SirEDCaLot

Obviously the right of people to live is very important. But if somebody encourages them to end their own life, their right is not being taken away, they are just being given bad advice. If they choose to suicide, their right to live is being surrendered by them, by their own bad choice. Taking away somebody's right to live is murder. Encouraging somebody to do something stupid is harmful, but it is not murder. No more is it theft if I encourage you to set your money on fire and you do it. You choose to follow my obviously bad recommendation, you choose to set your own money on fire. That is your choice and your responsibility.

Making any sort of speech illegal is a slippery slope. Most civilized people would agree they don't want to read racist rhetoric, encouragements of suicide, etc. but when 'I don't want to read that' becomes 'I don't want you to be allowed to say that' you start forcing the morality of the majority on everybody. And that rarely ends up in good places, historically speaking.

Half-Life. I know there's been some successful efforts to modernize it, but those only bring it up to Source 2 era.

I would love a fully modern remake. Modern lighting and raytracing could do great things for the detail of a headcrab infected scientist.

Absolutely. Game had a great mix of large-scale, good pace of a fight, and social element.

VGW

Why do we force them to do that? How does that help? The condo could be just as easily bought by a single family. The only point I am making is that there are a few legitimate situations where a corporation would want to buy property and we should let them. Houses should be for people to live in. Not for giant corporations to invest in.

I mean full respect when I say this- but if you advocate for a law or policy, don't shy away from the hard questions about it. Think them through BEFORE you advocate for the policy, as part of your thought process of whether that's a good policy or not.

In this case, those hard questions are exactly why I'm NOT in favor of such a policy.

If you make it illegal to recommend suicide, you create a situation where anyone who says anything even vaguely pro-suicidal is open to both criminal prosecution and civil liability. So that guy who (without any desire to see the poster suicide) said take a long walk off a short pier now is facing criminal charges, will have a criminal record, may go to jail, and then he'll be sued by the family of the deceased and probably lose his life savings (or whatever he's not already spent on lawyers).
Or, what if it's not the disturbed guy from the scenario who suicides, but some other random person a month later and they see that the 'long walk off a short pier' post was in that person's browser history? Do we blame that person for every single person who suicides who might have read that thread?
That in turn has a chilling effect on any online discourse and you'll get a lot more people using proxies and VPNs and anonymizer systems just for basic online discussion lest something they say be taken badly and the same happen to them.

And then in the wake of some publicized suicide, some politician will say it's time to clean up the Internet to keep our kids safe, and they'll task an investigative agency with proactively seeking out such things. Suddenly online message boards are crawling with cops, and if you say anything even vaguely pro-suicidal your info gets subpoena'd from the platform and you get cops knocking on your door with a court summons.

Is this 'better'? I don't think it is.

To be clear-- I have great value for the sanctity of human life. I don't want to see anyone dead, including from suicide. I think encouraging anyone to suicide is abhorrent and inhuman and I would personally remove such posts and/or ban such users from any platform I moderate.
But that's my personal standards, and I don't think it right or practical to throw people in jail or ruin their lives because they don't agree.

I also think one part of free speech is if someone else wants to create a toxic cesspool community, I don't have the right to order them not to. I'm okay with requiring a warning label on such a space though.

I think I might be okay with encouragement of homicide or murder or terrorism being at least somewhat illegal.

Question for you though, let's say you have a person with numerous documented mental health problems, who has been suicidal for quite some time, they post some awful shit on a forum one day when upset. One of the responses is to go take a long walk off a short pier. Only they go and do that, with a bunch of rocks in a backpack, and they drown.

What punishment would you prescribe for the person who told them to take a long walk off a short pier?

Making things illegal is easy, but all the law does at the end of the day is a list of if you do X your punishment will be Y.
So for the dude that told him to take a long walk off a short pier, what is the punishment?

Saying that whatever Trump does is political suicide misses the biggest issue with this election-

Nobody cares what either of them say because an awful lot of the electorate simply isn't listening.

The Trump voters would keep voting for Trump even if he joined the Nazi party. The rest of voters have either tuned out or are pushing Kamala simply because she's not Trump so she must be better.
An awful lot of people have just made up their minds and aren't listening for anything new.

So having a headline that Trump says something offensive is news to nobody. What would have been political suicide a decade or two ago is business as usual today. Whatever standards we once have politicians to, we no longer hold them to.

More likely, most of the sources that produce photos and videos would not be using the digital signatures. Professional cameras for journalists probably would have the signature chip. Cheapo Chinese surveillance cameras? Unlikely.

Yes, but quality over quantity. I was a redditor back in the early days, pre Digg migration. Being a redditor meant something back then, almost universally meant you were tolerant, usually but not always somewhat liberal, and with a very strong sense of fairness. I remember a good friend of mine started dating someone and when they mention their new partner was a redditor I am immediately thought oh good, that means they are very likely a good person (they ended up married). Reddit has of course grown since then, but not all of the growth is good. I used to go there for engaging discourse, knowing that I was surrounded by other relatively smart people and we could have respectful discussion on almost any subject. Those discussions are few and far between now.

So yes I would like Lenny and the fediverse to grow, but I am more interested in what kind of people we attract than simply growing numbers. When I would rather do is create a reputation that the fediverse is a place to come before respectful discourse and sharing of ideas, not just scrolling through page after page of mindless content like on a big tech social platform (FB / Insta / TikTok / etc).

Eventually, we will just have to accept that photographic proof is no longer proof.

There are ways that you could guarantee an image is valid. You would need a hardware security module inside the camera, which signs a hash of the picture with its own built-in security key that can't be extracted and a serial number that it generates. That can prove that an image came from a particular camera, and if you change even one pixel of that image the signature won't match anymore. I don't see this happening anytime soon. Not mainstream at least. There are one or two camera manufacturers that offer this as a feature, but it's not on things like surveillance cameras or cell phones nor will it be anytime soon.