• 0 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle





  • This article is giving them too much credit, frankly. Saying Republican support dropped from “majority to minority” is misleading, bordering on clickbait.

    All that happened was support dropped from 55% to 46%. They were only ever barely a majority.

    Saying “Nearly half” or “over half” of all Republicans don’t support gay marriage is splitting hairs. They all support the candidates that are against it.

    The real story here is that even support among Democrats and Independents dropped a bit in the last 2 years. Meaning the fear mongering is pervasive enough to affect everyone.






  • Sure, but she’s also his mother, not a random family member. I’m not going to fault a mother for standing by their child, no matter what he did.

    She didn’t let him buy anything, but she couldn’t make him get rid of it because it wasn’t in her house. It was locked up at a friend’s house in a different town.

    She was also ill, poor, dyslexic, and a single parent dealing with a difficult child. She doesn’t seem to have much in her life but her children, I’m not going to condemn her for not banishing him from her life. It’s not an easy thing for a mother to do.



  • Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I’m going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you’re an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

    This aspect of it isn’t getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there’s actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.

    You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous “artificial intelligence” tools would not work as they seem to.

    If the "AI’ needs a human support team to keep it “intelligent”, it’s less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.




  • Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.

    I’m so sick of this shit.

    Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it’s about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.

    You’d also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they’re collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.

    The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.

    Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That’s a pattern of risky behavior.



  • filling in the gaps in parts of town where it is impractical or cost-prohibitive to install a water fountain.

    As usual, if it’s a gap in our public services, the answer is not “let a private company do it” it’s “tax the fucking rich and use that money to improve our public services”.

    Those water fountains didn’t even need to be water fountains. This was basically just a bastardized version of what they do in the UK. There’s a program over there called Refill, that businesses and public places participate in. You use a free app that shows you the locations of participating places, and those places have refill points, all for free.

    This person probably saw that and thought “let’s ditch the free and the volunteer participation part, build unnecessary fountains in unsustainable areas, and try and make some money off that sweet public utility”



  • No, it’s going to make assumptions about what was important in that meeting and try to bullet point it. And that won’t actually work well enough to count on, and if it misses something, you won’t know.

    I also can’t imagine many managers will be happy about this, because the whole point of calling a meeting is that they want your attention. After a manager ends up lecturing a meeting full of bots a couple times, and someone misses something that was brought up in a meeting they ostensibly attended, they’ll complain, and IT will be instructed to block it.

    And I can’t exactly blame them, honestly. I’m not fan of unnecessary meetings but if I’m managing a team of people, I’d want to know I’m engaging with them, not Copilot.

    And as an employee, I’m not about to let an AI be caught doing any part of my job, because that’s just giving management “ideas”