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JoBo

@JoBo@feddit.uk

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JoBo ,

I mean, yeah. All of this. Absurd.

But, FWIW, offloading cheap tat onto charity shops is not going to work well. It costs them money to put it on a shelf and it probably takes up more space than it is worth. Plus, they very likely can't sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired, or at least not without spending more on having it tested than they could sell it for anyway.

Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.

On Being an Outlier (www.goethe.de)

Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are...

JoBo OP ,

That kind of analysis is done all the time. But, even if we can collect all the relevant data (big if), the methods required are difficult to interpret and easy to abuse (we can't do an RCT of being born female vs male, or black vs white, &c). A good example is the proliferation of analyses claiming that the gender pay gap does not exist (after you've 'controlled' for all the things that cause the gender pay gap).

It's not easy to do 'right' even when done in good faith.

The article isn't claiming that it is easy, of course. It's asking why power is so keen on one type of question and not its inverse. And that is a very good question, albeit one with a very easy answer. Power is not in the business of abolishing itself.

JoBo OP ,

Isn’t that a continuation of “why the outlier was culled”?

Not sure I follow, but I think the answer is "no".

If you control for all the causes of a difference, the difference will disappear. Which is fine if you're looking for causal factors which are not already known to be causal factors, but no good at all if you're trying to establish whether or not a difference exists.

It's really quite difficult to ask a coherent question with real-world data from the messy, complicated reality of human beings.

A simple example:

Women are more likely to die from complications after a coronary artery bypass.

But if you include body surface area (a measure of body size) in your model, the difference between men and women disappears.

And if you go the whole hog and measure vein size, the importance of body size disappears too.

And, while we can never do an RCT to prove it, it makes perfect sense that smaller veins would increase the risk for a surgery which involves operating on blood vessels.

None of that means women do not, in fact, have a higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery. Collect all the data which has ever existed and women will still be more likely to die from the surgery. We have explained the phenomenon and found what is very likely to be the direct cause of higher mortality. Being a woman just makes you more likely to have that risk factor.

It is rare that the answer is as neat and simple as this. It is very easy to ask a different question from the one you thought you were asking (or pretend to be answering one question when you answered another).

You can't just throw masses of data into a pot and expect sensible answers to come out. This is the key difference between statisticians and data scientists. And, not to throw shade on data scientists, they often end up explaining to the world that oestrogen makes people more likely to die from complications of coronary artery bypass surgery.

JoBo OP ,

Where did you get insurance carriers from?

No idea what your post, before or after edit, is trying to say. But the subject of your quoted sentence is "proponents of AI" not "AI", and the sentence is about what is enabled by AI systems. Your attempt at pedantry makes no sense.

If you're suggesting that it is possible to build an AI with none of the biases embedded in the world it learns from, you might want to read that article again because the (obvious) rebuttal is right there.

JoBo OP ,

The systems didn’t do anything they weren’t told to do.

You're thinking of the kinds of algorithms written by human beings. AI is a black box. No one knows how these models obtain their answers.

JoBo OP ,

It's how LLMs work.

JoBo OP ,

The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.

Apple says it doesn't understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don't use sex as a datapoint. But it's freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.

Apple's 'sexist' credit card investigated by US regulator

Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there's no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.

JoBo OP ,

It's asking why don't we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don't know how you think science works, but it's not like that.

JoBo OP ,

The way he plays with the meaning of words

She (or, if you're not sure, they).

any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that 'AI' is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn't get any gender data to analyse.

Perhaps that is the point.

That is, indeed, the point.

JoBo OP ,

I think you overestimate the amount of 'thought' going on here. (ref}

JoBo ,

How is the microphone for phone calls?

JoBo ,

Exactly this.

AFAIK it's good coffee because (wild) civets select perfectly ripe berries to eat. Captive civets just get fed berries.

JoBo ,

I think our current monetary system is more than only slightly useful.

