palordrolap

So who should be held accountable when (mis)use of AI results in a needless death? Or worse?

Let’s say a company creates an AI taxi that runs you over leaving you without legs. Who are you going to sue?

“Oh it’s grey, so I’ll have a dollar from each shareholder.” That doesn’t sound right to me.

My initial thought was that the computer pictured on the cover was a VIC-20 not a C64, then I remembered that they used old-stock VIC-20 keyboards and cases to get the first C64s out of the door quickly, so it’s probably an early model. Not enough pixels to make out what’s on the ID plate to the top left of the keyboard.

As for AI, I got a load of old Commodore magazines in the mid 90s, and one letter sent in to one of them has always stuck with me. The writer asked if AI was needed in order to make an enemy character follow a player character around the screen, and the response was along the lines of “no, you can do that with simple mathematics”, and provided a very simple algorithm.

The concept clearly generalises to “do not attribute to intelligence what can be achieved with simple mathematics” as well as being akin to “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and then “if you can convince a mark that your simple mathematics is intelligent, they’ll throw money at you”.

Killjoy: If there are no consequences there can be no memory of the event either. Our own future (from the time of returning from the past) would almost certainly diverge from the path of no knowledge otherwise, and that would be a consequence.

As such, every one of us might already have this ability, we just don’t remember doing it.

Right now, I’m leaning towards “no” on account of them allegedly being awash with money.

In the vein of alternative places to donate, consider your Fediverse instance(s). If you’re a Linux user, a few pennies towards your distro of choice wouldn’t go amiss either. (I’d also say archive.org, but someone else suggested that already.)

You may already be donating to these places, but this comment is also for the handful of other people who might see it, and like one of those arcade coin waterfalls, might trickle down into the conscience of someone who has cash to donate.

If the “kit” says it’s “one size fits all” or similar wording, check the instructions that come with it on how to adjust it for things that are likely to vary.

Otherwise, you’ll probably need to take measurements or, if you’re lucky, there’ll be make and model numbers on the existing parts that you can use to get replacements or new internal parts.

If you’re really unlucky, you have a bizarre but genius-designed toilet made by a now out-of-business manufacturer who found novel and unique ways around patents and lawsuits and you’d be better off replacing the whole thing.

Ah yes. An excellent plan that will not have repercussions a decade or two down the line.

I think this is filed in my head under “no two manufacturers’ sizes are the same (even if they’re supposed to be to a standard)”, and “this is especially true of women’s wear”, so while I may have known about bra cup sizes specifically at some point in the past, I’m not sure I did at the time I arrived at this post, and yet am thoroughly unsurprised to (re)discover it.

And here was I thinking that this character was so terrible that it caused Stan Lee to spontaneously spring back into existence in order to make that opinion known.

They’re probably referring to the fact it was founded by Jack Dorsey, who has since abandoned it because the other people in charge refused to let it be as bat-guano as he wanted.

Ironically, he left Twitter for the same reason. Bluesky was supposed to be his own version, in his image, and yet rational minds prevailed there at pretty much the same time Musk started pushing Twitter in the direction Dorsey had wanted all along.

You know that Jesus fella that conservatives seem to love so much? Archetypal liberal. 2000 years ago. Boomers are old but they’re not that old.

If he’d weep at all, it wouldn’t be because a woman says she wouldn’t be interested in him because of his politics – it’d be because of what’s become of his politics.

Frick, you’re right. Bit late now, but I’ll edit my previous comment.

Not directly. The underlying protocols are incompatible. You have to follow a bridging service which then causes your posts to be reposted on the other side by a bot pretending to be you.

Sounds a bit convoluted, if somewhat sinister - pretending to be you?? - but that’s basically how it works. And it won’t pretend to be anyone who doesn’t sign up, and will stop as soon as you unfollow, so the sinisterness, if any, is minimised.

Depending on where they are, a washing machine in the kitchen might be a thing. It’s very common in the UK, for example.

Dorsey left Bluesky precisely because the other people there felt they had to implement the old-Twitter-like checks and balances that caused him to leave Twitter in the first place. As such, it’s completely out of his influence.

Yes, it’s still one monolith waiting to be gobbled up by someone with a lot of cash, or to spiral down into what would seem to be almost inevitable enshittification, but it hasn’t done either of those yet, and both the good and bad there mean it’s the closest there is to old Twitter at the moment.

Please note that I’m not saying that everyone should go jump on there and use it, or even that we have to like it. Just pointing out that Dorsey has nothing to do with it any more.

Speaking of Dorsey, he went back to endorsing Twitter for a while, but now he’s started yet another platform called Nostr. Probably the better candidate for being avoided right now.

I have no such “but actually” about Threads. Definitely worth avoiding, even if it is supposed to be able to Federate.

Except we’re the things living, with required rent, inside skulls.

I hear that watching the evolution from eohippus to horse needs a lot of batteries.

“Now watch what happens when I slap it.”

Interface designers make mistakes, but I don’t think they’d make the mistake of allowing a negative sign anywhere on it. You could try for integer overflow, but that’s gonna be really bad if you guess wrong.

Someone smarter than me once pointed out that there could be a universe where magic is real only because there’s a group of people who have never had a magical incantation or action fail, purely by chance.

I liked the idea of that to the point that I went on to imagine that there’d be universes where that magic just suddenly stopped working one day because of well overdue regression to the mean and no-one there would have any idea why.

And then you could take that to the extreme: That one universe where the day they finally work out that magic had been random, incredible happenstance the whole time, only for it all to start happening again, just to mess with them.