NegativeK

I've seen coworkers do this to each other when their expertise is in different domains.

I find that AI can be incredibly useful, but just text dumping its output into a conversation feels insulting.

It was partially completed lowers before this, and general machine tools before that.

I support gun control.

This feels like theater, not gun control.

They don't want perfection. They want to move things forward, for their definition of forward.

If they ban bog standard VPNs and find out they're still being used, they'll punish the VPN companies.

If the VPN companies create workarounds and avoid the punishment, they'll punish the payment processors.

If the VPN companies start using esoteric workarounds and taking cryptocurrency for payment, then they've mostly won -- most people aren't going to deal with that shit.

All the while, they'll still go after the social media/etc companies for allowing circumvention of age-gating. So the social media companies will crack down on our ability to visit their sites with any sort of privacy.

My point: laws are all imperfect but can still have a huge effect. Pointing out work arounds doesn't change that.

For context, I'm really disturbed by the recent move to punish people seeking privacy instead of the social media companies that are enabling this social media shit. They know who the companies are, since that's who they're going to punish for not age gating. But they'd (I'm talking about US based age-gating pushes as well) rather fuck with our privacy and make our PII more susceptible to data breaches than tell the social media companies to eat shit.

What would happen if you honestly listed your earnings on your tax forms?

I live in the desert SW after living in far more humid climates. Two weird experiences:

Standing outside talking to friends after the sun set, where it's still over 100F outside: I could feel brief (minor) chills pass over me as I'd sweat in bursts and it'd instantly evaporate.

And back when I was cycling, I'd start summer rides about an hour before dawn, when it'd be at its coldest (sometimes 90F for the low). I learned to not rub my face because I'd have salt crystals from dried sweat, and they would abrade skin near the corners of my eyes.

Solar power is not free.

You can decide to not fix the panel that was being used to power a GPU.

Or you could sell the power back.

Or you could put it in a battery bank for when the sun is down.

Or, if none of those are the case and you just have excess power that's useless for anything but a GPU, then you prepaid for the GPU.

I love that we have solar panels, but we weren't gifted them. Using power has a cost.

I have no clue.

But I do think that this is a much better start than letting companies ignore the impact to software consumers or having open source devs be on the hook for volunteer work.

How so?

I'm thrilled that companies are liable for crap that ends up hurting other people. I don't think they should get an easy way out, and I also like that there's a carve out for people who aren't making money off of software (like OSS devs.)

That's apparently already changing in the EU, where software vulnerabilities mean the company is liable for damages. The only way out is to straight up not make any money (not just from direct sales) from the software.

Only referencing America, but professional liability for doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc isn't based on perfection. It's based on a reasonable effort.

So Google could, for example, switch from a tiny "this could be wrong!" byline to having the AI be less overconfident every freaking time regardless of whether it's spouting made up crap or actual facts.

The scale doesn't sound like a way out. If your company expects to get away with doing the wrong thing where smaller companies can't, then the solution isn't to continue getting away with it.

Are "your guys" a guerrilla force or something?

Because the military doesn't give soldiers rifles with guard rails. They give the soldiers intense, rigid training, and then try to enforce discipline and correct use socially.

If an LLM is going to be important in that way (this seems like a very contrived way,) then it's in the interest of the LLM's host to make sure it doesn't have guard rails that would get in the way _that_ way.

There are simpler ways to disrupt a flight.

The vast majority of people aren't aware of open versus closed protocols. If enough people they want to communicate with are using it to counterbalance how frustrating it is, they'll use it. It happened because businesses realized there's profit in lock in, and they threw resources at it.

Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.

That's the past.

Why does Google think it's a good idea to make that the case even if you don't block their crawlers?

A not thoroughly thought out response:

Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.

If you sell something to someone and they do computer crimes, you're going to have to prove that you couldn't've known that they're a computer crimer.

It's the same thing with selling general offensive security tools. You have to proactively make it clear that it's for testing and not criminal use. Otherwise, cops are going to assume you're complicit and make things shitty.

I don't think that using LLMs for medicine is an appropriate fix for the US's healthcare issues.

Unless healthcare businesses decide to improve patient care with AI instead of increasing patients per day, I think it's going to make things even worse.

Calling people dogs by analogy is not great.

That aside, corporations and groups don't make decisions. People do. We can understand and empathize with what led them to that decision (and sometimes we might be looking at the wrong person), but they're still responsible.

As other commenters pointed out, rubber/plastics fail.

Littmann sells repair kits.

Bike lanes exist to protect cyclists from drivers and to limit how cyclists affect the flow of traffic. Cars stopping in the bike lane shit all over that, just like they would if they parked on the sidewalk.

I wish drivers (and now leaders of a company) would have more empathy toward people on the road that can be squashed like a bug.

Your points seem focused on the bottom line and short term extraction of labor from employees, versus actually building a long-term community of healthy, productive people.

Like this:

will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

Maybe that's a good thing? [1]

I have no doubt that Meta is thinking like your four points and hiding behind "it's the corporation making the decisions, not a bunch of people at high levels", but... Ugh.

[1] Nitpick - I was speaking to a friend about a decade ago regarding their OT/IOT work in the defense industry, and they told me that they had to aggressively track every hour. The feds were punitive when it came to unreported overtime.

Doctors are continually interviewed every time a patient gets pissed and sues them or files a board complaint. If there's any fault they're (very publicly) assigned remedial training or put on a PIP. They're also in incredibly high demand, so its often the doctor interviewing the practice.

If the interview is for becoming a partner at a practice, it's a two way courtship that's more reminiscent of other businesses looking for a co-owner.

Doctors also tend to hear about each other. Even in decent sized metro areas, they can often know who to avoid.

(This process isn't perfect, but it's still way different than for software.)

If I had a roommate who spent huge swaths of our monthly budget on house cleaning we didn't need, I might tell them to go find another place to live.

Or to stop stretching metaphors.. The investors should be mad that the layoffs were even necessary.

We should be encouraging those users to switch to a password manager.

The defender must be right every single time, and the attacker right only once.

Until the attacker has initial access.

Then the attacker needs to be right every single time.

Particularly since so many companies don't even know all of the OSS they are using, and they often use OSS to offload the cost of maintaining it themselves.

Companies that market to the EU are going to need to find out real fast.

My experience with lawyers helping me respond to other lawyers is "Stop interacting with that person".

Unless I'm spending way more money, I'd expect any company to fire me as a client as fast as legally possible if I threatened them with a lawyer.

Make HIPAA include PII.

That hits your toxic waste goal real fast.

The sign won't be "don't do mass surveillance".

It'll be "make money off mass surveillance, but don't get caught like Flock did."

I think maybe we should listen to the lawyers here.

The tension is that people start with writing code to scratch an itch and share it freely. Every bit of community management pulls away from sitting down and coding a personal project. Even accepting the free work of others.

There are people who like doing both, but someone publishing their code online doesn't imply that. And it certainly doesn't imply that they hate democracy.