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throwaway439080

49 karma · joined June 22, 2021

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throwaway439080··on AI Gets Wrong Woman Jailed for Six Months, Life Ruined
Yes and no. I think the interesting thing about this story is how it's been presented: AI as a scapegoat for incompetence.

The police made an inexcusable mistake out of carelessness. They simply couldn't be bothered to spend five minutes fact-checking the facial recognition match, and it caused catastrophic harm to an innocent woman.

And what's the headline? "AI did this". It's a new and exciting way for people to shirk accountability for their actions. We're already seeing it in the reporting on the Iranian school bombed by the United States: blame AI for selecting the target, and not the humans in the loop who failed to do the most basic due diligence.

throwaway439080··on $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents
> Guess who sits on the school boards?

People who get elected to sit on the school boards? I think you're actually just complaining about democracy.

My local school district has banned phones during school time (enforced by an auto-locking pouch gadget that releases the phone when school ends), and parents overwhelmingly support it.

throwaway439080··on Poll: Trump voters support military intervention in more countries
Uh. 25% support military intervention in China? Which would, with high probability, escalate into a nuclear war? I guess this tells us how many of the polled Trump voters are totally out of their gourds.
throwaway439080··on Ross Stevens Donates $100M to Pay Every US Olympian and Paralympian $200k
Wow. When I saw the headline, I thought this would be a generous donation so that Olympians wouldn't need to work day jobs to make ends meet, allowing them to focus on training. But... nope...
throwaway439080··on Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals
The thing I learned from Amazon's senior principals is that actually it's good and normal to turn red in the face and scream at your junior colleagues that they're fucking idiots when they have the temerity to politely disagree with you.
throwaway439080··on Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
"Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" coming from Amazon leadership is maybe best understood as a joke. Amazon is a meat grinder, even more so since the big tech layoffs started.

(This kind of comment always elicits current Amazon engineers who disagree because they haven't personally experienced this. To them, I say: Stay at Amazon long enough and it /will/ happen to you. To those currently in the grinder: I hit the eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)

throwaway439080··on Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"
Kind of amazing the author just takes everything at face value and doesn't even consider the possibility that there's a hidden layer of instructions. Elon likes to meddle with Grok whenever the mood strikes him, leading to Grok's sudden interest in Nazi topics such as South African "white genocide" and calling itself MechaHitler. Pretty sure that stuff is not in the instructions Grok will tell the user about.
throwaway439080··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
Of course they are. The interesting thing isn't how good LLMs are today, it's their astonishing rate of improvement. LLMs are a lot better than they were a year ago, and light years ahead of where they were two years ago. Where will they be in five years?
throwaway439080··on FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
What's to stop ICE from declaring anybody they don't like an alien and rendering them to the Salvadoran prison? We already know they're inventing false pretenses to classify people as gang members. There is no functional oversight of what they're doing.
throwaway439080··on FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado
> Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow.

We don't know the identities of, or even how many people have been extrajudicially rendered to the Salvadoran prison. The administration claims they're not citizens, but how would we know?

throwaway439080··on The internet is killing old PC hardware [video]
Uh oh. I use em dashes all the time in writing. Am I an AI?
throwaway439080··on Hyperspace
Agreed, "I made a deduplication software in my garage! Do you want to try it?" is a terrifying pitch.

I've been writing a similar thing to dedupe my photo collection and I'm so paranoid of pulling the trigger I just keep writing more tests.