That has nothing to do with the quote you're responding to, about economic models that don't reflect reality. The problem is economic models built without an adequate understanding of the current monetary system.

Many trillions of words have been written about this since the crash. This is a useful short summary which links to some of them.

JoBo ,

This is flat out ridiculous:

Woods presented his real Social Security card and an authentic state of California ID card, but the assistant branch manager became suspicious when Woods could not answer security questions that Kierans had set for the bank accounts.

The bank employee called the phone number listed on the accounts, which was Kierans' number. At that point, Kierans correctly answered the security questions, and the assistant branch manager contacted the Los Angeles Police Department to investigate Woods.

Total incompetence from start to finish. But, you know, he was homeless. What are the police supposed to do, care about poor people?

JoBo ,

If you think Mike Masnick does not spend enough time on the Fediverse, you do not spend enough time on the Fediverse.

JoBo ,

You're not required to agree with him. But if your disagreement with the headline is stopping you from reading the article, you're missing out. There's some useful ideas described which Fedi-coders would do well to take notice of.

JoBo ,

What is there to disagree with? He's describing what looks like a very good system for federation (especially moderation), not telling anyone which way to go.

Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal (techcrunch.com)

Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given these apps’ use of encryption, Facebook needed to develop special technology to get around it....

JoBo ,

Who do you imagine is (or should be) making these rules for the Fediverse?

JoBo ,

You stated it very much as a set of rules that should exist. Twice.

JoBo ,

Yes. Did you forget how to quote your whole post?

JoBo ,

Yes. The licensing approval for things like this need to include a plan for continued support if/when the company goes belly up. That would have to include the govt agreeing to pick up the slack, which would require some kind of trust fund for each individual implant to cover a lifetime of maintenance. Or, you know, nationalisation. But this is the world we live in ... so even the most basic solution won't happen because it might get in the way of some rich fuckers turning people into money.

JoBo ,

Yes, yes it does.

JoBo ,

Trains.

Cool stuff

PEVs

JoBo ,

That's a fantastically efficient way to destroy their business. There's no way to get honest reviews of employers from employees who know their identities will be exposed whether they consent or not. Doesn't even matter if the review is after leaving that job, future employers can go nosing too.

Absolute techbro-brane gold.

Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you | AI tools are good for some things, but don’t trust your health to apps that make frequent mistakes (wapo.st)

In particular, know how to identify the common and deadly species (eg: much of the genus Amanita) yourself, and get multiple trustworthy field guides for your part of the world.

JoBo ,

You didn't read the article.

JoBo ,

Where does the article say the problem started with AI? It doesn't even mention LLMs, just the explosion in grifter apps since it became easier to produce a grifter app.

If you read the article, you did not read it properly.

JoBo ,

So

The government acknowledged the new administrative burden for businesses and put an 18-month “easement” period in place. During this period all wines between 11.5% and 14.5% would have to pay £2.67 in tax, the 12.5% ABV duty rate.

and

Analysis by the Wine and Spirits Trade Association (WSTA) has found that when easement ends prices on about 43% of wines will increase.

So, it must be going down or staying the same for 53%. Oh noes, what a calamity.

It is a bit more complicated to tax by % ABV rather than per bottle but it really is not that much more complicated. The retailers have all the data needed to do the calculation, it's not like they were previously working out their tax bill by hand-counting bottles of wine.

Both taxation systems are crap, of course. The per bottle and per 0.1%ABV schemes are so that they don't have to do it by price because taxing rich people would be wrong. Fuckers.

JoBo , (edited )

You start off by claiming that humans can't recognise their biases and end up by saying that there's no problem because humans can recognise their biases so well they can programme it out of AI.

Which is it?

JoBo ,

Maybe you could direct your righteous anger at the people misselling the app, not the people who use it to help them get pregnant or to avoid becoming pregnant in a proto-fascist society that has removed their right to an abortion?

JoBo ,

Wordle is a ripoff of Lingo, first broadcast in 1987.

They can take themselves down.

