We already couldn't trust anything a politician said! But indeed, this is the moral equivalent of how Photoshop has nearly undermined photographic evidence. That leaves video, and it's starting to succumb. Synthetic video AI politician, well, Robert Heinlein wrote _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ in 1966.
It is much harder to look at a photograph now and say for sure it's real. Before photoshop, there were ways of manipulating photos, but they were much harder and did not yield nearly as good results. You can photoshop people into photos they were not originally in, doing things they have never done. Even Trump is having his hands enlarged in photos.
Maybe you're speaking specifically about "evidence" in the legal sense. I can't speak to that. But there are countless examples where you can't (and shouldn't) believe what you see, because it's not real.
Certainly it raises the bar for skepticism, but I can think of relatively few cases where a photoshopped image has driven a news cycle/key event because someone famous/important believed it to be real.
Most doctored images/videos get snuffed out by the media very quickly if they grow viral.
So because you can think of relatively few cases where key figures were duped, it therefore must not be a problem? That hypothesis fails to account for the rest of humanity.
I have a friend who believes in aliens. They showed me a video that someone had put together of "footage". They were seriously showing it to me as evidence, to convince me that they are real, based on this video. I was shocked they were so serious - and having a hard time containing my laughter.
I later found a number of other videos debunking the videos and clips that video was based off of - but my friend still believes in aliens, based on those videos. And this is someone I regularly have "intelligent" conversations with.
This change, the ability to put words in someones mouth, is the next photoshop. And it WILL have consequences to it, good and bad. And we are not prepared for that, as a society - we haven't gotten over photoshop yet.
Epsilon is great. Let me offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It's a secret weapon, an unfair advantage we have, those of us in the know.
I was so happy to come upon it as a sadly ex-Symbolics-ZMacs user (and ex-MIT-TECO-Emacs user) when first confronted with a 286 system, and I have have been using it ever since. I buy a few copies every few years, typically for team members who wonder what's that magic I keep using. At my present company, I fought (and won) a three-month battle with the Software Standards Committee to be allowed to install it.
As a Windows developer I routinely do all editing in Epsilon, switching to Visual Studio only to compile and debug. To draft this very message, I switched away from my web browser to Epsilon. Steven Doerfler provides great customer service on the very rare occasion that I need to turn to him.
If you have any emacs in your soul, buy Epsilon. Now.
Well, the first N specific things that come to mind have already been expressed pretty well by previous comments here (including your own "snappier"). The next 10*N things are already expressed pretty well in the 2009-format-but-still-valid-content marketroid material on lugaru.com. As it happens, I haven't found a need to explore a universe of community extensions because right out of the "box" Epsilon does nearly everything I need, and my few personal extensions take care of the rest. Beyond that, I no longer care to engage in yet another emacs religious war, and emacs does not need any bad-mouthing from me.
I can understand and respect that you're reluctant to write an endorsement of Epsilon and/or a comparison with Emacs. But I'd like to let you know that while starting to read your comment I was looking forward to just that, and now find myself a bit disappointed that you're not sharing some reasons for your enthusiasm.
I was a big fan of Epsilon back in the days when it was an alternative to WordStar and I think I still own an original (paid) copy on floppy disks, but I'm not familiar enough (any more) with its feature set to meaningfully answer the question of what qualifies it above Emacs.
Personally, I'm considering paying $250 just for the nostalgia value. And I love fast editors with an uncluttered surface. The ability to edit arbitrarily long lines and binaries is certainly a plus. But I would appreciate, if you'd reconsider, hearing more arguments to knock me off the fence.
