Posts by Postscript 37 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jan 2020
"Nitschke has also been working on an implant that would be able to euthanize Alzheimer patients unable to make their own care decisions"
I feel like we need more information here. It's one thing for a person of sound mind to choose how they die, but unasked-for euthanization is just murder, innit?
Could they make the IOS app free and take payments through a non-Apple web interface? Or does that break some app store rule... It sounds more like people use their IOS devices to access Patreon content than actually use the app.
"...iOS is actually now the most used platform for communities on Patreon..."
My SO had the front-shirt-pocket to bucket of water experience with a flip phone while washing windows. Dried it out and it was fine. Not so much when an ipad was left on top of the car. We backtracked and found it thoroughly run over on the road. One of my greatest IT triumphs ensued - I hooked that wreckage up and got a full backup before it finally expired. And got a replacement from Apple for $29 under warranty, which we couldn't have done without the corpse. Whew!
"Or perhaps they'd rather break the world than clean up their act."
Is it not the same for all corporations and their capitalist governments? Rather burn down the world than admit climate change is real and rein in fossil fuel use. Rather have citizens without water and electricity than limit data centers. Rather let all their patients, employees, and their families become disabled or dead with Covid than protect anyone, give sick leave and insurance, or clean indoor air. Rather let grocery stores collude and price gouge their way to record profits while people go hungry. Rather let venture capitalists buy up all the housing and make homelessness a crime. Etc. This will continue to accelerate until somebody stops them.
"What I think is happening is he wants a big payout from an IPO"
Every time a golden goose is born, some CEO comes along to strangle it. When your business model depends on literal free labor from your users, including building tools to make your business usable, shitting on the users isn't a good idea. He could have found ways to enter into profit sharing agreements with subs to allow AI scraping, maybe use it to pay moderators, charge a small subscription fee, let subs compete for charity and a small cut, reward high-karma posters in some way, etc. Pay someone to do some research and find out what users actually want and would pay for. But just like every other social media CEObro, he thinks he is entitled to other people's free labor and will throw public tantrums until there's nothing left to enshittify.
The first week of a new IT job, I started my own jargon file to keep track of what the heck people were talking about. It's about six pages long now. I still want to punt my keyboard when somebody says with a straight face that we are "delivering value to the customer." It's a job. We're working. Perfectly fine words that everyone understands.
I've seen people come in with "AI" generated/assisted code. It looks like it might work on the surface, but then a lot of time is spent figuring out why it doesn't work or how to make it secure and appropriate in our environment. At that point, you've spent more time trying to force the 'lazy' way to work than you would have if you'd just done it yourself from the beginning.
"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
But as with whatever other global priorities we *should* have, we'll keep pushing "AI" it if makes us a dime, screw the risks. We could redesign our LLMs to be based on legally obtained, sanely curated, inspectable data, with audit trails, guard rails and watermarking, but we'd looooooooooose money if we did that. So we'll just keep making empty pronouncements and jamming "AI" into toasters.
They need to stop stealing data for their training sets, regardless of the source's fragrance. If they can't prove clear provenance, they should have to start over with clean, inspectable sets. They should take it as a blessing before they get sued into oblivion - they can start fresh with useful, genuinely curated data and not undifferentiated plunder.
Since they'll need to start over anyway, they could also solve the problems of watermarking AI generated content and output auditing along the way. They can come back and dump it on the public once they're done.
I've seen this referenced before in the context of writing ads for IT jobs. It was (maybe still is?) trendy to advertise for "rockstars," "gurus," even "ninjas," but that was found to turn off lots of people, reduce the diversity of the applicant pool, etc. Just explain what you actually need in the position, use broad categories rather than a pile of random software package names, and include the pay scale in the advert.
Google thinks it's no big deal but American Republicans' end game is to enslave women to prevent them from crossing state lines to get healthcare, and to gain access to medical records so they can arrest, prosecute, and execute women for getting abortions. It is a big deal and they are endangering countless people for the sake of a little bit of that sweet private information sales cash.
There won't be an airline industry to speak of, at least in North America. They won't protect their pilots or staff from Covid-19 and all her respiratory handmaids. They won't require masks or tests. They let anyone that can pay hop on and cough plagues all over each other, and the pilots and staff. They can't order up a batch of healthy fresh pilots from Alibaba, it takes years and huge expenses to train new pilots. Who will they promote when their last golden goose is too sick to lay an egg?
Opened July 17, 2014, I still get email updates when some new poor sap realizes they would like their work tickets to not be studded with smiley faces and 'thumbs-down' icons. It's marked as "Not Being Considered" by the Atlassian devlords but that hasn't stopped the plaintive cries for relief.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-39164
I worked in a group where one prize specimen liked to watch porn at his desk next to the community fridge. We banded together and complained to management and he ... moved his desk into a storage room. He remained there, presumably happy as a clam, for the remainder of the time I was there.
Or the lab leader who asked for support and had been searching for (among other things) Miley Cyrus naked when she was well underage. He didn't successfully find any CP so he just got reported to management rather than the police. No repercussions beyond being embarrassed.
Or the visiting international researcher who called for support for his fresh new PC... He'd had it for ONE day and it was eaten up with viruses. I won't burden you with his grotesque tastes. He got reported and pretended he no longer understood English. I formatted the PC, busted him down to User and told him to never speak to me again.
The article points out that these caught criminals mostly got the experience they needed to commit the crimes from once having legit jobs in the IT workplace. If there are few women in the IT workplace, women won't be getting the skills, however rudimentary, that they would need to embark on a life of computer crime.
oh that story takes me back - a senior faculty invited a gang of staff to Christmas lunch at her house. I was the department IT person and went along. Whilst there she said "Oh, PS, my Mac in the next room is having problems - will you go fix it." So the rest of the group sat around socializing while I fixed the Mac. It's a good thing she didn't invite the custodian and demand she fix the toilet!
I spent the bulk of a Saturday afternoon helping someone at their house - setting up their network, getting backups going, some training on cameras and photo software. Partway through the afternoon she came in with a tube of hand lotion. 'I got this in London, you might like it' - er, ok, not something I wanted but whatever. When I finished up, she walked me out to the car - and didn't offer to pay me at all! Evidently the lotion was the payment (the previous time she gave me the traditional cash for work). I've done a lot of IT side work for people and never had someone just straight-up stiff me before. I didn't press it altho I should have. Needless to say, I ghosted her next time she emailed asking me to come spend my precious weekend hours working for her ... for free? She wrote again later asking if she'd offended me, but never mentioned actually paying me.
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