My bad, I guess I should have written a 5000 word essay detailing the intricate workings of the executive branch instead of a simple shorthand most people readily understand.

I'm glad to hear the president isn't actually important to the day to day operation of the executive branch. I guess I can stop caring who even gets elected.

I know people are focused on the implications for the upcoming election, but I find myself wondering "Who is running the country right now?"

I'm guessing the answer is something along the lines of "It's complicated", which should be a completely unacceptable answer for everyone.

At this point I'm much less concerned with his debate performance than the continued inaction while the supreme court runs the country into the ground. They just granted him a license to do far, far more than he has even hinted at and I very much doubt that is going to change.

photos

They aren't photos. They're photorealistic drawings done by computer algorithms. This might seem like a tiny quibble to many, but as far as I can tell it is the crux of the entire issue.

There isn't any actual private information about the girls being disclosed. The algorithms, for example, do not and could not know about and produce an unseen birthmark, mole, tattoo, piercing, etc. A photograph would have that information. What is being shown is an approxomation of what similar looking girls in the training set look like, with the girls' faces stiched on top. That is categorically different than something like revenge porn which is purely private information specific to the individual.

I'm sure it doesn't feel all that different to the girls in the photos, or to the boys looking at it for that matter. There is some degree of harm here without question. But we must tread lightly because there is real danger in categorizing algorithmic guesswork as reliable which many authoritarian types are desperate to do.

https://www.wired.com/story/parabon-nanolabs-dna-face-models-police-facial-recognition/

This is the other side of the same coin. We cannot start treating the output of neural networks as facts. These are error prone black-boxes and that fact must be driven hard into the consciousness of every living person.

For some, I'm sure purely unrelated reason, I feel like reading Phillip K Dick again...

cdparanoia I believe is what you're looking for. If the cli isn't your thing Asunder is a mostly successful gui for it. Ripped all my CDs this way, but it doesn't always detect skips/scratches and you should give any poor discs a listen to check.