every permanent gun transfer between people requires one. Per existing law, these checks can never be used to build a database. The government must provide the check for free (right now it costs about $50 to do the check at a gun store). And there's an exemption for temporary transfers between known people, and transfers between family members (IE, I can lend my buddy a rifle for a hunting trip without 'transferring' it to him and then back to me), and father can pass guns down to son without paperwork).
In exchange, gun owners get national reciprocity. That means if they get a carry permit from their home state, that permit is valid in all other states, just like a drivers license. They must comply with all applicable laws of the state they visit, for example magazine size limits and where it's permissible to carry.

That IMHO is a real compromise. You get something, I get something. What you get has a few limits from what I want, what I get has a few limits from what you want.

What do you think? Would you take that?

I wrote out a whole reply to your various points (which I'll send if you want) but one thing in your post caught my eye as the most vital and important...

I want training and licensing, universal registration and background checks, widespread mental healthcare, and poverty intervention. I want to see that immediately.

I'm fairly pro-gun (if you hadn't figured that out already). I also DESPERATELY want widespread mental healthcare and poverty intervention. I want to see these things IMMEDIATELY and in great quantity. As in, let's pass a bill today and start this vitally important work tomorrow. This to me is vital to the health of the nation that I love, because the nation is made up of its people and too many of those people are poor and suffering. I don't think it is (or should be) the American way to just sit and laugh at our fellow countrymen and women and let them suffer while we live the high life.

We disagree on everything else, but I think we agree on this. So why don't we set aside arguing over the things we disagree on, and focus on implementing the things we DO agree would benefit our nation?

And that was the meat of my original point. When it comes to guns, I suspect you and I are fairly opposite. But I suspect that when it comes to taking care of our fellow humans, you and I are not so different.

Yet the political machines on both sides have us at each others' throats over gun rights vs gun control, while they push for their own power. What we (people on both sides of the aisle) SHOULD be doing is TALKING to each other, figuring out what we agree on, and focusing on getting THAT done.
But top of just about everyone's list is end corruption in Washington, so there's a vested interest in making sure we keep fighting each other rather than working together. And right now that interest is winning.

If you could push a button to make a deal, that was 'you give up further pushes for gun control, but in exchange we get universal mental health care and poverty intervention', would you push that button?

FWIW, in the opposite- 'would you codify gun regulations as they currently are, but in exchange get universal mental health care and poverty intervention' I'd push that button in a heartbeat.

I don't get why not wait a few days for the release then? If the problem is that easy to fix, is there some other issue that needs to be released ASAP?

Or maybe power grids are teetering because utilities raked in profit for the last two decades by ignoring upgrades that would obviously be necessary... Just a thought :)

My utility sells $400 Wi-Fi touchscreen thermostats for like $25, the catch being you let them turn your AC down/off when grid load peaks. A few truckloads of thermostats are cheaper than grid upgrades, so they do the thermostats and kick the can down the road more.