This is the difference between standing on a street corner shouting "shit" and taking a shit on a street corner.
The court is generally pretty adept at navigating the difference between "a bookstore that has some spicy books" and "a sex shop that has some non-spicy books".
Most modern social media is the latter, but for trash and propaganda, rather than sex. So why doesn't the court apply the same rule that it's okay to check IDs on entry?
Probably because there are reasonable principles to draw on about withholding access to explicit sexual content from children, but there are no similar principles about trash or propaganda. Trash and propaganda are both pretty clearly within the remit of permitted free speech.
Bookstores that carry porn are porn shops. Apps that carry porn are porn shops, and since the app store has apps that carry porn, the app store is a porn shop.
Can you back that up? Basically nowhere else I'm aware of do we draw that kind of expansive categorization. A gas station isn't a book store if they have one rack of books next to all the snacks. A book store isn't an electronics shop if they have a rack of e-readers.
The world is very complex. It's effectively impossible to write laws on most topics that perfectly capture all nuance. Which is why we have a judicial system that can look at a law and a situation and say "nope, this law (or this usage of a law) is incorrect". Which is what's happened here, where the court issued an injunction on enforcement of the Texas law.
Far from it, but I'd rather not drag things so severely off topic. I'll just point out that you used to be able to mail order some surprising (at least by modern sensibilities) stuff.
I chuckled, but presumably it's useful for applications where you want data types to take up the same amount of space, like for matrices or database columns? Or maybe where you coerce different data types into boolean? The language offers WordBool and ByteBool too, so they're pretty consistent. And AFAIK, there aren't any languages where you can specifically allocate only a single bit for a single boolean.
You kind of can in C with bit size specifications on struct members, but you’ll still face the problem that C’s minimum alignment is one byte - so a struct containing a single 1-bit field will still occupy a byte in memory. However, it does let you “allocate” different bits within a byte for different member fields.
C++ has vector<bool>, which is supposed to be an efficient bit-packed vector of Booleans, but due to C++ constraints it doesn’t quite behave like a container (unlike other vector<T>s). Of course, if you make a vector<bool> of a single bit, that’s still going to occupy much more than one bit in memory.
There are plenty of hardware specification languages where it’s trivial to “allocate” one bit, but those aren’t allocating from the heap in a traditional sense. (Simulators for these languages will often efficiently pack the bits in memory, but that’s more of an implementation detail than a language guarantee).
chimpanzees are animals, and the only people who think differently are the straw men in the imaginations of people I prefer not to spend time talking to.
"But what if black people really _are_ subhuman?" No thanks. Not biting. I disagree, but arguing that topic just makes me sad and angry, and I've never changed a racist's mind.
Try looking at the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve. What isn't beneficial is sometimes retained as long as the cost isn't bad enough to impair reproduction.
> and then sort out everyone's status after the fact.
Did they do that? Or did they throw out the ones with valid visas too? (hint: It was the latter. Details are in the article.)
The bigger problem is that they "invalidate" your visa post-facto, on a whim, for whatever they want. Attend a political protest? Have a 20 year old bad check on your record despite having lived here for 50 years, since you were a young child? Embarrass a politician? I've seen all of those and more result in a legal immigrant having their visas cancelled and then thrown in jail until they can be deported.
* or governments fail to look far enough ahead, due to a bunch of small-minded short-sighted greedy petty fools.
Seriously, our government just announced it's slashing half a billion dollars in vaccine research because "vaccines are deadly and ineffective", and it fired a chief statistician because the president didn't like the numbers he calculated, and it ordered the destruction of two expensive satellites because they can observe politically inconvenient climate change. THOSE are the people you are trusting to keep an eye on the pace of development inside of private, secretive AGI companies?
While one in particular is speedracing into irrelevance, it isn't particularly representative of the rest of the developed world (and hasn't in a very long time, TBH).
"irrelevance" yeah sure, I'm sure Europe's AI industry is going to kick into high gear any day now. Mistral 2026 is going to be lit. Maybe Sir Demis will defect Deepmind to the UK.
That's not what I was going for (I was more hinting at isolationist, anti-science, economically self-harming and freedoms-eroding policies), but if you take solace in believing this is all worth it because of "AI" (and in denial about the fact that none of those companies are turning a profit from it, and that there is no identified use-case to turn the tables down the line), I'm sincerely happy for you and glad it helps you cope with all the insanity!
I know, you wanted to vent about the USA and abandon the thread topic, and I countered your argument without even leaving the topic.
Like how I can say that the future of USA's AI is probably going to obliterate your local job market regardless of which country you're in, and regardless of whether you think there's "no identified use-case" for AI. Like a steamroller vs a rubber chicken. But probably Google's AI rather than OpenAI's, I think Gemini 3 is going to be a much bigger upgrade, and Google doesn't have cashflow problems. And if any single country out there is actually preparing for this, I haven't heard about it.
> I know, you wanted to vent about the USA and abandon the thread topic, and I countered your argument without even leaving the topic.
Accusations about being off-topic is really pushing it: you want to bet on governments' incompetence in dealing with AI, and I don't (on the basis that there are unarguably still many functional democracies out there), on the other hand, the thread you started about the state of Europe's AI industry had nothing to do with that.
> Like how I can say that the future of USA's AI is probably going to obliterate your local job market regardless of which country you're in
Nobody knows what the future of AI is going to look like. At present, LLMs/"GenAI" it is still very much a costly solution in need of a problem to solve/a market to serve¹. And saying that the USA is somehow uniquely positioned there sounds uninformed at best: there is no moat, all of this development is happening in the open, with AI labs and universities around the world reproducing this research, sometimes for a fraction of the cost.
> And if any single country out there is actually preparing for this, I haven't heard about it.
What is "this", effectively? The new flavour Gemini of the month (and its marginal gains on cooked-up benchmarks)? Or the imminent collapse of our society brought by a mysterious deus ex machina-esque AGI we keep hearing about but not seeing? Since we are entitled to our opinions, still, mine is that LLMs are a mere local maxima towards any useful form of AI, barely more noteworthy (and practical) than Markov chains before it. Anything besides LLMs is moot (and probably a good topic to speculate about over the impending AI winter).
It's a dumb law, but, devil's advocate - isn't that how porn shops work? And porn shops also sell some non-porn items, too.