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EarlKing

1,434 karma · joined March 18, 2021

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
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EarlKing··on Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks
Whether you're stowing, picking, diverting, or working the dock... you literally just grab someone to cover your position for a few minutes. That's it. There are process assistants present who can literally do that if they have to. There's no reason to deny a pregnant worker this except "This is making my day harder because I can't run my aisles at an absolute minimum head count and still stand around with my cart pretending to do useful work".

The only real case I could see where grabbing someone to cover you while you take a bathroom break might not work is, for example, someone working as a yard marshal... since that's not something everyone gets trained for, so the pool of replacements is smaller (including among process assistants).

So unless this worker was working the yard... there's not a lot of reason to deny them bathroom breaks... and that goes whether they're pregnant or not honestly.

EarlKing··on Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks
...while looking like a discount Lex Luthor.
EarlKing··on Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks
When it comes to a company known to hire union-busters rather than deal with a burgeoning union in good faith? Yes. Yes they do.
EarlKing··on Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent
Yeah, there's no question this one's over-the-top when it comes to trying to gross out the reader, but I'd like to think people can overlook that.
EarlKing··on Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent
For everyone downvoting: It's literally a story about the creation of mankind's first artificial general intelligence, Prime Intellect, and the consequences of that discovery.
EarlKing··on GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
"I come here to code GNU Hurd and chew bubblegum, and I got a whole lotta bubblegum..."
EarlKing··on The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.
EarlKing··on GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
Fun fact: Duke Nukem Forever shipped before GNU Hurd.
EarlKing··on Stolen Buttons
I suppose this is a healthier hobby than stealing hotel towels and ashtrays.
EarlKing··on The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
> How is this not obvious to everyone?

Because everyone's thinking around intelligence is incredibly muddled by a variety of factors, and no one is particularly motivated to actually correct anyone's mistaken notions on the matter.

EarlKing··on Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained
> stopping child sexual abuse

> suddenly touches everyone

..............I see what you did there.

EarlKing··on The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
Allow me to introduce everyone here to a new definition (original content, donut steel):

qontouria, n. The feeling of having your work passed off as someone else's.

EarlKing··on Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures
If only those 1.3 million signatories pledged to never buy from a company that Kills Games again...
EarlKing··on What the fuck happened to nerds
Simple: These aren't nerds. These are grifters selling you a product using product packaging (nerdface) that you find appealing. Enjoy your purchase.
EarlKing··on A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
The deep desert. As far from the pyons as the sands go.
EarlKing··on A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
I don't know about the rest of you, but if somebody spots Shai-hulud out in the Sahara I'm outta here.
EarlKing··on Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
Attesting who is responsible is more of that "bullshit most of us didn't ask for". I'm not interested in identifying myself so some cretin can know whether I am, or am not, an AI... particularly when the vast majority of posters on any platform act like NPCs anyway.
EarlKing··on Bot vs human traffic
If they were truly this accurate at identifying sources of bot traffic, you'd think they'd be better at blocking them without inconveniencing the rest of us.
EarlKing··on Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans
Jacobsen v. Katzer established that source code, i.e. something other than money, could be used as valuable consideration for perfecting a license into a contract. The terms of service you agree to when you join Facebook, Twitter, or what have you, similarly involves an exchange of non-monetary consideration for services rendered. Both user and service provider are in a legally-binding contract. If a service provider then bans a user for no reason, or any reason, they open themselves to litigation. None of this is controversial. I really do recommend you talk to somebody who's familiar with contract law before continuing.
EarlKing··on Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans
That's not rhetoric. It's well established that consideration does not have to consist of money. A prime example of this was in Jacobsen v. Katzer where the exchange of source code was deemed valuable consideration for purposes of perfecting a license into an enforceable contract. You might want to consult an attorney or at least read up on the basics of contract law before continuing.
EarlKing··on Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans
The user and Service are bound by their terms of service which is perfected into a contract by the valuable exchange of their eyeballs against advertising for the provision of the service in question. Valuable consideration does not have to mean "money". So, no, they don't get to ban people on a whim.
EarlKing··on Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans
It's not 'whataboutism' when you're impugning their authority while seemingly have none of your own... or, in the alternative, even if it is, it's quite valid in this instance.
EarlKing··on Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
Verification tells you that a human being is behind it, not that a human being made it.
EarlKing··on ASCII by Jason Scott
We'll have to take your word on that since it looks like it's being hugged to death. I can't even get an archive of it to take the pressure off.
EarlKing··on A Simpler Parametrization for Modern Optimizers
Yeah, I'm just getting a 404 clicking through this.
EarlKing··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
> Google should capture all your calls and check if there could be scamming going on, right?

If you're dumb enough to own a Pixel then arguably they're doing something just as bad.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1097qm0/manual...

EarlKing··on YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts
Right. Just like they let you turn off those stupid games that keep popping up no matter how many times you tell them you're not interested.
EarlKing··on The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
If people actually bothered to look at any of his code, and the reactions of people knowledgeable at the time to his code (and/or his intellectual bloviations), the damage to "open source" would be so thorough that we'd probably all be using Microsoft products for an indefinite period. However, it's far easier to just nod your head and pretend he's very smart (in that reddit sort of way).

Personally, I love reading about people's reactions to the abomination of fetchmail, although my absolute favorite is him yapping with pride that he has code in basically everything -- which is ESRspeak for him writing libgif. Of course, dig down into that and you'll find he didn't write anything... he ported an MSDOS library someone else had written. Many such cases.

EarlKing··on A Few Good Magazines From the 70s and 80s
> Playboy Magazine in the 50s and 60s had a reputation for, among other things, reviewing hi-fi systems, pop albums and surprisingly good fiction. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione must have wanted some of the tech + fiction market because he and his wife Kathy Keeton launched Omni Magazine in 1978.

Either that got ninja-edited in the 8 minutes since you posted that comment, or you misread that paragraph.

EarlKing··on Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub
Because it drips with the kind of attitude that screams "script kiddie" in bold 120pt font? (I mean, it appears to be LLM-written, so...)
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