It’s kind of a difficult issue. Jury nullification has been used for both good and bad, with the simplest and most obvious examples being from Civil War type stuff - people who unambiguously broke the law against helping slaves escape have had their verdicts nullified. Good thing. But also people who lynched black people in the south have had their verdicts nullified. Bad thing.

Making sure that verdicts are determined purely based on the law and whether the law was broken means that people need to work to change the law, they can’t just apply the law unevenly by nullifying against some defendants and not against others. So I can see the case for nullification being a bad thing. Ideally, you deal with that by removing or reworking the law so that it doesn’t come to the point of needing nullification.

But, well, reality isn’t ideal. Still, it’s unavoidable - as long as a jury can’t be forced to explain the reasoning behind their verdict beyond insisting ‘I was not convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt’ and as long as a jury verdict of Not Guilty is final and cannot be retried, jury nullification will de facto exist. That said, it’s the entire system not just ‘this judge’ that is attempting to prevent jury nullification from happening. The judge’s question about following the law is boilerplate standard basically everywhere, and it’s a systematic and intentional attempt to weed out potential jury nullifiers.

That’s exactly the reason for those questions. So they can ask ‘would you consider using jury nullification’ without informing people that jury nullification exists.

And also so that if you at some point admit something that sounds like you’re voting not guilty because you disagree with the law, they can kick you off the jury and possibly charge you with perjury.

If you ever find yourself in a jury and intend to nullify, you must not admit it ever: you must maintain simply that you are not convinced by the evidence.

Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.

It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.

Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.

No shit! That’s our fucking election system. After the primaries, we wind up withtwo candidates that most people don’t like, and we vote against the one we think is worse. It’s been this way for a very long time. Case in point:

https://youtu.be/riDypP1KfOU?si=xwlInd1CS9p7rYcT

Acting like this is shocking news is disingenuous bullshit.

Nope, wouldn’t really be in less danger. That’s something that bothers and concerns me, people act like it’s Trump that’s the problem, but he’s really kind of irrelevant. This is the Republican party, this is all Republicans. Trump is not some bizarre outlier, at least not in the sense of the things he wants to do and will push for and enable as President. Every Republican wants those too.

I did years ago when Google started censoring my search results even with safe search off.

Unfortunately Bing is doing it too now and I can’t find a search engine that isn’t, though I would love to learn about one that isn’t.

The big question is how many times to press it. Once at least is a given. It does specify the death as gruesome, so I don’t really want the death, but I’d also like enough money to not have to worry again until a non gruesome death.

Like, if it was painless death, I’d probably say something like 20 or 30 times, but with a gruesome one…maybe 5 max, or perhaps even less. Still, one or two pushes is a given.

One of the things that really angers me about supposed second amendment supporters is their quiet acceptance of laws infringing on my right to bear any arm that is not a gun. In most states where it is legal to carry guns around, there are way more restrictions on carrying things like knives, swords, polearms, etc.

I bet some people flashed that one and such too, but I could find no indication that it was shut down because of that.

It feels like society has backslid tremendously on some freedoms in the past 15 years, particularly where it comes to prudishness.

These days we even have otherwise progressive people jumping on the prude bandwagon along with hyper religious controlling anti feminists and it just makes for such strange bedfellows.

Gorsuch is the one that, in at least one case, Obergefell vs Hodges, was honest in his textual approach. The law said on account of sex and he ruled based on that.

No idea his record on other things, and it’s probably not as good anywhere he can willfully misinterpret more easily, but at least in that case the text was so unambiguous he could rule no other way.

So civil asset forfeiture may well be another one like that, where the text is unambiguous enough he can’t rule differently because he actually has a line he won’t cross when it comes to completely ignoring the straightforward meaning of the law.

I’m more surprised at Thomas, while also being utterly unsurprised that the ‘liberal’ justice isn’t against it in all forms.

Yeah, these projects done by one or two people could be better with a larger team, but it’s definitely not a matter of hiring a big pile of people suddenly.

The ideal size is probably a couple dozen people, but scaling up to even that will take months since the one person currently in charge has to do a lot. And it’ll almost fully pause work on the project for a while.

Cause if there’s one person, they’ve got to find all the candidates, do all the hiring, then bring people up to speed.

The real problem is if the person who made it doesn’t have the skills to manage even a small group of people.

I don’t understand the complaints about the expansions for these games. Ok, there’s a lot of them? But they’re generally good. And if you don’t want them, just…stop updating and stay on whatever version you liked?

And unlike most, they make it easy to play an older version. Did I like a particular patch better and hate all that’s come since then? Easy to roll back to it. What do people want…for them to not put out expansions?

Some of them, sure, but there are a lot of stories of how many lies recruiters will tell you to get you to sign on, so a pretty significant number are genuinely bad people.

So one thing I don’t fully understand is this: the secret service is required by law to protect the former president, but…is there anything that actually requires the state of New York to accommodate the secret service in doing so?

In theory, couldn’t the state of New York just actually throw Trump in prison, no special privileges, and also no special accommodations for the secret service?

You take off the glasses during totality. Only during totality is it safe to look.

Metroid is an interesting example. In some of the games she definitely counts as having no personality or character, but overall in the series she’s been given a story and characterization with personality. Zelda games are in a similar boat; Link shows little personality in most of them but does have an established overall story and personality.

In cases like those two I’ll consider them, but the lack of personality in game is a point against them regardless of the gender involved and honestly that’s discouraged me from playing many games like that (including both those series) for a long while.

Way I see it, modern games have no excuse not to either let me create my own character or give the predefined character a strong personality that shows throughout the entire game.

When the protagonist’s character, personality, and story is significant, then that’s fine. If I’m playing a game like that I’m not playing a generic character that could be either and therefore should absolutely be a choice.

I’m fine playing a game like the Witcher, Red Dead 2, etc, cause those are the stories of that guy.

Where I won’t play is games that give you a generic protagonist with little to no personality but restrict you to male only, or even I suppose female only, although this is incredibly rare and I haven’t run across it myself.

That’s awesome. I have played Deus Ex, since I give old games that leeway, whereas there’s absolutely no excuse for new ones, but it might be enjoyable to give it another run with that mod, so thanks!

Nice to hear. I just don’t play games that don’t have female character options, unless the character actually matters and has a personality that is a major part of the game, like say, Geralt. I leave old games some leeway, but nice to hear they’re fixing that in this old one, means I’ll probably give it a try just based on that alone.