JoBo ,

You must be very, very young if you do not remember these tropes being absolutely standard in the 'Christian' world, and not paying much attention now if you think they've completely disappeared since.

JoBo ,

When I was born, married women were barred from most white collar jobs and women did not have the right to their own bank accounts, decades before rape within marriage was formally recognised as a crime.

If you are old enough to remember this era, you should realise that singling out these behaviours as somehow "Muslim" is bizarre.

I appreciate that that might not have been your intent (although it is certainly the subtext of this thread).

JoBo ,

So you haven't been paying attention. Well done.

JoBo ,

To start with the obvious:

How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America

And here's a small selection of recent history from elsewhere:

How Ireland Turned ‘Fallen Women’ Into Slaves

Infidelity plus' – the new defence against murder

Ugandan MPs pass bill imposing death penalty for homosexuality

What It’s Like to Staff the Home of a Billionaire (www.thecut.com)

Say you’re on a yacht with your principal and they had a few tequilas, and then they’re like, “Oh, come on. Join us.” Ultimately, you have to remember that you are there because they’re paying you. It’s a job. They’re not your friend. Obviously, you need to share compassion and empathy. Sometimes your boss needs...

JoBo ,

It's a bit more complicated than just adding up all the money and dividing it by the number of people.

Rich people don't spend their money, they use it to outbid each other for control of existing assets that the rest of us need and have no choice but to pay them for. Instead of spending that money on things that other people get paid to make (the "trickle down" lie), they use it to extort us for access to things we need to survive.

There is plenty enough in this world to go around. That so many have so little is nothing to do with the amount of arbitrary exchange tokens that exist.

JoBo ,

You know that money isn't dug out of the ground, right? There's no gold standard any more. The number of exchange tokens is irrelevant when you're being extorted (most obviously on housing costs).

That’s true. To be clear, I’m not saying poverty is necessary. I’m saying it’s not because of the super rich (at least in the West). Nor am I saying the super-rich are useful.

If there is enough to go around, then your money-based maths must be incorrect. You're contradicting yourself. Which is it?

JoBo ,

This was one company, with only their NZ code affected. It'd be astonishing if all the pumps in NZ were still using the same code as four years ago. And not at all astonishing that coders are still making careless errors to do with dates.

JoBo ,

But how does setting his clock back 24 hours mean that 2pm becomes 2am? 12 hours, yes. 24 hours, no?

JoBo ,

Good. It is extremely unlikely they will bring anyone with power to account but here's hoping they'll never sleep soundly again.

JoBo ,

Are you charging for your performances?

JoBo ,

You can't point to a difference and say it's (directly) caused by chromosomes or the SRY gene or hormones, whatever. Brain differences increase with age, suggesting that they may be more to do with socialisation than genetics. Does this evidence prove that women should be treated differently or is it evidence that women are, in fact, treated differently?

JoBo ,

No.

But if you have to buy from Amazon (and sometimes it is difficult to avoid), find it via a search on your less evil search engine of choice so that Amazon has to pay them for the click.

Elon Musk's Battle with Swedish Unions Is Now Impacting Tesla's Charging Stations | The months-long battle between Nordic labor and the petulant billionaire has led to perpetual humiliations for th... (gizmodo.com)

Elon Musk's Battle with Swedish Unions Is Now Impacting Tesla's Charging Stations | The months-long battle between Nordic labor and the petulant billionaire has led to perpetual humiliations for th...::The months-long battle between Nordic labor and the petulant billionaire has led to perpetual humiliations for the electric...

JoBo ,

Try reading the article.

JoBo ,

Archive link

JoBo ,

Surely there's a legal way to carry on fucking women over.

JoBo ,

But they're not telling men that, only women. And that is unreasonable no matter how hard you struggle to justify it.

JoBo ,

Yes! Phones with small screens are not useful. Phones which don't fit in pockets are not useful. Flip phones solve the problem and I've been wanting one for twenty years.

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